My 10 Year Anniversary

By: Jim Poyser

Here on the completion of my first decade at Earth Charter Indiana, I note one of my most prized and precious possessions: a handwritten thank you letter from a 9 year old kid named Jamal. 

It reads:

Thank you for helping me see how bad straws are, thank you. I see how much animals are hurt and I’m so grateful that I don’t know how to forgive you.

Of course what Jamal meant to say was he was so grateful he didn’t know how to thank me, but he actually says, forgive. Well, I take that to heart. I’m the guy who comes to your school and tells you the polar bears are dying, the sea turtles have straws stuffed in their noses, the planet is heating up, sea levels are rising and that we should have started working on solving this 50 years ago. 

I wouldn’t forgive me either, Jamal.

Lots of you know this story

It all started in the spring of 2013, when I was managing editor at NUVO Newsweekly and editor at Indiana Living Green. I accepted an invitation to visit elementary students at CFI2 to deliver a presentation on climate change. I biked downtown from my NUVO office to share my slideshow, built from Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project. The visit turned out to be a revelation. These fourth graders were astute about the subject of climate, and at some point, I let them take over the presentation, moving through slides on Arctic melt and the Greenhouse Effect and explaining the content to each other. I sat back and marveled. They were more adept at running a powerpoint than me!

As I left the school, and climbed onto my bicycle, I paused to savor the moment. It was a sunny April day, cool and crisp. I knew something had changed in me, and a vision for my future began to form.

I have many fine folks to thank for helping that future become real, starting with Rosemary Spalding, whom I met late in 2012. Rosemary clued me into ECI, which John Gibson and Jerry King had founded in 2001.

Before long, I began to volunteer with ECI, but one day in June of 2013, we were sitting at a coffee shop – John Gibson, myself and others – trying to figure out how to increase ECI’s impact. It was becoming painfully clear the climate crisis message and its solutions couldn’t be carried only by volunteers.

John turned to me and abruptly asked: “Are you willing to quit your job to run this organization?”

Instinctually, without thinking, I responded, "Yes!"

Don’t get me wrong – I loved my job at NUVO. But it was a natural next step to seize this opportunity to focus, completely, on what had become the single clarion issue of my life, the climate crisis. Besides, by then, I’d had my sweet epiphany at CFI2. 

Now all I needed was the financial support to change careers, and both John Gibson and another old friend, Charlie Sutphin, contributed enough for me to proceed. My boss at NUVO, Kevin McKinney, might have wanted to talk me out of this crazy idea, but instead he saw — even better than I did at the time — the perfect fit for me at ECI.

So here we are, ten years later, and so much has changed. Spoiler alert: The Climate Crisis is worsening. In truth, in many ways, the past decade has been a harrowing descent into the apparent impossibility of addressing the climate catastrophe. It’s too big, too complicated, the bad guys are too powerful, plus we are all complicit, simply by existing.

This is a brutal, depressing business, but one I wouldn’t trade for any other.

The early years at ECI 

I jumped into my work at ECI, biking or driving to schools to deliver slideshows to kids, recalling the CFI2 experience and hoping to recreate it elsewhere. I would dutifully keep count of the number of students to whom I presented, proudly reporting the data to my board of directors each month.

Before too long, I figured out that this presentation business wasn’t terribly exciting – for me or for the kids. So I’d break away from the slidedeck and perform spontaneous trashcan inspections, inviting students to sing sad trombones about waste wrongfully thrown away. 

There was one particular animation I would show, the precipitous melt of the Arctic Circle, the canary in the coalmine if there ever was one. It pulsed with the seasons, showing the gradual then rapid decline of sea ice over the course of a couple decades. After sharing it a handful of times, I recognized how it maintained a kind of metronomic cadence, and invited students to make up music to accompany this indicator of their imperiled futures.

I created a game show, The Ain’t Too Late Show, and brought that to schools. It was an effective way to keep high school and college students engaged – they didn’t need another lecturer talking at them. Sometimes I would invite guest stars like Tim Brickley or The Troubadours of Divine Bliss to add music.

Soon, immersive projects increased and the presentations grew few and far between. Climate Camps were established in those early years, summer immersive experiences in climate science and solutions. There was the innovative Stop Idling project at Oaklandon Elementary School, where students created a reward system for parents who turned their cars off while waiting in line for their children to emerge. And, with funding from the World Wildlife Fund, we performed food waste audits at school cafeterias, to collect data for a national project to determine just how much food was thrown into landfills each day.

We started a Straw Reduction project at numerous schools. I even built a strawbale structure from used plastic straws. Yep, I’m that guy, building a strawbale from 9000 used straws, washed with water from my rain barrel. One day at the school that started it all, CFI2, we loaded my strawbale-made-from-straws onto a wagon and paraded it around downtown, asking restaurant managers to sign a pledge to not automatically hand out straws to their customers.

Because pondering the horror of a climate-ravaged world can produce anxiety, I tried to create fun and interactive activities for students, and it often worked: There were countless hilarious moments of creativity, sparks of brilliance, and projects that challenged our wasteful systems. Some years ago in Southport, high school students ranked climate solutions by the number of Titanic deck chairs. The more authentic and scalable the solution, the fewer deckchairs it received. Call it gallows humor. 

ECI’s work grows, complexifies

Along the way, we hired Shannon Anderson, first to help John Gibson with his Sustainable Indiana 2016 project, and then to help ECI in general. It was such a relief to have a  multi-talented person to rely on, in part so I didn’t have to bug my other friends to volunteer quite as much: friends like Kate Franzman, Andy Fry, Anne Laker, Amanda Shepherd and so many more.

ECI failed in our early effort to motivate Indiana’s Environmental Rules Board to pass a climate action plan, so we turned our attention to municipal Climate Recovery Resolutions, led by kids. Based on the Our Children's Trust model, kids inspired Indiana cities to pass climate policy, to get on track with climate planning. First Carmel, then Indianapolis, then 8 more cities followed.

Today, Indiana leads the country in the number of youth-led climate resolutions at the municipal level. Hey we had to start somewhere, right? And here’s an exciting update: thanks to a federal program, Indiana is actually FINALLY going to create a climate action plan, and we are working hard to have a seat at that table.

Financial support grew over the years, thanks to so many generous funders: Charlie Sutphin, the McKinney Family, Ann Stack, Herbert Simon Family Foundation, the Energy Foundation, Earth Rising Foundation, and many more. We started a green schools program with the City of Indianapolis, then took over that program, hiring Tatjana Rebelle to run it.

After a while, the three of us, Shannon, Tatjana and me, turned our staff structure into a horizontal co-directorship, so that we could more effectively focus on our mission. Soon more staff help arrived in the form of Colleen Donahoe, in a part time capacity, and then Miranda Frausto, in the beginning of this year, as our full time Latino/x/e Outreach Coordinator.

We are a small but mighty team, and help each other achieve our program aspirations. Me, I’m involved in both a theater program – with React (formerly Young Actors Theatre)  – and a journalism program: the Youth Environmental Press team. Theater and journalism are lifelong passions for me, and it turns out they’re also an effective means of bringing more young people into the climate solutions sector.

Why we persist

This summer, when the Canadian wildfires were fresh in our minds and eyes and lungs, a friend of mine said, “Jim, we should have listened to you 15 years ago.” It’s closer to 20 years, my Cassandra role of climate doom, but it brings me zero “I told you so” satisfaction now that climate chaos is on our Hoosier doorstep. 

Though there is some progress, the forces of fossil fuel propaganda and foolishness persist. We’re trying to turn the ship, but the iceberg has already put a hole in our hull.

Some years ago, I was visiting a local high school’s Eco Club and spoke to the students about the climate crisis. I must have said something a bit too optimistic, because afterward, a trusted student pulled me aside and called me on it. 

I said, “You’re right, Cora, but what should I have said?”

I’ll never forget her reply: “Just tell them ‘it doesn’t look good, but you’re not giving up.’”

And so on the occasion of celebrating this extraordinary decade, I’ll flat out tell you: It doesn’t look good, but I’m not giving up.

I’m not giving up because of Jamal and Cora and all the kids – my own, and yours, too – the kids in all the schools and camps and programs.

None of us can give up. There’s too much to do and too little time left to do it. The good news is we will grow stronger, because we have each other’s backs. 

Join me in our celebration of my ten years at Earth Charter Indiana, Saturday, Dec. 2, 6-9 p.m. at the Krannert Room in the Indiana Interchurch.