At the age of eleven, Ken Cline watched the river in his Ohio hometown catch fire from pollution. As a high school student, he volunteered to help draft the boundaries of the CuyahogaValley National Recreation Area. These early experiences, along with his love of the outdoors and of rivers in particular, inspired him to become involved in conservation. For more than twenty years, Ken has taken an active role with the Sierra Club at the local, state and national level. As a member of the Sierra Club's national conservation governance committee in the mid-1990s, he helped to reshape the club's conservation policies and campaign strategies.
At the time, anti-environmental legislation threatened to weaken the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and other key environmental laws and regulations. The Sierra Club's strategy had been to focus its efforts on lobbying; however, Ken and other leaders soon realized success could only be achieved by raising public awareness of the issues at the local level. The club began to focus on educating the public and mobilizing individuals to oppose the proposed legislation. As a result, the Sierra Club was able to leverage its national network of volunteers in new and highly effective ways to preserve key environmental protections.
As an attorney with an undergraduate degree in the biological sciences, Ken says that he was surprised to encounter "really brilliant lawyers who were intimidated by environmental cases because they involved science.” He notes that colleagues in the firm where he worked had misgivings about his environmental beliefs and were reluctant to assign him environmental cases; however, because of his knowledge of science, they would consult with him despite these misgivings.
Ken was drawn to COA because it seemed to offer "the education I wish I would have had.” As an undergraduate, there was little integration between his academic interests in biology and political science. As an attorney, he saw first hand how biology, politics and justice intersect. He observes, "Problems don't start out as legal problems, or social problems, or economic problems. They are just very complex problems where all these things are interconnected.”
Ken's teaching methods are rooted in his experience as an activist. While it is important for students to have a strong theoretical background, he feels that they learn best by applying theory to solve real problems. To that end, Ken and his students have participated in the Earth Summit in Rio de Janero, Brazil, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa and the Convention on Biodiversity in Curitiba, Brazil.
Students in Ken's advanced land use planning course, co-taught with Isabel Mancinelli, worked with the city of Ellsworth to draft recommendations for revitalizing the waterfront. The city later hired a professional consultant to develop a revitalization plan. The consultant was so impressed with the students' recommendations that he decided to use them as the starting point for his own work.
Ken and his students have also been active with the Union River Watershed Coalition, working to expand the coalition - which started as a working group of state and federal agency personnel - to include broader representation. As a result, the organization has grown to include individuals from the nonprofit and business sectors, land owners, real estate developers and other interested citizens all working to preserve the economic, social and ecological integrity of the watershed. According to Ken, this effort has taught people to think not in terms of political or human boundaries between towns or counties, but in terms of the watershed's ecological boundary. Creating that shift in people's thinking, says Ken with pride, "is the most subversive work I've ever done.”
See:
A River Runs Through It - A College-Community Collaboration for Watershed-based Regional Planning and Education |
