People and planet come together at Imago Center

MARY JO SPIEGEL | ENQUIRER CONTRIBUTOR

'If you hold the earth and its people as sacred, how would you live?"

With that question in mind, Jim and Eileen Schenk founded Imago in 1978 as a series of workshops to address the unhappiness Jim noticed in many people through his work as the director of Covington Community Center. Meaning "to image" in Latin, Imago aimed to heal that unhappiness by recognizing that ecology and spirituality are interwoven in every aspect of life.

"There's a dichotomy between the values in our culture of acquiring a lot of stuff and the values of people who only need the basic necessities and to be cared about, to be loved," Jim, 63, explains. "There's a disconnect between people and our planet."

By 1994, Imago's original workshops grew into the nonprofit Imago Earth Center, a 16-acre education center and wildlife preserve in East Price Hill. This patch of wilderness, reclaimed by volunteers, offers four looping hiking trails, education and natural exploration to the general public. Imago also reaches 10,000 school aged children annually through its environmental education and scouting programs.

"At one time there were houses here," says Chris Clements, 32, Imago's executive director of their mostly wooded plot, "They were cleared for a school that never got built. That's when Imago stepped in to protect it."

"I approached the school board in 1993 about preserving that land and doing programs for kids around ecology," Jim says. "I feel we really don't need to build on our green space in Cincinnati. That same year I started thinking, 'How do we walk our talk?' That's how the ecological neighborhood, Enright Ridge, where we live, came about."

At Enright Ridge Eco-Village, adjacent to Imago, 90 households in 80 buildings on a dead-end street work to sustain themselves through a community garden and, in general, by treading lightly on the earth. Eco-Village held its first home and garden tour in October, showcasing alternative energy applications and its ecologically rehabilitated homes.

But for the tour and the proud banners, the homes look much like any other. But they're part of a quiet revolution on Enright Avenue represented by a sign at Imago Earth Center that reads "respecting the land and all its species."

E-mail mjspiegel@fuse.net