Reimagining environmentalism in the Champlain Valley

“I imagine they’ll stand in a circle and pause and laugh as well as cry.”

That’s how Elinor Randall imagines her own funeral.  Most of us have tried to imagine that moment at some point.

One thing Randall won’t have to imagine: where she’ll be buried.  She’s picked a spot on the property where she’s lived for years in Vermont.

Randall is the first subject in a series on “green” burial.  Tomorrow we’ll meet a man who builds biodegradable coffins.

You can watch audio slide shows, with terrific photography, of both of them here and here.

Both are produced by Angela Evancie, a Middlebury College graduate who’s engaged in a year-long fellowship to expand the notion of environmentalism.  You’ll be hearing/seeing from her often on NCPR and ncpr.org.  I’ll let her introduce herself:

Hello, North Country!

I am excited to introduce a new project, “Champlain Sounding,” which I will be carrying out with support from NCPR in the coming year.  “Champlain Sounding” seeks to reimagine Champlain Valley environmentalism by bringing new voices into the conversation.

How, you might ask?  Well, I have a recorder.  And I have a camera.  And, of course, lots of questions.  And for the next twelve months, I’ll be ferrying myself back and forth across our dear Lake Champlain (full disclosure: I live in Vermont), creating multimedia portraits of individuals, families and communities that might not fit the mold of “environmentalists” by today’s standards, but still have inspiring perspectives on what it means to live on and care for the land.

At the end of twelve months, I hope to have created a body of work that gives residents from shore to shore new ideas about what environmentalism in the Champlain Valley can look like.

I hope you’ll follow the project here and at champlainsounding.org.  Feel free to send your questions and comments to [email protected].

Angela Evancie is a 2010 Compton Mentor Fellow and a recent graudate of Middlebury College.