Loyola Chicago’s Mosaic

The Chicago El is the perfect place to find environmentally minded people to volunteer. Maybe it’s in the heart of a city not entirely known for its green policies across the globe, but think of the city’s motto, Urbs in Horto, “City in a Garden.” More convincing is that a person who rides the El is not riding in a car by him or herself, spewing the guzzled gas out into the atmosphere.

So it isn’t a great surprise that the Forest Preserve District has begun advertising with a new web address, http://www.soclose2you.org/. Named for the locally impressive forest preserves we have (64,000 acres–the largest preserves next to a major metropolitan area in the world), the district has decided to try to convey that to millions of high-rise dwellers. It is only a single page, designed to aim your web surfing to the Forest Preserve’s main website and volunteering page.

The only suggest I would make is to convey really how much we have, and then convince people to want to save it. Telling people they don’t want to lose their entire natural world might not work so much after so many disaster movies, Inconvenient Truths, and assorted other doomsayers.

Tell the people they want to keep their awesome 64,000 acres. It’s less doom and gloom, and you might make more friends. Remember that? Two Cs, “convey” and “convince.” “Less doom and gloom.” “Make more friends.”