Protecting the Common Good
It's the last week at the Institute on Civic Engagement, and a though theme comes up dulcis in fundo: environmental issues. The link between environmental issues and climate change plays a primary role in European policies, but here in the U.S. - as we were able to understand during previous days' sessions - debate is far more heated, and far more complex and varied have become the approaches taken to protect the environment as a common good.
That said, this morning we had the perfect chance to learn about what more, separately from climate change, endangers U.S. landscapes, in particular rivers, and what grassroots activism has done here to successfully safeguard the environment.
Congaree Riverkeeper Director, Bill Stangler, took us on a virtual and vocal tour of the park before we could even see it with our own eyes, and speaking of eyes, he opened ours on the energy, courage and, above all, willingness to serve that make Riverkeeper a solid, successful organization in its fights for the environment (who's Jimmy and how and why did he lose his leg? Neither Bill nor us will ever know!).
The afternoon finally stepped in, and with it an exciting trip to the Congaree National Park, which we all really wanted to visit regardless of the warnings for sunburns, mosquitoes and weird spiders looking like bananas (and they're big spiders, trust me. Yellow, big, fancy spiders that embellish the park with their state-of-the-art webs).
A wooden path stretched out into the wilderness, and we followed it through impressive trees, sky-blue streams, muddy soils that revealed how water shapes the land at Congaree, a river filled up with fish and turtles and meadows spotted by eerie cypress knees, which are apparently very common for U.S. cypresses to grow.
I saw the knees for the first time here at Congaree, and found them to be indeed quite eerie: many Italian legends, including those I heard from my grandparents, tell of fairy people living in the woods, and the knees did look like little fairies sitting jokingly motionless on the grass, singing a silent song at century-old trees and staring at humans passing by them.
It was with this image in mind that I left the Congaree park, and waving at the little fairies sitting by the trees, I waved at and thanked all the people who made this possible, hoping to get as much inspiration as possible from their essential efforts.
