Remembering Bill Burch, Forward for Fall 2024 Newsletter
Colleen asked me to compose this essay about Bill Burch, who founded the Urban Resources Initiative (URI). What to write? I strongly dislike writing “remembrances,” in part because I don’t like to say “goodbye,” and a remembrance feels like a very final goodbye. In the case of Bill, as everyone called him, I don’t think it’s appropriate (and would be such a Burch-like reaction).
Instead, I suggest that Bill is ever-present and that his disposition is embedded not only in the DNA of URI but in the many of us who knew him or have engaged with URI as well. Bill was kind and caring. He was supportive and relentless. He was contrarian and cantankerous. He believed in and loved people, community, and nature. To him, they were all awesome.
Bill started URI when he was challenged by someone’s simple and fundamental question. Why was Yale working internationally in rural areas in community forestry and not working in his own country, and in urban areas? The questioner’s point was that underlying the specifics, the basic issues, concepts, and practices were the same. And, so, in 1989, URI at Yale began.
Like Mark Twain, Bill believed that school should never interfere with one’s education. In other words, he thought the classroom was insufficient for learning and for training professionals in natural resource management. Like clinical training in law, medicine, and public health, Bill felt that we needed something similar for environmental professionals. But he believed that URI should be more than merely “training” Yale students or Yale’s “helping” communities.
Bill encouraged students from Yale to engage in mutual respect, learning, mission, and agency with our partners, from community residents of all ages to civic organizations and government agencies. We all have value and knowledge. Bill also loved metaphors, and described engagement to be like playing jazz or a beautiful dance. While Bill did not know jam bands and the Grateful Dead, he might have agreed that “It’s all one song, man.”
I have to admit that Bill would say things that would take me years to understand what he was talking about. And then, sitting in a meeting, walking through a forest, or looking at a vacant lot, I would realize, “Oh, yeah, now I understand what he was saying.” I think many of us have had that experience. Or will.
Perhaps this is why I am reluctant to write a remembrance and say “goodbye.” Directly or indirectly, big or small, Bill impacted all of us, whether we know it or not. Yet as long as we continue to pay it forward, he will be alive with us and the people and places where we work. So, I write this with profound gratitude and appreciation. Thank you, Bill and URI, and I believe we all are just as amazing as Bill thought we were.