Seniors’ Efforts to Save the Environment Turn a Gray Future Green : Locally and nationally, older Americans are helping to preserve the world around them.

Today in suburban Washington, D.C., a two-day national conference begins “linking seniors to environmental action,” as the event’s organizer, Tom Benjamin, puts it. He’s chairman of the Environmental Alliance for Senior Involvement, which he described as a coalition of groups with programs for seniors who want to “conserve and protect the nation’s environment.”

Leaders of organizations as diverse as the huge American Assn. of Retired Persons, the small North American Coalition on Religion and Ecology and the ubiquitous Environmental Protection Agency will meet for two days to trade ideas on how to turn “grays” into “greens.”

Here in Southern California, it turns out, something like this is already happening. Like other California seniors, actor Eddie Albert has been sensitive to green issues for decades. He has volunteered to serve as official spokesman for the new alliance’s efforts around the country. His special concern is agricultural topsoil loss, but he notes a lot of other environmental risks facing the aging American.

“This is serious stuff,” he told me on the telephone. “We’re talking about the life of the human race. We should get with the groups that do things about this and get tough.”

A poll last year by Senior Highlights, a Southern California-based monthly magazine, revealed that subscribers in our county and nearby chose Greenpeace as a favorite charity for donations. “(Seniors) are not a selfish group and are aging in a younger way--enjoying the outdoors and looking forward to their future in it,” said Lee McCannon, the magazine’s publisher. Ventura County seniors in particular seem to be going beyond donations when it comes to environmental matters. Locally, they are creating green volunteer opportunities and producing the volunteers to fill them. For instance, when the city of Thousand Oaks needs 50 busy hands for a direct mail campaign aimed at keeping the town actively recycling, members of the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program turn out in force--every season. The program’s members maintain the 35-acre Gregor Mendel Botanic Garden in the Conejo Valley. And the Knights of Columbus chapter at St. Jude’s parish, whose members average age is 57, works throughout Thousand Oaks planting hundreds of pounds of flower seeds provided by the America the Beautiful Fund. Another volunteer environmental program, reported in a previous Earthwatch column, has placed local seniors in research and activist roles in locations all over the world. The EarthCorps, as it’s called, is operated by a Boston-based organization, which has, entirely by coincidence, the same name as this column. One feature of their program, which has proven rather attractive to seniors, is that the travel costs and certain other expenses connected with EarthCorps volunteerism are tax deductible.

Another motivator for senior involvement in ecological issues is real estate value: Many seniors are homeowners and quite aware that they can’t get lots of cash equity out of a house next to a landfill or along a smoggy boulevard. Also, modern seniors are living longer and spending more time outdoors. Who wants to jog or golf in smog? According to the latest actuarial figures, a 60-year-old can look forward to almost 20 years of senior living.

It’s a future that folks that age didn’t used to have, according to Dr. John T. Gruppenhoff, director of the National Assn. of Physicians for the Environment. He also notes that seniors are medically at high risk from smog and other toxins, and psychologically disturbed “about the increasingly polluted environment we are leaving as a legacy to our children and grandchildren.”

Details

* FYI: For Ventura County seniors interested in environmentally oriented volunteer programs, call your local Retired and Senior Volunteer Program office, 497-2663 in Thousand Oaks, 646-0144 in Ojai or 385-8020 in Oxnard. EarthCorps is at (800) 776-0188. For the Knights of Columbus “Seeds of Life” project in Thousand Oaks, call 492-0992. For Senior Highlights Monthly call 563-2541 . The Environmental Alliance for Senior Involvement is at (703) 330-5667.