Chronicle profile: John Ealer, Croton's CLEAN-up man, takes over as chair of the Conservation Advisory Council.

Ealer has used film and television to try to bridge our disconnectedness from each other and bring people together. In Croton, he found that community trash pick-ups served a similar function.

Photo courtesy of John Ealer

When John Ealer first moved to Croton in 2017, he saw a lot of things he liked. There was the wide and mighty Hudson River, of course, and the wonderful waterfront walkways that so many villagers enjoy. But as he walked along, he began to see something he did not like: The trash that drivers had thoughtlessly thrown out their car windows along the highway.

So he started bringing a trash bag from home and picking stuff up. Soon others started helping him. And when former resident and Croton Conservation Advisory Council (CCAC) member Anthony Magardino founded the group CLEAN in 2021, Ealer quickly got involved. When Magardino left Croton early last year, Ealer took over leadership of CLEAN, which stands for “Croton Litter-Free Education Advocacy Neighborhood.”

Now Ealer has taken on an even bigger job related to conservation and the environment in our village. When Janet Monahan stepped down as chair of CCAC last October, Mayor Brian Pugh appointed Ealer to take her place.

Under Monahan’s leadership, CCAC took on a lot of conservation projects and issues, some of them controversial. Ealer acknowledges that she will be a hard act to follow.

“Janet did an amazing job,” Ealer says.

(Editor’s Note: In full disclosure, the Chronicle’s editor spent a year as a CCAC member before launching this publication.)

Ealer’s own professional training is not in conservation or environmental studies, however. He is an Emmy-nominated film and television executive producer and showrunner, with a lot of successful programs on his resume. He was the showrunner, director, and head writer for CNN’s smash hit, “History of the Sitcom,” and served similar functions for CNN’s six-part documentary “The Story of Late Night,” just as examples.

Ealer is currently producing Season Two of Bloomberg’s “An Optimist’s Guide to the Planet,” a project of which he is particularly proud. Indeed, the title of the program might be seen as a statement about Ealer’s life and work as well.

Ealer grew up in a small town in New Jersey about an hour from Manhattan. Now in his 50’s, he received a BA in communications studies from the University of Iowa and an MFA from the University of California.

Ironically for someone who would go on to be a conservation advocate, Ealer’s father was a chemical engineer for Union Carbide, and helped invent some of the polyethylene plastics that today are considered problematic for the environment. Ealer and his father would later talk about those issues, sharing a mutual understanding that while plastics revolutionized modern life in many ways, and their invention was well-intentioned, they had created problems that now have to be dealt with.

As Ealer pursued his career as a producer, he tried to use his craft to foster that kind of tolerance and understanding among his viewers.

“The simple truth for me is that many individuals meet far more people on our screens than we ever do in our daily lives,” Ealer told the Chronicle. “So the stories we tell and how we tell them matter, I think now more than ever. I tell stories in a way that is accessible to audiences everywhere, because it touches on elements of the humanity that we all share.”

Living in Croton has reinforced Ealer’s conviction that the division between people, even neighbors, is one of our leading problems as a society. “We are more disconnected than ever from each other,” he says. “It’s easier to think of our neighbors as others and not part of ourselves.”

Ealer adds: “Cancellation and expulsion and expecting dogmatic purity from anyone is something you see on both the extreme left and the extreme right. We cannot live in a society where every single viewpoint invalidates every other viewpoint.”

That is why Ealer found such satisfaction in picking up trash and working with others to do it. “It made me feel better and I felt like I was doing something.” Cleaning up the village was a “pure” act, Ealer says, something that was good for everyone and that no one was likely to be against.

Nevertheless, when Ealer joined CCAC in 2021, he found that some fights were worth having. Right at that time, the Hudson National Golf Club had applied for a permit to build a solar array on its property, a proposal that generated fierce opposition among some in the village despite the Croton Board of Trustees favoring it.

“I am for solar power,” Ealer says. “But the array was a bad idea whose time had not come. We fought it and we fought hard.”

Under Janet Monahan’s leadership, CCAC issued a position paper opposing the project, and soon afterwards the golf club withdrew its application.

The Hudson National Golf Club’s solar array proposal raised a lot of environmental and conservation issues.

Also under Monahan, CCAC took on other controversial issues, including advocating for an eventual complete ban on gas-powered leaf blowers (the group has had to settle for a seasonal ban), as well as projects to protect and enhance our local environment (the Chronicle recently profiled Croton’s trails committee, a CCAC subcommittee, as well as its Repair Cafe. For more about CCAC and all it does, see their Web page.)

As the new chair, Ealer will have his hands full, along with the other CCAC members. One of his biggest priorities for 2025 will be updating Croton’s open space and natural resources inventories. “You need to know what you have in order to conserve it,” he says.

For Ealer, being chair of CCAC and pursuing an avocation as a conservation advocate is consistent with his philosophy of life and work, which focuses on bringing people together.

“How do we help people take the small steps that could lead to important changes later on?” he asks. “I want to find those small areas of common ground that we can build from.”

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