Politics & Government
The Ubiquitous They – Constance Beutel
Constance Beutel is a lifelong conservation enthusiast and vice chair of the Community Sustainability Commission.
Who are you and what is your role? I’m Constance Beutel and I am the vice chair of the Community Sustainability Commission.
Why the Community Sustainability Commission? My parents were deeply committed to conservation and organic gardening in Minnesota. We were doing organic gardening in the ‘50s. That’s very much part of my background. When the commission came along it became a very tangible way to get involved at a practical local level. Behind that is urgency because I just see this accelerating exponential pace of change that we’re seeing on a practically everyday basis.
How long have you lived in Benicia? I moved to Benicia in 1989. I came here just after the earthquake. I love Benicia. It’s everything that one would want in a community. It has a history, it has a place, it has an identification, and it has people who are really interested in the community from arts and culture to sustainability and economics and things like that.
What would you like to see the Community Sustainability Commission accomplish in the next year? To help provide the information that helps people make informed decisions on how to access sustainability, so that people can see what’s happening and then they can start to take meaningful action. I think we all have to work together. We all have to be informed.
What do you say to those who don’t think sustainability is a priority? There really is a lot of data, scientific verifiable data that’s visible. And usually things that happen in such a grand, epic kind of way are so hard for the human eye or the human being to detect. But we are seeing this at such an accelerating rate that you can look at photographs of glaciers and see what’s happening. There’s just too much information out there to say nothing’s happening. It isn’t just global warming, it’s global climate change. If people still want to say this is not happening, they have to reconcile themselves to what the consequences are going to be if we don’t start to make changes to adapt.
