The Big Picture: The beauty and effectiveness of citizen activists

The beauty and effectiveness of citizen activists

STEPHANIE RIEGEL

I HAVE BEEN inspired of late by the citizen activists, who, fed up with litter and trash clogging Baton Rouge waterways, have taken matters into their own hands and formed an organization that is not only raising awareness of the issue but doing something about it.

Photographer Marie Constantin co-founded the organization—the Louisiana Stormwater Coalition— with Kelly Hurtado, Renee Verma and Jeff Keuhny in March, after more than a year of documenting, through her arresting images, the litter she and random groups of volunteers collect on weekly kayaking cleanup trips around the Capitol Lake and other waterways.

In her quest to make Baton Rouge and its watershed cleaner and, therefore, healthier, Constantin has researched the many causes of the persistent litter problem, identified several potential solutions, and talked (and talked and talked and talked) to anyone who will listen about what we need to do.

Make no mistake, she will wear you out. But the intensity of her passion is contagious—and effective.

As of late June, the nascent coalition had established a fund through the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, raised more than $15,000, and acquired the first of what it hopes will be several litter-trapping booms.

What’s more, the group had identified a location for the boom in Bayou Fountain, secured permission from the private landowner to place the equipment on his property, and was in the process of finalizing an agreement with BREC to provide the manpower to maintain and regularly clean the boom, which will be located just upstream from the paddle boat launch at Highland Road Park.

It’s an impressive start for a small group, especially when you consider how long it would take government to make all that happen.

Granted, government has to operate within certain necessary constraints that serve to protect public dollars. But those protections often have a way of gumming up the works and hamstringing progress.

It is refreshing to see ordinary people band together and, through a shared dedication and vision, get things done.

I saw another example of how that kind of passion and dedication can pay off—even if it takes decades—at a reception earlier this summer at the offices of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, which are located in a sweet, unassuming cottage in Old Goodwood.

LEAN has been at the forefront of the state’s environmental movement for almost as long as there has been such a movement; and, the group has proven itself effective—not by chaining itself to pipelines or making poster children of the victims of environmental racism—but, rather, by working with industry and elected officials, using data and building relationships to achieve small but significant wins, which is about the best you can hope for in Louisiana.

Its leaders have been key in this nuanced approach. They include, chiefly, Marylee Orr, who, like Constantin, is singular in focus, generous to a fault and committed to something much bigger than herself.

She co-founded the organization in 1986 as a mother of two young children, who was concerned about their health and the impact of the state’s air quality on it. Some 35 years later, she is still at the helm of the organization.

With Orr and equally engaged in the effort is Wilma Subra, now 77, and a nationally renowned chemist, whose technical expertise has given LEAN credibility in its campaigns to reduce toxic emissions. She’s a MacArthur “Genius” fellow, among other things, and has been featured in countless national publications, including Chemical and Engineering News, which in 2020 described her as an “unstoppable pioneer in environmental chemistry and community advocacy.”

Kathy Wascom, a community activist and volunteer, is also a key member of the organization, who has given years of her life representing LEAN in the Legislature and monitoring countless public meetings for the group. She bravely continued that work this past spring, even while mourning the death of her brother, the late Davis Rhorer.

There have been dozens of others, both living and deceased. Those women are memorialized in a moving, visual tribute that hangs on the walls in LEAN’s lobby and tells the stories of the important contributions each made to the effort to protect Louisiana’s precious environment.

At the reception that night, however, Orr, Subra, Wascom and friends were gathered to honor a man—Willie Fontenot, another early LEAN activist, who documented through pictures many of the environmental campaigns, rallies and cleanup efforts in south Louisiana of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

For most of those years, Fontenot served as community liaison in the Louisiana Attorney General’s office. In that capacity, he gave tours and interviews and worked to educate the public, the media, businesses and organizations about Louisiana’s environmental issues.

But his commitment to LEAN and to raising awareness of Louisiana’s environmental problems was more than a job; it was a vocation.

Fontenot is visually impaired now and unable to really see many of those pictures he took. But they are hanging at LEAN in a new little addition off one side of the house that Orr and her son, Michael, built during the pandemic. it was touching to see him that night, surrounded by Orr and the others, as they collectively looked back on their years together, fighting the good fight using fair means and effective measures.

There is much work still to be done. But it is heartening to see others following their example and taking up their own worthy causes in an era where there is so much division, partisanship and paralysis.

REFLECTIONS

OVERCOMING FEAR, WEARINESS AND ANXIETY

This feature is a tribute by our publisher in honor of Business Report founder, Rolfe H. McCollister Sr.

OVERCOMING WEARINESS is about exchanging our weariness and lack of might for God’s strength and His increase of power. Notice Isaiah 40:28-29, “Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth does not become weary or tired. His understanding is unsearchable. He gives strength to the weary, and to the one who lacks might He increases power.” Isaiah is encouraging the hearers to look up and see five aspects of God’s nature that get in view how big God is: everlasting, Lord, creator, no weariness or tiredness, and full of understanding. Then Isaiah directs us to wait on the Lord, which is not passive, but is assertive trust and “being still and knowing that He is God,” Psalms 46:10. As an eagle mounts up and catches the wind in its wings and soars to new heights with a view from above. The believers in God assertively trust God, new strength arises so we can run and walk and not become weary or tired. Beloved, get the bigness of God in view; assertively trust God; and then enjoy to strength and power of God in your wings to soar, run, and walk.

COL Jeff Mitchell, Retired Army State Chaplain, Present Hospice Chaplain