Setting the record straight

Cliff Vanover doesn’t have his facts straight

Training activists in Virginia

By Catherine O’Reilly Collette

When I read about the comment by Cliff Vanover in EcoRI.org calling my husband Will Collette “anti-environmental” I was shocked at his ignorance of the facts.  After some years as a community organizer, Will spent 18 years working in the environmental movement. And I don’t mean the life or death struggle for open space and hiking trails.

Will and I met in 1969 when we were both volunteers for Ecology Action for Rhode Island, where we later served as board members.

In 1981, Will helped Love Canal hero Lois Gibbs launch her national organization against toxic waste, the Citizens Clearinghouse, now called the Center for Health and Environmental Justice. He was Lois’s National Organizing Director between 1981 and 1989.

He helped create and worked with hundreds of community groups fighting huge garbage dumps, incinerators, and chemical plant pollution.

Later, as staff director for the Citizens Coal Council, he helped local organizations from the eastern Pennsylvania coal fields, through all of the Appalachians and across the Midwest, and up and down the Rockies fight unsafe coal mining practices, and other corporate actions which were putting poisons in the soil, air, and water and were making families seriously ill.

With Navajo elder Maxine Kescoli, one of the leaders in
the fight against Peabody Coal (at Monument Valley,
near the world's largest strip mine)

He helped the Navajo and Hopi tribes fight Peabody Coal in the Southwest, which was fouling the water supply, killing sheep, and blasting so near family dwellings that ancient hogans were being shaken apart.

He directed the McToxics Campaign, which was successful in forcing McDonalds worldwide to drastically cut back on the use of Styrofoam. And he worked with Western US groups to fight for family farms against predatory agri-business.  

Through all those years as an environmental organizer, Will worked with groups around the world, travelling to every state in the US, to Canada, Puerto Rico, Great Britain and Germany to help people organize for a safe and healthy environment.

He still stays in touch with and advises groups he helped decades ago. He has been an active advisor to the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, recently known for their work on the BP Oil Spill. Will helped them get started over 25 years ago.

And he still keeps his hand in, most recently, by helping a group in a Cranston neighborhood block a polluting concrete plant from operating in their community.

Perhaps Mr. Vanover doesn’t value work that is aimed at saving lives and protecting people’s health. Perhaps Mr. Vanover’s environmental interests begin and end with preserving open space. He is entitled to have his own priorities. But he is not entitled to hurl false accusations and expect them to go unchallenged.

And a final note. I wrote these comments as a citizen of Charlestown and as Will’s spouse of 42 years, not in my capacity as chair of the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee. These opinions are mine, not the Democratic Town Committee’s. Also, Will did not ask me to write this.

And it is also my opinion that Mr. Vanover should be ashamed of himself.