A journalist who works long enough in any given field can develop relationships and attachments with some of the people in that world. By the rules of objective journalism, we shouldn’t be quoting that person or covering their work in a journalistic venue. That would be a conflict of interest.
That’s a useful model for journalism, but less effective when you’re leveraging deeper obsessions, like an interest in the Great Lakes or understanding the dynamics of environmental change. Sometimes we’re better storytellers because of who we know. It would be a dis-service to you, the reader, to not tell you about this work or that scientist.
File this edition of The Lemonadist under Friend of the Show. (My disclosures are built right into the piece.)
It is quite possible that I first met Jane Elder — the author of the new book Wilderness, Water, and Rust: A Journey toward Great Lakes Resilience — on one of the most important nights of my life.
I wouldn’t know because all of my attention that evening was reserved for Cindy Coffin, who worked with Jane. I picked up Cindy at her place of work for our very first date. Nobody could know that we would marry in a few years, that we’d have kids, that we’d be that active, happy family bringing toddlers into the wilderness. No one could guess that we would all lose Cindy in 2008, to breast cancer.
Through much of Cindy’s and my time together, Jane was a constant presence: sometimes her office-mate, sometimes her boss, always her mentor. Cindy deeply respected Jane’s intellect and experience. One of their bigger projects explored how to talk to the public about biodiversity. They worked with focus groups and pollsters, trying to figure out the best ways to reach citizens and influence policy.
(Quick note: I’m going to keep calling her Jane, because the formal construction feels like an alien has hijacked my brain.)
I quickly learned that Jane is a comprehensive thinker about politics and policy surrounding the Great Lakes and the broader environmental movement. We were young professionals who shared Jane’s passion for the environment, and as we talked she often showed up in conversations at home. Cindy was a careful listener and religious about attribution, so she often said things like “I learned from Jane….” But it wasn’t until reading Wilderness, Water, and Rust that I fully appreciated how much of Cindy’s environmental thinking harmonized with Jane. They also shared a a sense of grace and dry wit. So there were times reading this book when I felt a little haunted, in a very special way.
We stayed connected after Cindy passed. I worked briefly for Jane, turning a major statewide report on water resources into a magazine narrative. I still sometimes call her to talk through the framing of complex environmental problems. And for years I ran into her husband Bill Davis at a local coffee shop. He followed a parallel professional track in environmental policy and advocacy. We’d talk politics and share the joys and frustrations of parenthood.
All this backstory fits the review because Jane’s tale of activism, hope, and challenge is importantly grounded in her sense of place. She’s writing as a child of the Great Lakes, a daughter of an autoworker in Flint, Michigan. Her career spans an important period for both environmental policy and the Great Lakes region.
And it makes sense to follow along in her own discovery of wild nature and everything it means to humans. Alongside the occasional reflection of exploring the Upper Peninsula are the trepidations of playing wilderness guide to powerful people who could help save this lake or that landscape. Like the time in Sylvania when a key Senate staffer — but novice paddler — sat in the bow of an awkwardly outfitted canoe while a Forest Service employee fought wave and wind without assistance from his important passenger. “I thought we might lose the Senator’s fragile support at any time if they capsized,” remembers Jane. (They made it.)
To Protect the Land and Water
Jane began her work lobbying for Michigan wilderness. At a 1978 conference she learned just how divided the public could be on the topic when one attendee from the Upper Peninsula threatened a shotgun welcome if wilderness advocates ever set foot near his property. “That leaves an impression,” she writes.
That’s the most extreme manifestation of the supposedly “deep philosophical divide between conservation for the sake of protecting hunting and fishing resources, and conservation for the sake of broader environmental health, aesthetics, and intrinsic value,” she writes. “I thought the divide was artificial then and still think it is artificial now. It is a more cultural than practical difference.”
Unfortunately, this divide has been weaponized.
Environmentalists got stereotyped, cast as shrill people “screaming at the wind,” she writes. The movement “unwittingly” allowed this branding to happen, and didn’t have the resources or the savvy to unwind this deliberate marginalization.
The irony here is that 1970s marked a time of great optimism and progress. Bipartisan acts of Congress passed landmark legislation, protecting public lands and setting aside important recreational resources. Government was actively tasked with environmental protection, and both parties played a proud role in this development.
Then Reagan’s presidency began to split this consensus, using environmental issues as one of the wedges.
This tactic is still accelerating, and it would have been easy for Jane to document this devolution of the Republican Party. But we don’t need another indictment in the current political culture wars. Instead, she focuses on the kind of democratic work that goes into the making of policy. Her stories about lobbying against persistent chemical pollution in Great Lakes ecosystems are an invaluable reminder that creativity and the human touch are an important part of social change. Remembering what democracy looks like at a time when government seems particularly broken feels important.
It’s also powerful to hear the child of a unionized autoworker family in Michigan struggling with deciding what to drive. For all of our continuing cultural and economic obsessions around autos, it’s a reminder that it wasn’t so long ago that the decision to buy a Honda over an American car — and then later to go hybrid — was a very difficult and personal decision for many families.
In fact, it’s this kind of economic identity trauma that helps fuel Trump and his acolytes. But Jane categorically rejects their economic recidivism: “…an economy built on processes that poison public waters and foul the air its workers and neighbors breathe [is] not sustainable. A society that pretends the riches of the earth will forever be theirs for the taking with no consequences, is blind, foolish, and doomed. Corporate leadership that can divorce itself from place and people in the name of business profit is not leadership.”
And while government has many warts, tearing it apart hasn’t worked.
“[W]hat is democracy without government?” she asks. Privatizing and underfunding environmental protection has so far failed significantly, whether you’re worried about PFAS, invasive species, clean water, or climate change. “I fail to see how cutting taxes will fix any of this,” she argues. “Imagine Eisenhower trying to build the interstate highway system with a ‘government is the problem’ cloud hanging over him….”
Indeed, after the promise of the 1970s the list of significant environmental policy wins over the last 30 years is perilously small. One of the big winners has been Great Lakes restoration, but even that rose comes with its bundle of thorns: “…we’ve been able to secure federal funding for Great Lakes cleanup, but we haven’t had the political capacity to change the underlying threats. We keep paying to treat the symptoms but are unwilling to address the causes, or if we do, it is not at a scale that will solve the problems.”
Hope for the Great Lakes
The Great Lakes region, Canada included, supports 107 million people working 51 million jobs and sustaining a GDP of US$6 trillion. That economic backbone — combined with abundant social, ecological, and intellectual capital — suggests that the Great Lakes should be capable of fixing its abundant problems.
“If there is hope for places like Flint, and for the larger Great Lakes region and its environment, it is beyond the formulas that left it abandoned or damaged,” she argues. “The boom and bust formula has played out in the Great Lakes region.” Much of this work is happening, in sustainable agriculture, green infrastructure, and ecological restoration.
Whether or not these sectors will continue to ascend and transform equations of exploitation into a more resilient ecological whole remains to be seen.
When people ask Jane Elder if she’s optimistic, she instead says “that I choose to be hopeful.” And this is a hopeful book — candid, sober, grim, funny, deeply informative — and hopeful. She subscribes to poet Vaclav Havel’s notion of hope: “an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands to succeed.”
I’ll be back to these pages. There is a lot to learn here, not least about the relationship between love and hope: “To say we love the Great Lakes is not a casual statement. It is a commitment. Love is hard work — sometimes heartbreaking — sometimes demanding difficult choices, but so powerful. It is also the most profoundly human power in our lives to achieve what reason says is beyond hope.”
That tastes like lemonade to me.
