ruling and serving: stewardship & environmental justice in the national & urban community

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Ruling and Serving: Stewardship & Environmental Justice In The National& Urban Community

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Ruler And Servant

• In my experiences with stewardship, I have found that there are two ways to achieve your goals of conservation.

• Ruling is achieving your means through disrupting nature.

• Serving is adding to nature directly.

• But both are for the good of nature, or those who appreciate it.

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Where My Story Began…

• From New York City.

• Never really found my passion.

• Heard about The Student Conservation Association.

• Suddenly, I’m going to Humboldt State Park home of the ancient Redwoods, in a national crew.

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Ruler of Nature

• We primarily built trail, but cut trees, put in fence posts as well as other things.

• We often seemed to disrupt the natural flow.

• But the results showed it to be necessary.

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:

The Tale of the 5 Ton Tree

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My brush with the heart of nature changed me in many ways

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The Order

• I got on the plane, accelerating back towards the real world.

• As I sat there, certain things became clear.

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I found my outlet for stewardship with the Student Conservation Association’s Service Initiative ‘ConSERVE NYC’

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• ConSERVE NYC was originally created to help New York recover from Hurricane Sandy

• It was so successful that the program not only dealt with issues related to Sandy, but performed acts of stewardship all around the city.

• Since its creation I have participated in almost all of the ConSERVE NYC events.

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• The success of the program is tremendous and vital to the environmental health of New York City.

• So far there have been 13 projects, over a thousand volunteers and 4,620 hours of conservation service.

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More Impacts

• Five tons of debris removed,Close to 80,000 SQ FT of invasive species removed, 2000 saplings, 800 FT of erosion fencing erected and many other things from bulb planting to trail building.

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Environmental Justice:

• A few bullets of text …

• … is all you need.

• They want to see and hear you …

• … not watch you read!

These acts of service inspired me to take my own time over the summer and join a crew in New York City building a trail that would house a platform accessible to people in wheelchairs.

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Friendships

• A few bullets of text …

• … is all you need.

• They want to see and hear you …

• … not watch you read!

The Student Conservation Association Community Crew helped me improve my work ethic and skill, but also it helped me find people with the same drive and appreciation for conservation that I did .

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Environmental Justice:

• A few bullets of text …

• … is all you need.

• They want to see and hear you …

• … not watch you read!

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About Sam Willner

Samuel Hugo Willner

35 Prospect Park WestBrooklyn, New York 11215

samwillner@gmail.com

(718) 398-3381 – home(917) 842-9909 – mobile

Affiliation: The SCASchool: Bard High School / Early CollegeAge: 16 years

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Photographs courtesy of Student Conservation Association, and Gavin McDonough, SCA Crew Leader.

ConSERVE NYC statistics taken from “ConSERVE NYC Report 2014”