Being Where You Are

Being Where You Are: How Environmental Volunteers Impact Their Community and the Planet Every Day features the stories of a charming, eclectic and fascinating group of environmentally involved everyday citizens. They include a frog song monitor who used to be terrified of frogs, a man whose personal mission and life’s work is to clean his town’s beaches, and a mother-daughter team of suburban beetle ranchers, among others. Their efforts run the gamut from monitoring osprey nests and banding migrating songbirds to pulling trash out of rivers and educating children at nature centers. While the places range from small coastal towns and mountain villages to major cities, all of these volunteers have a deep connection to the special places where they live. They also have a lot to say and teach about the environmental problems we all face and how every person, regardless of location or stage of life, can get involved and do their part. As much as they are educational, their stories are hopeful and inspirational, with the potential to motivate others to become environmental volunteers as well, creating important and necessary change in their home towns and their small corner of the planet.

Being Where You Are explores the lives of people who volunteer for conservation organizations, those with missions supporting the preservation and protection of the natural world. This book poses some essential questions, such as: How do people connect to place? What makes them care about a place and want to work towards preserving it? What motivates them to seek out volunteering opportunities? What do they get in return when they volunteer to protect a place they love? Beyond simply asking these questions and analyzing the responses, Being Where You Are tells the tales of volunteers, offering answers while relating the personal stories of these people, their volunteer efforts and the way those efforts influence the health of our planet in important ways. Conservation organizations, from land trusts to watershed associations, are especially dependent on their dedicated volunteers, sometimes making up a small army who conduct the work which would otherwise take many paid staff members. Volunteers, those featured in this book and many more like them, do everything from testing the quality of water in rivers to tracking wildlife in the woods during winter to writing grant proposals and press releases. They conduct their work in office cubicles and knee-deep in trash-strewn rivers, at all times of day, from early morning to late at night. Through their personal stories, these volunteers relate how and why they feel a deep, personal connection to a place and then act upon that connection with this kind of dedicated, tireless work. Told by the volunteers, in their own words, these are stories of giving back to the community and the planet. Stories of finding special connections to special places. Stories of the many ways that anyone who is willing and able can have a powerful and lasting impact on those places. They are stories which provide readers with an opportunity to learn about environmental problems occurring all over the world, from countries many miles away to their own back yard, and what local citizens are doing about those problems. Finally, they are stories that provide readers an insight into what they can do themselves, to get involved, give back and do their part to combat or reverse oncoming ecological crises.

For more than three years, Robert Barossi has been immersed in the world and work of environmental volunteers. In April of 2011, he began working with the Trustees of Reservations, the largest land conservation organization in Massachusetts, on a public relations project aimed at the group’s volunteers. Robert spent that spring and summer attending volunteer events, meeting with volunteers, speaking with them and interviewing them, at Trustees properties across the state. Over the summer and fall of 2011, he worked with the Trustees’ Public Relations Manager, writing press releases detailing the stories of the interviewed volunteers. The following spring and summer, Robert began the process of contacting and interviewing volunteers for the work that culminated in Being Where You Are. Over the course of the project, approximately eighty environmental organizations were contacted. Many volunteer program directors and managers responded, enthusiastically interested in taking part and willing to facilitate contact with the organization’s volunteers. He then contacted volunteers at all of the responding organizations, eventually interviewing roughly sixty of them, from Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, varying in age from twenty-three to eighty years old. Those interviews now make up the chapters of Being Where You Are. Robert is a recent graduate of Green Mountain College, where he received his Masters of Science in Environmental Studies, with a concentration in writing and communications. Recently, his environmental writing has appeared on the blog for The Trustees of Reservations, as well as a new environmental blog which he helped to launch, The Ecotone Exchange (theecotoneexchange.com). He has continued to tell the stories of environmental volunteers at his own blog, Being Where You Are (beingwhereyouare.com) and can be followed on Twitter @RobBarossi.