At the Byrd

This Saturday, I spent the afternoon volunteering at the Sierra Club’s Environmental Film Festival at the Byrd. I was disappointed not to see any of the films playing that day, with topics ranging from Arctic photography to veganism to nuclear energy. But in some ways, the experience was as educational as watching a documentary—I got to chat with local Sierra Club leaders about their work, interact with community members, and help get signatures on a petition asking President Obama to make environmental disruption one of the key pillars of his second administration.
I’ve worked with the Sierra Club in the past, but learning more about the organization was especially intriguing in the context of what we’ve been learning in Geography of the James. The group’s structure is hierarchical, with national, state, and regional levels. The way my partner at the table was talking about it, their model sounded just like watersheds—we all live within the boundaries of a regional, state, and nation-wide force advocating for the environment, and each of these organizational levels is inextricably tied to the success of the others. The regional clubs are named after significant natural features in their areas—ours is the Falls of the James Group, which just goes to show how integral Richmonders feel their watershed identity to be as a component in their broader identity.
We can also think of our campus as a smaller ecological community nestled within so many kinds of larger ones. I spoke with a Sierra Club employee named Kate about how strikingly the work she’s been doing in advocating renewable energy and the struggles they’ve been facing parallel what Green UR has been experiencing on campus. It was just the kind of dialogue that I hope to see a lot more of between environmental groups, each of us having been working on such similar projects with very little awareness of the other organization’s efforts. We’re all seeking the same stability and security for our watershed—it’s imperative that our efforts not be fractured, disjointed. The afternoon I spent with the Sierra Club may have opened the door for an even more fruitful collaboration between their work and Green UR’s (we’ve come to a confluence, har har), and either way, the afternoon we spent learning from one another was a powerful illustration for me of the many kinds of impact this kind of community involvement can facilitate.