Composer and ASCAP Boardmember Doug Wood co-founded a non-profit environmental organization with his wife Patti in 2000. Here he talks about the awardwinning programs they’ve created and how he thinks they can help change the world.
How did you get involved in environmental work?
When our kids were young, Patti and I became concerned about the pesticides being used on lawns and trees around our neighborhood. We started out by convincing everyone on our street not to use pesticides. We took a picture of all the neighbors and their kids standing arm-in-arm across the middle of the street holding a big "Residents Against Pesticides" sign. The local press and cable news station picked up the story, and things took off from there.
Over the years Patti became an expert on environmental toxins (she's now a visiting scholar at Adelphi University) and a soughtafter speaker on environmental health issues. I was busy with my music and ASCAP work, but I used to go to Patti's lectures and I saw the effect she had on her audience. So I got involved at first making films and web sites, trying to help her reach more people with her message.
You and Patti formed Grassroots Environmental Education in 2000. Why did you pick that name?
Real change happens from the bottom up. Big money pretty much controls how most things are done in this world, and the only thing that trumps big money is public opinion. Public opinion is shaped by education. And that's best done at the grassroots level, where the influence of big money is less potent.
Our focus is on environmental health, and the effect that common, everyday exposures have on humans, especially children. The target demographic formost of ourwork is the parents of young children, who have this natural instinct to protect. One of our first projects was a halfhour documentary film called Our Children At Risk,which dealtwith the unique vulnerability of children to environmental toxins.
The goal of Grassroots is to empower and enable individuals to become catalysts for change in their own communities. We provide them with documentary videos, fact sheets and studies. We publish reports, consumer guides and tip-strips, and we provide sample policies and programs to help people bring about positive and lasting change at the local level.
Let's talk about your latest program that just received an Environmental Quality award from the EPA, How Green Is My Town.
HowGreenisMyTown.org is a "greenweb" – a blueprint for local action, a measurement tool to see how your town is doing, a buyer's guide for verified green products and services and a college-level environmental assessment tool.
When one of our Grassroots board members askedme how he could tell if his town was really green, I looked online for a simple checklist. I couldn't find anything except tools to measure your carbon footprint. But being green is also about sustainability and environmental health. So Patti and I developed our own checklist, pulling ideas from government agencies and non-profits as well as our own work. When we were done, we realized people would be hearing about many of these issues for the first time. We had figured out the right questions, but now we needed to give people the answers.
We spent almost three years researching and writing the copy for the web site, explaining the issues, and finding the best programs and policy solutions from non-profits and government agencies all over the county. This spring we worked with Pace University to evaluate all the towns and schools in Westchester County, just north of New York City, using our criteria. We put up the details of our evaluations on the web site, so every citizen could see what their local leaders were doing, or not
doing. It caused quite a stir – which is a good thing, I think.
Grassroots is called "science-driven and solution-based." What does that mean?
Over the years we've established a network of medical professionals and scientific researchers from some of the most respected academic institutions in the country who are working on trends in emerging science. But just having the science isn't enough: you need to give people positive solutions that are practical, economical and effective. It's easy to scare people, but if you don't have something for them to do, what good is it? In the case of local political leaders, the best strategy we've found is to provide them with the information and give them a policy or program that has worked in other places.
You and Patti have a new radio show, Green Street Radio that airs here in New York on 99.5, WBAI.
We've had some wonderful guests on the show – scientists with deep backgrounds on critical environmental issues. And of course WBAI is listener-supported radio, free from the influence of corporate advertising or underwriting, so we have the freedom to cover whatever subjects we want, from fluoride in the water we drink to fire-retarding chemicals in the furniture we sit on.
You're a composer, recording engineer, filmmaker, script writer, radio host, ASCAP Board member. Patti is a professional flutist, artist, author, lecturer. And you work together running your music business, Omnimusic. How do you find time to do everything?
We're idea people, and even after working together side-by-side all these years (we've known each other since we were four years old) we find there's usually not enough time in the day to do all the things we want to do. So we try to get as many things done as we can. The issues we deal with are very compelling, and when we see families torn apart by the diagnosis of a serious illness or disability in a child, it drives us to do more, better, faster. We keep glancing over our shoulders at the ticking life clock, hoping we have enough time to do all the things on our list before time runs out.
