July 26, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

‘The planet doesn’t need another house’
Visiting actors now acting to save the environment
by LEN LEAR

Julie Dingman Evans, 38 (from left), Mark Dixon, 32, and Ben Evans, 37, have left their jobs and homes to travel to all 50 states in the next year promoting environmental consciousness and protection.

Meghan Carey, a singer-songwriter, earlier this month had three most unusual overnight visitors at her home on Shawnee Street in Chestnut Hill. All three are professional actors who until very recently were living and working in New York, where one of them, Julie Dingman Evans, had met and befriended Meghan.

Julie, 38; her husband of three years, Ben Evans, 37, and Mark Dixon, 32, who had met Ben when both were students at Stanford University in the 1990s, did not come to Chestnut Hill to sightsee, vacation, take an acting job or buy a leaf-blower at Kilian’s. They came here as one of the first stops on a year-long eco-expedition through all 50 states in the country.

The trio of environmental activists have put their acting careers on hold while they drive across the entire country “to connect with Americans of all stripes and figure out how the heck we can start cleaning up after ourselves.”

The group’s project is called “Your Environmental Road Trip” (YERT), and anyone can communicate with them on their web site, www.YERT.com. After several weeks of planning the trip, the trio first went to Pittsburgh, then to the Live Earth concert in New Jersey, then to East Stroudsburg, then Centralia (where a coal mine has been burning for 40 years) and then Chestnut Hill, where they met with representatives of Friends of the Wissahickon and others. They visited officials in Media because “it was the first city in the country to go all ‘Fair Trade’ at a policy level.” Then they took off for destinations in New England.

With video camera in hand and tongue in cheek, the trio is exploring the landscape of America’s approach to environmental sustainability. Their goal is to meet with activists, reporters, businesspeople and ordinary citizens at every stop to spread the message that everyone has a stake in protecting the environment and minimizing waste of the world’s resources.

“We hope lots of people will join us online each week,” said Ben, “as we shamelessly bathe ourselves in the best, the brightest — and the weirdest — of America’s ecological progress with a mix of outrageous antics, provocative examples and thoughtful reporting.”

No one can accuse the trio of being morose, somber activists. They are actually quite amusing, as can be gathered from the biographies on their web site, of which the following were excerpted:

•“Ben was raised in Kansas and New Jersey (by wolverines). Ben graduated from Stanford University in 1994 ... at least that’s what he tells his family ... of wolverines. After working for a Bay Area graphics software company for two years, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the performing arts ... Over the last decade, he has performed in film, television and theater in L.A., New York, Europe and across the U.S. ... He believes that the U.S., if it tries really hard, can melt everything. This would be bad. In his free time, Ben enjoys mincing salt, juicing bananas and petting feral cats.”

•”Julie Dingman Evans is unparalleled in her ability to grind jokes down to a halt with the most absolutely literal interpretation ... Born in Florida and raised in Kentucky, Julie believes her need to hug trees can be traced to countless camping and fishing trips, long bike rides, several failed attempts to save baby birds and tending mom’s flowers and the family vegetable garden ... Julie has toured shows professionally across the U.S. And Europe and most recently starred off-Broadway in Shout! The Mod Musical!” (Ben and Julie, by the way, met on Long Island while acting together in Annie Get Your Gun. They played the two leads, Frank and Annie. “It made it easy to fall in love,” explained Ben.)

•”After surviving childhood at a young age, Mark Dixon attended Stanford University and somehow graduated in 1997 ... A citizen of the world, he has visited 26 countries and lived on three giant continents, including a year in Tokyo, Japan. Mark has entertained audiences ... in a variety of genres, including jazz, comedy, gospel, opera, improv and musical theater and classical religious music ... Mark is also one of 1000 climate messengers chosen and trained by Al Gore to give presentations about the climate crisis that we face today.”

How on earth can adults — not college students who can relay on daddy — give up their jobs for at least one year and embark on an enterprise that is bound to be quite costly?

“We had been saving up to buy a house, and so was Mark,” explained Ben. “We kicked in all of our savings to pay for this trip, with Mark kicking in the most. The planet needs this project more than it needs another house. This will be a life-changing experience. The time is definitely right; people are starting to open their eyes about the critical state of the environment.”

The trio hope to save money by camping out whenever possible, staying at the homes of friends, as they did in Chestnut Hill, and with strangers who visit their web site after learning about them through media stories like this one.

“We are trying to set an example by generating little or no waste and to challenge the notion of what’s necessary,” stated Ben. “It’s good to recycle, but it’s even better to not use things in the first place and stay out of the waste stream. Restaurants are probably the biggest offenders. In Pittsburgh, for example, we asked for a pizza to be served on a metal plate instead of a paper plate, and they did it.