A Place of our Own

Remember that "talk amongst y'selves" skit they used to do on Saturday Night Live? Isn't that what propels the quality of life/environment/ecology effort forward, all that talking amongst ourselves?

Why is that so hard? One of the reasons is that it's so hard to find a place to sit down and talk. The CEC has put together a terrific panel to talk about "Air Quality and Community Health" in October and we're down to the last part: finding a place to have it. It's always like that, always a chore to find a place.

And when we do find a place, it's often not quite right; doesn't have something or other that we need, or that would make the thing work better. Most of our member organizations have the same problem, year after year, and I wonder if there's not a solution.

What if we had a Houston Environmental Conference Center? In a central location, with a nice space that would seat 200 people theater style, or smaller groups in roundtable format. With decent audio/visual equipment and comfortable seating. And a small kitchen. And a media room with a couple of computers and copiers and the other tools that make conferences work. And some offices that some of the 75 Coalition member groups could rent full time at reasonable prices. And some smaller conference and meeting rooms. And a roof where people could go watch the sun set. And a garden outside, a place to walk and do some heavy networking.

A really nice place where the quality of life is excellent and people could get together to talk about ... the quality of life.

I've actually been talking to a few people about this, and I think there may be some interest. The notion of a corporate-quality meeting space where everybody in the environmental community can get together again and again is one that may strike a chord among corporate environmental managers and executives. It's a vision of the kind of space that people from governmental agencies and task forces, corporations, and community groups can feel at home in, with the underlying mission that we have to figure out how to improve the quality of life in our region and the only way we're ever going to do that is if we can sit down and talk, and listen.

I'm thinking of the kind of space that demands some civility. I have some experience in this. Years ago, I photographed the several Rothko Chapel Colloquia, and if you've been in the chapel, you know what an imposing place it is, and what a sense of submission it seems to require from people.

The Chapel used to bring together people from very different backgrounds and points of view, Muslims and Jews and Sufis and Buddhists, and sit them all down in this amazing space, and talk, often for days at a time. I sat through all of those meetings and listened and watched, and I realized how powerful that vehicle was, the quiet, comfortable space with an option for outdoors that allowed smaller discussions, walking discussions, meetings of minds. No one left those events unchanged.

We can do that. There is so much property here, so many pleasant places, so much money and capability, it's ludicrous not to believe we could establish a place that all of us would like to go, and often, and talk things out.

How would we start?

A Largish Conglomeration

Members of the CEC board have been talking more and more about the Coalition, about getting our coalition humming somehow. Somebody suggested that the combined memberships of all the groups in the Citizens' Environmental Coalition exceeds 25,000 people. That's a pretty good bunch of folks. Ought to be able to get something done with a crowd like that. Problem is we almost never get together into a crowd.

We've been wondering if we could do something on Earth Day 1998 that was not aimed at the public at large, but at ourselves, a big family event like a picnic in Memorial Park. Or perhaps a big buffet dinner where we could all get together and pat eachother on the back. Sound like fun? Let's hear ideas.