How I Became an Activist

(How You Can Become One Too)

The day had grown cold, and I’d brought only a flimsy jacket to our outdoor meeting.  Our host, Anna Brown, brought me a cup of hot tea, but still I was shivering, so she went inside and found a warm fuzzy coat for me.  The meeting a few days ago on Election Day was one of many I attended this week to help organize the nascent work of FreeportCAN.  This tender gesture as we sat together in Anna’s backyard to do the work of responding to the emergency facing life on this planet filled me with gratitude, not just for the coat, but for the opportunity to do this work together with Anna, again. 

My story about how I became an activist begins long ago and Anna, ten years old Anna, is a big part of that story. 

The story doesn’t begin with a rousing idea, a bold vision, or even a five-step plan scribbled on a piece of paper.  It begins, instead, like all good stories since the beginning of time, on a day, an ordinary day, when love broke my heart. 

I want to tell this story because I want to share with you readers how easy it is to bring about change, how much miraculous energy will bud up when you speak about love and grief.  You will, I believe, find, as I have, that others feel that pain too and, out of the synergy of that connection, a path opens, then another. As you will see from my tale about sitting outside in Anna’s backyard this week, paths from the story I am about to tell are still opening years later, surprising and delighting me with their synchronicity. 

The year was 1988 and I was forty-three years old. I lived with my husband and two children in an 1803 ship-builder’s house at Porters Landing, a few miles away from where I live now. Later, this house too would break my heart, but that is a different story.  It was a bright autumn day and my daughter, Bridget, in the third grade at Soule School in South Freeport, had just gotten off the bus and come home.  We were in the sun-filled front room with the plaster walls and the reeded moldings.  She was sitting on the red velvet couch. 

“Mom,” she said, “Ms. Pennock, our science teacher, said that the ozone layer around the earth is growing thin from pollution.  She says the sun will become dangerous.  I am worried I will have to ride my bike underground.” 

The image of this little girl, so happy outside playing in the woods and the saltmarshes just beyond the front door—confined to a dark tunnel, riding her bike through miles of dim, wet concrete corridors smelling of rot and mold, hit me like a stone. 

“Do your friends feel the same way?” I asked?

“Yes, we were all talking about it on the bus, and they are scared too,” she answered.  A bus-full of scared little girls, their childhood innocence smashed by this news of what we are doing to the earth.  It broke my heart.

When I was her age, I too lived beside a saltmarsh.  Not in Maine but on the south shore of Long Island, an hour’s ride east on the Long Island Railroad from New York City.  I loved the saltmarsh: the red winged black birds returning in spring and perching on the tips of the marsh grasses; the marsh sparrows and the shy bitterns; the sweet fetid smell rising on a hot afternoon; the sound of deep silence.

Loving that saltmarsh broke my heart, my not yet fully grown heart.  Or rather the dredge that sucked sand and mud from the bottom of the bay and spit it out on top of the marshes broke my heart.  Or the hundreds of homes built on top of that salt- marsh, the result of the great migration from Brooklyn out to Long Island after WWII, broke my heart.

No one talked about the plunder of the salt marsh.  No one moment marked its surrender.  It was the nineteen fifties and progress was sweeping America into a delirious dream state, one from which we are only now awakening.

So, when Bridget spoke about the loss she imagined she would face from forces larger than her, my heart broke not just for her, but for the little girl that I was when the saltmarsh died and no one recognized the grief and no one spoke about it.

“Why don’t you bring your friends home so we can all talk about it,” I suggested. 

She did.  We talked about it.  I called their mothers and they helped organize us.  Judy Brown, Anna’s mother was one of those mothers.  We needed a name for ourselves and someone much more clever than I came up with it: CAKE, Concerned About Kids Environment.  Lots more kids joined.  The group settled down to learn about the problem of ozone holes and discovered the biggest culprit: CFC’s: chlorofluorocarbons, chemical emissions from Styrofoam.

 At this point in telling the story, I don’t remember who is responsible for many of the steps we took. It wasn’t important. It wasn’t about any one person: it was about what we as a group could do.  I didn’t have the metaphor of the interconnection of trees back then, but now I find it perfect for the work of this group which soon would spread far beyond this Freeport forest. 

The group decided to bring an ordinance to the Town of Freeport to ban Styrofoam take-out containers in town.  On a warm June night in 1989, a hearing on the ordinance was held at the Town Hall.  Lawyers from Mc Donald’s (I think there were only two, but it felt like an army) showed up in suits, carrying those big rectangular hard-sided briefcases lawyers carry.  The girls in the group showed up in Laura Ashley dresses, the boys in neatly pressed shirts and ties. 

Bridget, Kay Bradley and Anna Brown outside Town Hall, 1989.

Each side presented its case to the Town Council.  At one point the poor outnumbered McDonald’s lawyers claimed their staff picked up all the litter on a regular basis, so kids didn’t need to worry that seagulls would ingest a bit of sugar-coated Styrofoam and choke to death.  In a scene fit for a Netflix special, some kids snuck out of the meeting with a big plastic bag.  They collected litter beside the road and came back into the Council meeting and dumped that bag, now filled with Styrofoam cups, onto the floor. 

The vote was unanimous in our favor.

But the story keeps going and going in ways none of us could have foreseen when we started out with our broken hearts.  A friend of mine from Social Work grad school, Jane Quinn, an activist for community schools way before their time, happened to call the next day to catch up.  “What’s new?” she asked.  “Oh! That’s a Today Show story,” she said after I told her what we were up to.  “I know someone there.  I’m going to call.”  The next day Bridget, and Anna Brown and I were on a plane to New York City.  The Today Show put us up in the Plaza. The kids slept like puppies.  I was a nervous wreck and stared at the ceiling most of the night.  A limo picked us up the next morning and took us to the studio.

We waited in the Green Room until we were called onto the set.  There was Bryant Gumbel and everywhere—lights.  There was a camera and a TV set up on a table with the face of a man who represented the Dow Chemical. He was there to debate the girls and disprove their concerns.  Another great Netflix scene.  I don’t remember exactly what they said to him or what he said, but the girls rocked it!! 

But here’s the part about the mystery of change, the unimagined consequences of our actions.  Years later when Bridget and Anna were in college, a Wall Street Journal front page article would quote this man from the plastics industry as crediting this debate with Bridget and Anna as the moment when he knew he had to leave the plastics industry and devote his life to helping the planet! 

After the ordinance passed, after we came home from NYC, many things happened I could never have imagined when I said those first words to Bridget: why don’t you bring your friends home, and we will talk about it.  The list I could make of those things is long and that’s only what I know about. CAKE clubs were formed in other towns in Maine, and as far away as Santa Fe, New Mexico. Many of the kids involved grew up to become environmental scientists and activists. Notably for this story, Anna Brown is one of those kids.  Her whole career has been devoted to climate change and environmental equity. 

Eventually, the Montreal Protocol which phased out the use of chlorofluorocarbons, was signed. 

None of this happened because of any one individual, or any one action, or any one idea or plan.  It emerged with the energy, interest, and interconnections of an ever-evolving movement of kids and adults who loved something dearly, whose hearts were broken by that love and who took it upon themselves to speak about that love and that pain.

Was there anything brave about what we did?  Perhaps bravery comes from staying in the place of the broken heart long enough to know how much you care.  Perhaps It comes from speaking the feeling and not being afraid to look silly or weak-kneed or, as in the case of my family of origin, asked to stop talking about it.   

The saltmarsh at Porters Landing with 3’ of sea level rise. Use this link to discover what sea level rise will do to a place you love: https://maps.coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/slr.html

So here I am, thirty two years later, my heart once more broken by forces of progress way beyond my control, facing the prospect of the loss of another saltmarsh I lived beside. I am huddled around a table on a cold November afternoon, working to save what I love.  Anna has invited me to meet Valy Steverlynck, another earth activist, an effervescent woman who rode her bike to the meeting to discuss how FCAN can support the work of the town’s Sustainability Committee. Together we vowed. That’s how. 

Now reader, it’s my turn to invite you to come sit with me, to accompany me on this journey of the broken heart. If you live here in Freeport, you can do that beyond the page in real life! FCAN is holding small group meetings through November to help build a climate action group, this time of the big people in the room.  And, like CAKE, we aren’t sure what the future will bring, but we are sure that together we have the imagination, the experience, the brains, the heart, and the energy to come up with some pretty good ideas about what to DO.  Together.

(Yesterday FCAN had its second small group meeting. I will write about it in next week’s blog. But I want to give you a hint: it was indeed miraculous.)

If you don’t live in Freeport, maybe you can be tempted to gather a small group of friends together, ask them to come talk about their concerns…explore what emerges.

Back in 1989, Freeport was a model for other groups and towns concerned about  environmental threats.  I believe we can again lead as a model community, that we can together imagine what a community responsive to the idea of living in harmony with the planet, and not in dominion over it, would look like.  And then we can live it. Together.