New Haven Independent

The midday tour hadn’t even started yet, and already MaryAnn Moran of Fair Haven’s Grand Paint (right) had made a new friend. Lee Cruz made her do it. “We believe that the people that come on these walks are the best people,” Cruz said to the group of about 40 gathered at Blatchley Avenue’s Fair Haven Furniture, the starting point for a miles-long walk organized by the Bioregional Group to encourage connection with the area, and familiarity with both its natural environment and human development. (Click here for more on the history and philosophy of the Bioregional Group.)

“But the best people don’t know each other very well.” To fix that, Cruz instigated a platonic round of “speed-dating”: instructing pairs of strangers to link up, chat up, and connect.

By the time the group started off on River Street toward Criscuolo Park, everybody had a new buddy. “This is as much about connecting to the earth as connecting to each other,” said Cruz, a devoted community leader in Fair Haven.

Tess Korobkin, who works at Youth Rights Media, had a chance to hear why Domingo Medina goes in for the Bioregional ethic: “It connects people back to the community, to where the water comes from, where the waste goes.” Medina even shared his idea for extending Earth Day to “Earth Month,” during which trash collection should stop, forcing people to really confront their waste.

This reporter met Maria Tupper, organizer of communications for the Bioregional Group, who sang the value of “having a real relationship with the region you live in.” “The only way you can really know your area is by walking it.”

Equally pro-Bioregional was Ben Ross (pictured here taking a load off behind Grand Paint), a spirited participant in the group walks and “lots of things in the community.” Not neglecting, of course, the valuable activity of “chilling out.”

Passing through the John Martinez School fields across from the currently shut-down English Station power plant, the group was at ease enough to call out competing proposals for its conversion. “Think museum!” “Casino!” Unanimous was that it shouldn’t, across from the K-8 school, be permitted to reopen as a plant.

A stop in front of Haven Street’s Reclamation Lumber warranted praise for the company’s conservationist orientation. They de-nail and restore old wood for re-sale: including kinds tricky to find elsewhere. “If you ever need that yellow pine to fix your floor, this is the guy to come to,” pitched MaryAnn Moran.

Across the street residents Carlos (left) and Antonio (right) didn’t join the tour, but they had no objections. “We’re taking a walk through the community to get to know it better!” called Moran mid-stride. “OK!”

After a watermelon pit-stop inside Grand Paint, the group headed up the Mill River, admiring a newly-cleared trail — with new Fair Haven wisdom and surely a few new recruits heading into summer. Join them odd Wednesdays at 7:30 at Never Ending Bookstore (810 State St.) for a “Series of Bioregional Conversations.”