Sierra Club Environmental Award to Christine D. Sevilla

Earth Day, April 22, 2010

Each year the Rochester Regional Group of the Sierra Club honors someone from our community; someone who raised environmental awareness and had a beneficial impact on the natural world. Past awards have highlighted efforts to promote alternative energy, to improve the condition of the Great Lakes, to advocate for clean water and air. 

The award this year is given posthumously to Christine Sevilla, and  will be engraved on a plaque beside a tree to be planted on land that ultimately will be preserved in her honor. (Incidentally, the GLT, the Audubon Society and the Memorial Project group, who will be handing out packets of native seeds, are all accepting  donations to acquire the property, and each group is here at this forum tonight.)

Christine, our friend, championed many environmental causes, including wetlands, native plants, natural areas and well-protected parkland. ---She felt very deeply, and when she saw wetlands being filled for soccer fields, dedicated parks being thoughtlessly torn up by bikers or bulldozers, or invasives being planted for their exotic, and toxic, beauty, her heart bled. She truly suffered, and she tirelessly tried to rouse everyone to the injustices she saw.

She used her formidable intellectual and artistic resources to try to remedy abuses: she and I worked together  on the local Sierra Club wetlands committee, and on the ongoing effort to restore Buckland Creek where it goes through the Brighton School District at Twelve Corners campus. She spoke often at public meetings, challenging city and county governments to ensure the protection of hard-won parkland; she organized “Weed Walks” for the public, to identify and eliminate harmful invasive species.

And, Christine wrote, and photographed. She wrote, among other things, the Guide to Public Access Wetlands in and around Monroe County, and took marvelous pictures. She published calendars, called Thanotopsis (a title that meant death, due to the misuse of the natural world), but that ultimately celebrated the beauty of life. She showed her photographs in art galleries, on posters, in books. She produced a multi-media presentation about wetlands that was shown here in this very church. She worked ceaselessly.

And so this award is given to her, recognizing that one lovely light has gone out, (Thanotopsis), but celebrating life, her life; her humor, her joy, her  passion, her recognition of the overwhelming beauty of the natural world.

We don’t know many things; we don’t  know perhaps very many answers at all. We don’t, for instance, know all the answers to ecological problems, and to the great problems of living together in this mechanized modern world.

But Christine put all her energy into finding these answers. She tried hard, and she cared deeply, and she will be carried in our hearts for a very long time.

Here’s to you Christine Diane Sevilla!

Tribute in Rochester Regional Group "Eco-Logue"