SUGARCREEK — Ask the average American (especially young ones) when the environmental movement began and you’ll likely be told it all started with Earth Day 1970. Hard to explain, then, the founding of the Sierra Club in 1892, followed a decade later by the National Audubon Society. Or how three, still vital groups — the Isaac Walton League (1922), Wilderness Society (1935) and the National Wildlife Foundation (1936) were engaged decades before that first Earth Day.

This isn’t to say that Earth Day 1970 didn’t accomplish anything. It did. It was a wake-up call that roused a slumbering citizenry to the fact that we were destroying our world, and time to repair it was running out.

Another curiosity’s here, too. Ask that average citizen what has been accomplished since 1970 and answers will be national in scope — the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act — big stuff requiring new laws and regulations, large appropriations and bureaucracies to oversee them.

What you won’t likely hear are proud but modest claims like, “We saved a stream.”

I need here to honor a Minnesota woman I call one of my “environmental war-horse friends.” Shirley Hunt was on the board of a statewide environmental action group of which I was president. But that’s not where she started. She started with Nine Mile Creek, a small, increasingly filthy stream that ran through her own backyard. Shirley didn’t cotton to filthy. Her sons played in that stream. She realized, however, that “her” stream ran through a lot of backyards, and she couldn’t save it alone. It would take a community.

So she set out to forge one. One neighbor or business owner at a time, Shirley organized the Nine Mile Creek Association. Those who “owned” a piece of the creek began to take pride in it. A sense of community accountability began to replace the old notion that “It’s mine, I can do what I want with it.” By the time Shirley was done, Nine Mile Creek wasn’t just the pride of her suburb, it was a sparkling model of citizen action.

Why am I telling you this? Because it’s happening here, and could have equal or greater impact. The most recent step occurred a month ago when a mixed bag of Crawford County organizations, Allegheny students and individual citizens assembled to discuss how to engage more people in the transformation of Mill Run from a neglected resource to an artery of pride (see “A great ‘run’ ” in the April 15 Tribune). That gathering was only the latest dialogue about growing a sustainable community — one that recognizes and capitalizes on assets that nature put here long before David Mead and his clutch of settlers rafted up French Creek in search of a town site. Now in its sixth year, the effort has adopted a title that qualifies it for double entendre status: “Meadville, PA: Not Your Run of the Mill Community”

Unfortunately, some aren’t impressed. It’s just an old creek, they argue. What difference does it make? I wish it were just an old creek, but it isn’t. Environmental assessment undertaken at the start of the project discovered human fecal coliform pollution. That’s a gentile way of saying that Mill Run carries raw sewage right through Meadville.

But fixing it will cost money. How can Meadville afford that? Actually, the opposite is true. Our planning and environmental assessments will put Mill Run on the state’s list of impaired waterways, making us eligible for financial grants to underwrite improvements. The same effort will leverage state funds to upgrade North Street’s sewer pipes from which the pollution appears to originate. And the Shadybrook Park renovation project, already under way, will filter storm water runoff from 19 acres, improving the stream’s water quality.   

None of this would surprise Shirley. She realized that community efforts don’t just happen, they require sustained effort over time. She knew that this kind of effort succeeds only when everyone remotely connected — property owners, elected officials, wading kids or caring citizens — see themselves as stakeholders. This isn’t your decision or mine. It’s ours. It takes a community to undo years of abuse and resurrect a stream to the status of community asset.

Most important, Shirley understands (I know, because we fought enough of them together) that environmental decisions don’t always pose a good against an evil. They are often issues of competing goods. Personal property rights are an essential part of the American social contact. But so is my neighbor’s welfare. A stream may run through “my” property; but when it leaves mine, it enters yours. I’m no more entitled to degrade its water in the short time that I control it than I am to foul the air that flows through my yard and into your window.  

Mill Run is a community resource. It requires the care — and the caring — of all of us. Wouldn’t it be neat if the very first thing we wanted to show every visitor to Meadville was a sparkling brook that winds right through the middle of our town?



Skinner, a native of Meadville, is chaplain emeritus of Allegheny College and a longtime environmentalist.