Valerie Robertson is a pillar of the local environmental movement. She is the founder of Cape Fear’s Going Green, a long-running and well-known environmental magazine that serves as a central information hub for local environmental information and the Environmental Book Club, a local organization that critically discusses environmental literature. As a seasoned environmentalist, Robertson’s experience offers valuable insight into what it means to live sustainably.
Her first brush with the environmentalist movement was in high school. On the first Earth Day in 1970, her high school held a symposium with keynote speakers. “The next day, everybody was congratulating themselves for doing something,” she said. “My response to that was, we haven’t done anything, we’ve just introduced the concepts.” This experience first evoked her desire to create a tangible change in how people interact with the earth.
From then on, she was involved in the environmental movement in a diverse set of ways, from working for an engineer that specialized in solar heating and cooling systems to joining meetings of the American Solar Energy Society. She even ran her own arts magazine in the early 2000s in Wilmington, which provided her with the seeds of knowledge necessary to create Cape Fear’s Going Green.
These seeds began to sprout in 2006. When she moved to Wilmington, she noticed the lack of a central resource for people who wanted to live sustainably. “Whenever I would walk my dog, I would overhear some neighbor asking a question such as ‘I’d really like a tankless water heater, but you can’t buy one in Wilmington’ or ‘I want a raised bed but I’m having trouble finding clean wood,’ or other similar questions,” she said. “And I always knew the answer or knew who they should talk to.” These observations led her to start creating a resource center for people wanting to live sustainably in the Cape Fear region. A year later, in October of 2007, the first issue of the magazine came out.
The process of starting and maintaining the magazine wasn’t easy. It took an enormous amount of time and resources to start it up, but now it is self-sustaining. The most remarkable part about Cape Fear’s Going Green is that it has no hired staff, and is run entirely by volunteer staff and interns. Additionally, because the magazine is free to the public to ensure its information is accessible, it doesn’t turn a profit. However, it still manages to produce high-quality and relevant environmental content to the community.
Despite the challenges, the experience of running the magazine has been deeply rewarding. Ms. Robertson says the greatest reward has been the amount of community feedback and engagement that she receives. “I have 8 year olds that read this, faculty at UNCW that read this, and people will come up and start conversations with me that surprise me – they see me and connect with something they’ve read in the magazine,” she says. “People read this, and they remember it. And so running into people all the time who will just jump into a conversation about something they’ve read in it, that’s very gratifying.”
Another one of Ms. Robertson’s key contributions to the Cape Fear environmental community is the establishment of the Environmental Book Club, which meets every second Tuesday of the month at Old Books on Front Street. She says the book club is particularly valuable because of the kind of community it fosters. “The book club attendees range in age from high school students up to 80 something. We get feedback and thoughtful conversation from four generations of people… It’s community building, in a stronger way than I thought possible.”
When asked about her strategy to inspire people to make changes in their own life, she stressed the importance of encouragement. “Instead of telling people what to do, I like to share stories of what people in the community are already doing,” she says. “So that people know first of all, somebody’s doing something – and second of all, they’re doing something that you might be able to help them do. So I try to be encouraging and supportive instead of dogmatic and judgmental.”
She also emphasizes the importance of building a community of like minded people when taking environmental action. “To be truly effective, you need to work with people that are like-minded.” She encourages people to think about what’s important in their region, and look for a group that is addressing problems that are interesting to you. For those in the process of that search, she has a resource page on her website with a list of local organizations.
When asked about what she’d like to see more of in the mainstream environmental movement, she stressed the importance of connecting with and having respect for the environment. “I’d like for there to be a cultural shift in the US where people feel more connected to nature and realize that they are part of an ecology,” she says. “We don’t know where our food comes from, we think our food comes wrapped in plastic in the grocery store. I would like for us to appreciate that we are animals sharing the earth, a wonderful place, with all these other animals, and appreciate that animals have more skills and aptitudes than we give them credit for.”
She also warns about the pessimism that she notices in the climate movement. “I’m worried that we’re falling into a defeatist mindset, and if we actually get there, that’s going to be hard to reverse, and that frightens me,” she says. “I want to do a more compelling job of offering people ways they can connect and make a difference.”
Despite the pessimism and bad news that she sees, she still feels hope for the future. The source of this hope stems largely from the other passionate people she meets – “When I run into people who have devoted their whole life to some aspect of making things better, I’m just so excited about that. And sometimes this person is 21 or 13, and that means their enthusiasm is going to outlive my time on this earth. And that’s such a relief to me.”
Her advice to young people is simply “to get outside.” She stressed the importance of viewing nature as a “ friendly rather than a foreign experience,” and how engaging with nature through activities like hiking, boating, or swimming can cultivate this kind of meaningful connection. She also encourages them to take an active role in their community by engaging in local environmental organizations.
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