It’s
surprisingly tough to find full-time environmentalists in Rochester.

National
advocacy groups tend to gravitate toward centers of media or government like
New York or Albany, and even statewide and regional groups pass our city by. At
recent hearings for the 48-hour pesticide neighborhood notification bill you
could have bumped into the paid staffers of environmental advocacy groups based
out of Buffalo and Syracuse, and even Long Island. But none from Rochester.
(Caveat: The state Public Interest Research Group does open an office here for the summer canvassing season, but only
for canvassing; the nice college kid you gave that check to doesn’t spend her
evenings lobbying lawmakers.)

That
gap means grassroots volunteer-driven groups form the backbone of Rochester’s
environmental community. To make those groups more effective, the Federation of
Monroe County Environmentalists is trying to get them to work together. In a
June 27 session the group brought together nearly 30 activists from a handful
of organizations to swap ideas, make connections, and share priorities. Water
quality topped the list, with agriculture, land use, and environmental
education not far behind.

What’s
the next step?

“We’re
hoping that there’s going to be a core group of people who come together once a
summer and plan a meeting in the fall to look at our priorities,” says Alison
Clarke, one of the group’s organizers. That may sound like a glut of planning
and prioritizing, but Clarke disagrees.

“I
don’t think having a second meeting is too much,” she says. The idea is to
eventually create a clearinghouse where citizens can gather information or
sound the alarm on urgent issues.

“People
whose focus is around agriculture, people whose focus is around water, they can
at some level support each other on their issues,” Clarke says. “We put a whole
lot of bodies and a whole lot of organizations behind the issue.”

Mapping
their priorities now will keep the
loose-knit coalition operating smoothly down the road when an issue emerges,
she explains.

Not only does the
environmental community here suffer a dearth of paid activists, there’s also an
apparent lack of involvement from young people.

“I
don’t know why there’s not as many young people active in upstate,” says Kate
Mendenhall, a program manager at the New York Sustainable Agriculture Working
Group and one of only a few young people to attend the FCME workshop.

In
a recent work-related trip to New York City, she met plenty of environmental
activists her own age. One reason for that might simply be well-established
demographic differences, Mendenhall says: Larger cities tend to attract younger
folks, activists and non-activists alike, while rural areas and mid-sized
cities like Rochester draw an older, settled crowd.

“I
think [FCME] could definitely use some younger blood,” she says. One obvious
place to begin, she suggests, is by reaching out to environmental groups at
college campuses around the region.

Still,
the absence of people her own age doesn’t seem to dampen Mendenhall’s optimism
about what the FCME can accomplish.

“I
think it has the potential to be a really good collective,” she says.

This article appears in Jul 6-12, 2005.