ECOLOGIA Reaching Out With Environmentalism

Author: Pete Faroni

Vermont, home to several prominent civil and political advocacy groups, is also the home of Ecologists Linked for Organizing Grassroots Initiatives and Action (ECOLOGIA), an international environmental organization based in Middlebury. The Middlebury Campus recently caught up with Carolyn Schmidt, co-founder and Board Secretary of ECOLOGIA.
In the ECOLOGIA office, a poster hangs on the door that bears a saying of Eugene Debs: "While there is a lower class, I am in it." ECOLOGIA works to help this lower class and create a global civil society through its grassroots initiatives. "You can't just look at yourself as removed from the struggles of the world," Schmidt remarked.
The Campus: How did ECOLOGIA get started?
ECOLOGIA: ECOLOGIA was started in 1989, by my husband Randy Kritkausky and me, as a response to going to the Soviet Union. [It was] coming out of the Cold War times and seeing everything opening up, finding so many points of connection and feeling that there had been many barriers between people: fear, distrust and xenophobia. It's very exciting to think that you're in a position, despite historical chance, to bridge over some of those gaps. So we connected with people from the Soviet Union on a lot of different dimensions, especially on environmental concerns. We were involved with our own environmental issues in northeastern Pennsylvania-(where we lived at the time)-and the people of the Soviet Union had horrendous environmental problems. A lot of the problems were related to the fact that, being in a centralized system, local people had no say in what environmental degradation was done to their land. So one thing led to another, and we ended up forming a non-governmental organization (NGO), ECOLOGIA.
The Campus: Is there any relationship between Middlebury College and ECOLOGIA?
ECOLOGIA: The Middlebury connection comes in through our daughter, Laurel Kritkausky '99, who was 12 when we went to the Soviet Union for the first time. It was a life-changing experience for all three of us. She ended up going to Middlebury, and after she graduated, she worked for us for four years. She was the director of the Nuclear Communities in Transition Program. She just recently resigned, wanting to do something else after having put four years into this intensive work, mainly in Russia.
The Campus: Is your daughter's attendance at the College the reason that your organization is now based out of Middlebury?
ECOLOGIA: In the year 2000, we moved ourselves and ECOLOGIA's U.S. headquarters from northeastern Pennsylvania to Middlebury. This decision was certainly influenced by the fact that when we came up to visit our daughter, we began to appreciate more and more the human resources, the culture and the politics of Vermont and the Champlain Valley. The idea of living and working in a personally and professionally supportive climate was very appealing.
The Campus: Is having the College in your backyard been an asset in your work?
ECOLOGIA: There's a whole appreciation and incorporation of diversity in Vermont, and we feel that, for a lot of reasons, it's not just supportive for us, but it's also a wonderful area to bring international visitors. There's a whole supportive network of students, professors, staff -- the whole institutional orientation of Middlebury as a liberal arts college with an international focus is a terrific source of a lot of support. We have enjoyed getting to know and working with a lot of different people at Middlebury. In particular, Professors David Rosenberg and John Isham, and organizations such as the Rohatyn Center -- they've been very interested to work with us, interested in what we have and in what we're doing, [which is] real-world, grounded roots action.
The Campus: How has ECOLOGIA gotten involved with environmental work in other countries?
ECOLOGIA: A government is composed of people. We work on a variety of levels internationally, but we do as much as we can to link them. We work to locate individual projects done by community groups in the fields of environment and sustainable development. We have a real world connection with small-scale community groups; they want money so they can buy shovels so they can plant trees. In order to get the project done, people in local government and business leaders work together with them. This has a long-term effect of showing cooperation, but also showing the government that citizen groups can be involved, and that they have a lot to offer. This will open the government officials to more cooperation with citizens group in the future. It will also give the citizens more confidence to get involved.
One of the first things we did was to buy a hand-held radiation detector. A lot of the stuff that we took into the Soviet Union on our trips at that time we took in illegally because it was illegal for people to have anything of their own. You couldn't even have your own pH kits. It was illegal to have anything that would let you know about your environment-that was only for the government. Therefore, getting to citizens equipment they could use to find out about their environment was a revolutionary thing. That is what we started doing. With the hand-held radiation detector, the person who got it was able to walk around the nuclear power plant in his country and document evidence, which was used to get other scientists and the workers in the factory to realize that they had a problem and had to look into it to see what they could do to fix it. ECOLOGIA, as an environmental organization, being committed to sustainable development and the future of the planet, strongly encourages everyone everywhere to look into sustainable development for power, both solar power and wind power, not just jump in to supporting nuclear power.
The Campus: Has there been any involvement on behalf of ECOLOGIA in seeking international environmental standards?
ECOLOGIA: At a top international policy level, we are working on the creation of global greenhouse gas standards for factories to be in compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. In many countries this is more of an issue than it is for American companies, in the short run at least. We have two staff members who travel literally all over the world to International Standards Organization (ISO) meetings. Decisions about these standards are made and there is a lot of political involvement. In the ISO, we actually co-chair one committee. You are there, you have a voice and you have a protected legal status.
The one main thing that we are focusing on, whatever standards are chosen, is having information available to the public. Who is making sure that you are doing what you say you're doing? It becomes a very complicated process. The ISO's process is industry driven. My main concern is that it not be done behind closed doors.
The Campus: With consideration of our country's unique position, has there been any benefit to working on international environmental issues from an American perspective?
ECOLOGIA: There is a certain amount of power for people from other countries to come here and to see so much good, particularly the American approach of: "Here's a problem. Lets fix it." It's a really positive, high-morale approach to solving problems, rather than collapsing in despair and frustration.
We have had very good experiences with exchange groups -- people can come to the United States and see how we interact with each other and see how citizens relate to government officials. It's the kind of thing that you can talk and talk about, but when someone comes to see it, it is eye-opening.
The Campus: To what extent do politics and, in particular, political differences, influence ECOLOGIA's action in other countries?
ECOLOGIA: We are primarily an environmental organization -- that was our first real point of connection and it's a wonderful point of connection, especially when working with people in authoritarian countries. We are not coming in and saying "We're promoting human rights. We're promoting dem
ocracy." Rather, we're working together on common problems. If the other things come in as a byproduct of the openness and the opportunities to travel and work with people in their own societies, that's terrific, but our focus is primarily environmental.
Regardless of the idiocies of anybody's government you just have to say the key thing, the human thing, which is to connect with other people. However, because of those boundaries you have to make an extra effort. As a human, you see incredible oppression and people living in tremendous fear and with tremendous courage and you respond as a human.
As Americans we have a lot more freedom of choice, a lot more optimism about the world we grew up in, and a lot more financial resources. The first thing you ask is, "What can we do as individuals?" So it comes from the citizens -- it's grassroots, as opposed to starting from the government -- and I still feel that it's a very powerful approach that the world needs a lot more of.