For a cleaner, more prosperous world, ACC mobilizes conservatives around environmental issues, fostering collaboration in the pursuit of environmental conservation.
When you write about conservation efforts, it is extraordinarily tempting to stick to stories of trail work and trash bags, of cleanups rather than cookouts. The truth is, however, that cultivating a love for your city, your country, your place is just as important as restoring watersheds and planting trees.
Our All American Summer effort embodies this. An All American Summer event at ACC seeks to celebrate the classic American experiences that define our collective culture: cookouts, rodeos, line-dancing, fishing trips, and more. The cynic or anti-American propagandist will tell you the USA has no culture, that there is nothing worth celebrating. This is impossible to take seriously when the young people who are building the conservative environmental movement decide to deliberately celebrate their nation and have a wealth of choices with which to do so.
Consider all that our branches have done this summer.
ACC DFW put a party barge on Lake Lewisville with members from across the metroplex early in July. They had been hard at work in past weekends cleaning local parks and beaches, so celebrating both our All American Summer and America’s 250th anniversary was long overdue.
Meanwhile on the Fourth of July, ACC Houston held a beach cookout in Galveston and came back the following day to team up with local partners to haul away thirty bags of trash. We have said this before at ACC but in order to conserve a place, you need to love it first. Houston embodied that ethos.
Loving your country often means picking up the crown thrown to the gutter. When Melbourne, Florida decided to stop putting on its Fourth of July parade, former ACC branch leader Dave Neuman and two other ACC Florida members started a nonprofit and took over the operation themselves. Friends of Melbourne has run the parade for three years now and ACC Florida was happy to join them. This was the first time ACC had been featured in a parade and the members were happy to hand out All American Summer stickers and other swag.
The Austin hub planned a paddleboard social but when the city closed the local waterways due to recent flooding, they kept the paddle theme by hosting a paddle ball tournament and reflecting on the flooding and what they could do to prevent it in the future.
A group in Florida rode the tram at Shark Valley and joined a ranger-led hike through Everglades National Park, counting alligators and one ten-foot crocodile along the way. The Everglades is the only place on earth where those two species actually share a range.
Yes, yes, a parade restores no watershed and plants no trees. A cookout does not restore mangroves or reforest an eroded hillside. Instead, these events do the work that is actually upstream of both: they give people a reason to care about their place, about where they live. Stewardship is never made in a vacuum, but rather always follows attachment. That truth holds regardless of if you’re talking about a five acre meadow, an ecologically-imperative coral reef, or a country celebrating its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary
In a wounded world that finds anything earnest, patriotic, or even wholesome suspect, it is a wildly defiant act to celebrate your country and the classic experiences that define its culture. Our branches have spent the summer being defiant, but what’s more is they set the foundation for conservation.
A profound love of place.
Ryan Anderson is the Stakeholder Communications Manager at the American Conservation Coalition.