Cultivating Community Environment

Our goal is to help families, local businesses, and Town Hall to adopt more environmentally friendly mindsets and lifestyles. We aim to adopt conscious consumption, resource conservation, minimal waste, recycling/reuse, and renewable/sustainable energy as policies and practices when possible both personally and in our community. We focus not on political agenda but rather practical action that will make our lives and the well-being of our community better now and sustain it for future generations to come.

Sustainable social practices and relationships are just as important as ecological ones - we don't think community should just be a bunch of individuals who happen to live in the same area, but rather an engaged body that is a living whole, thriving to the extent that its individual parts are active and interactive. To this end, we host a variety of events and activities that not only relate to green and sustainability issues, but also to cultivating community, as in our slogan 'Cultivating Community Environment.' Event types include community education (workshops, film showings), community dialogue (forums, farmer's market table), community action (cleanups, tree plantings, community energy project), and bulk purchasing collectives (rain barrels, dual-flush toilets, CFLs, renewable energy certificates).

Some background

It all started out last summer in 2006 when three idealistic but concerned teenagers (Tim Richards, Josh Schaefer, Andy York) were sitting around in a basement, pondering what they could do in their community to help make positive change. They hatched the idea for an environmental group in Mount Airy that would handle important issues at the local level, such as conservation, recycling, eco-awareness, and so forth. Unfortunately, they were all too busy learning, growing, and doing other things to make their idea a reality.

Fast forward to November 2006. Tim receives an email from his school, Haverford College, concerning a "100 Projects for Peace" initiative offered to students wherein a philanthropist is donating $1 million to 100 different "Peace Projects" ($10,000 each) to college students with an idea they want to try out anywhere around the world. Seeing an opportunity to pursue a concept that recently interested him, he goes through the process of planning and applying to the program to start a Community Garden in his hometown of Mount Airy. His application is denied.

However, those in charge of the decision at this school, the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, encourage Tim to refigure his idea into a summer internship that they can fund for him to partake in. Thinking back to the synergy of three college students and their desire of local change for the greener, he follows suit, applying to start a citizens grassroots environmental group: Citizens for a Green Mount Airy. This time, his application meets success; thus CGM is officially born in March 2007. See this Gazette news story.

Josh and Tim at the Renewable Energy Forum, sporting their Green Mount Airy tees

Tim and Andy at the Mount Airy farmer's market

Philosophy - the broader context of "Green"

We believe that both action without theory and theory without action are equally ineffective. As such, we've provided the following philosophical musing about what it might mean to achieve a "Green Mount Airy," as our group name and web domain nominally attest to being our goal:

Green is not about a certain political agenda or ideology. It's about a way of being in the world so as to be harmonious with nature and to promote health of human and all other forms of life. It's about realizing our symbiotic relationship between ourselves as human beings, between humans and other animals, and humans and the natural world - living with a full knowledge that harming the other harms oneself. It's about revering our factual interconnectivity: spanning gaps, hurdling barriers, collaborating for a better life on Earth, now and in the future. It's about recognizing long term consequences and acting with these in mind by shifting towards the sustainable - economically, politically, and socially as well as environmentally.

When we use harmful chemicals that kill pests and plants, which is deleterious to ecosystems, these detriments will come around to harm us humans, too. When we benefit economically from polluting the air and water, we will pay both economically and physically in kind in the future (natural disasters, cleanups, diseases). Doing the right thing environmentally may cost more money in the very short term, but we will profit from doing so handsomely and holistically later. This seems an obvious choice when the alternative is saving a pittance now but paying direly in a manifold of monetary and non-monetary ways in the future. Put economically, being green is akin to investing heavily in the short term but being guaranteed high returns down the line.

We have a vision for the future: a society where we can live healthily and harmoniously with ourselves, other life forms, and the Earth. This is not a political policy nor an agenda for political power, but rather an outlook and practice that seeks to redefine our physical way of being and existing in the world; a way that deeply acknowledges that the present moment is contained in and contains the future, so in each moment we define the world now and lay paths to a related future. Ask ourselves: will these ways of living suffice for future civilizations? We need to live as if life will not end, neither individually nor collectively. Doing so demands a thorough reassessment of our usage of finite resources and non-renewable forms of energy, as well as economic systems hinged solely on growth and expansion.

We are aiming for a sustainable Mount Airy government, a sustainable local Mount Airy economy, and a sustainable Mount Airy society through an active, informed citizenry and a vibrant public sphere. This will be achieved in and through the adoption of greener (and thus more sustainable) lifestyles, mindsets, and ways of being in the world, both individually and collectively. Of course, these goals are not meant merely for Mount Airy alone. Greenness and sustainability are models and methods to germinate in and cross-pollinate through individuals, families, communities, and societies across the planet - so that we can once again live in balance with and in the capacity of our mother Earth.

Now we can move on to action.