March 28, 2024

Meet Northern Michigan's Climate Change Activists

Oct. 16, 2015
Concern over the Planet's Future Has Prompted Some to Change Their Lives

A never-aired television show changed Bill Latka’s life. The producer and director worked on a Discovery Channel program in the early 2000s called The Final Hour, a show intended to chronicle how scientists would confront climate change. He said he was not an activist before that show, but he became one after.

“I was a regular guy,” he said. “I worked in advertising.”

Many people don’t worry about climate change or don’t believe it exists. Some people believe whatever challenges come will be managed through human ingenuity. Others, like Latka, have changed the way they live because they believe life as we know it is in danger unless serious measures are taken now.

“LET’S STOP THE FLOW OF FOSSIL FUELS”

The Final Hour was cancelled before it aired amid a network shake-up, but Latka had no doubt about its importance.

“We were going to find out what the plan was to save the planet because of climate change,” he said. “We found out that there was no plan. Most of the scientists who were working on it weren’t even talking to each other.”

He said the things those scientists discussed — severe drought and wildfires in the western U.S., devastating storms and flooding in the east — have come to pass. “It’s happening. They didn’t make it up,” he said. “It’s real.”

Today, Latka is a member of TC350, a chapter of 350.org, the international climate change nonprofit founded by famed climate activist Bill McKibben. Latka joined when he saw McKibben speak in Traverse City in 2008, not long after he moved back to northern Michigan from Los Angeles.

Latka sees climate change as both a global and a local issue. Take, for example, Line 5 at the Mackinac Straits, a decades-old oil pipeline that a coalition of environmentalists has demanded be closed because an oil spill in that location could be catastrophic.

For Latka, that’s a secondary concern. “The other part of it is burning fossil fuels, and this is what TC350 is all about,” he said. “Let’s stop the flow of fossil fuels.”

He said oil needs to be more expensive so that its cost reflects the damage it poses.

“If we make the economic cost of moving that fossil fuel more expensive, make it a real cost that they have to pay, it makes that less viable,” he said. “The water issue is the hook.”

ACTIVISTS DISAGREE OVER HOW FAR TO GO

Deb Hansen, an interfaith minister and climate change activist, disagrees with Latka’s position on Line 5.

She said the health of the Great Lakes motivates her activism against the pipeline.

“The goal of the ‘Oil and Water Don’t Mix’ campaign is to protect the Great Lakes from spills of crude oil,” the Pellston resident said. “We have an ethical responsibility to protect these bodies of water, as fully 20 percent of the world’s fresh surface water.”

Hansen said she agrees that fossil fuel use needs to be reduced, but she believes that’s more complicated than shutting down pipelines.

“It is true that there is an urgent need to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions to ensure a livable planet,” she said.

“We also need to understand that there is a direct correlation between a vibrant economy and the availability of affordable sources of energy.”

Hansen said she has always loved nature, but she wouldn’t have imagined becoming a climate activist in a former life when she was a communications manager for IBM.

Her involvement in the fight over a coalfired power plant that Wolverine Power proposed in Rogers City changed that. She said she became attuned to how energy and the health of the planet are related.

“I don’t even like the word environment anymore; it sounds like a stage set that you can just walk off of,” Hansen said. “We’re talking about, really, the foundational elements of life when we’re talking about water and air.”

Hansen founded a group called Concerned Citizens of Cheboygan and Emmet Counties. Their focus has been opposition to Line 5, but Hansen hopes to branch out.

“We’ve put so much focus these last couple years on what we don’t want, next year I’m hoping to put some focus on solutions,” she said. “We need to make political changes; we need a big cultural shift.”

FIGHTING FOR A SHIFT

Elizabeth Dell heads the Citizens’ Climate Lobby in Traverse City. Dell wasn’t extremely active before she joined CCL a few years ago, but now she feels like she is doing something tangible for a cause she believes in.

The CCL seeks passage of federal legislation to limit carbon emissions. They propose a law that would charge a fee to fossil fuel producers, or importers, per ton of carbon; the tax would be used to pay a dividend that would be returned to citizens. According to CCL, the proposal has been independently studied and would drastically reduce carbon emissions and improve the economy.

In Michigan, Dell’s volunteer job is to convince the state’s federal legislators it’s a good plan. She writes letters to the editor and she pens Op-Eds. In June, Dell and others in the Michigan CCL met with all of the Michigan members of Congress. Democrats were more receptive than Republicans.

Nonetheless, Dell said, CCL has succeeded in winning over conservative legislators in other states.

“We’re not there yet, as far as any Republicans in Michigan supporting us,” she said.

Kate Madigan, Michigan Environmental Council’s Traverse City–based climate and energy policy specialist, believes the atmosphere around the climate debate has already shifted so much it’s not inconceivable to imagine a day when the Fee and Dividend program could win bipartisan support.

“We have seen a shift in Congress and we’re seeing less denial that climate change is happening,” Madigan said.

DIFFERENT PATHS TO ACTIVISM

Climate change is difficult for some people to approach because it demands personal sacrifice from believers — consume less, recycle more — and it instills a sense of smallness once a person decides to join the cause.

“It can be very daunting, and I get asked that a lot by friends and family. ‘What can I do?’” Madigan said.

Madigan answers with the simplest explanation she’s got; she explains small steps everyone can take in their lives. She’s motivated by her children, ages 6 and 9.

“If we do nothing, the impacts that they will see in their lifetimes, that we will see in our lifetimes, are not acceptable to me,” she said. “We need to do what we can to make sure that they have a livable world that they’re moving into.”

Dell wrote a college paper about greenhouse gasses in the late 1980s and that got her concerned about global warming.

She never really stopped worrying and, several years ago, she decided to take a bus to Washington D.C. to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline with other activists.

“I didn’t know what to do. I mean, I was one of those millions of people who said, ‘What do I do?’” Dell said. “This is new to me. And the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, one of their purposes is to teach people how they can take a lead — how they can make a difference.”

Today, Dell believes she is doing tangible work to address something that deeply concerns her.

“I don’t think people are ignoring it,” Dell said. “I think it’s frightening. It’s big and they don’t know what to do.”

Madigan agreed. “I think once you start taking action in your personal life and once you’re engaged with the part of the movement to create political will to make bigger changes, it’s really empowering.”

THE WATCHERS OF THE BAYS

Climate change is perhaps easiest to understand as a global issue, but for some people, it’s a local issue.

Gail Gruenwald, executive director of Tip of the Mitt Watershed Center in Petoskey, said her nonprofit has worked for several years addressing problems they believe have been caused by climate change.

“What we’re working on is addressing changes that we’re seeing right now and trying to keep our community more resilient,” Gruenwald said.

Gruenwald expects to see more invasive species, especially in inland lakes, as a result of warmer water temperatures. She expects water levels to be even more unpredictable. She said the region will see more stormwater problems as a result of more severe storms.

“The biggest concern that I have is that we won’t be able to manage our way out of the kind of changes that come our way,” Gruenwald said.

Watershed Center – Grand Traverse Bay Executive Director Christine Crissman agreed. Crissman recently reviewed a Michigan State University study about the potential effects of climate change on Grand Traverse Bay, a study that has not yet been released to the public.

“There’s been a significant increase in temperature over the last hundred years and that’s expected to continue,” Crissman said.

Crissman said that, for several years, the Watershed Center’s focus has been to prepare the region for severe storms that are expected to become more common so that stormwater runoff doesn’t ruin the water quality of the bay.

“If we continue to pave and we continue to have practices that actually increase the amount of stormwater that gets into the bay, the water quality of the bay is going to change,” she said. “We need to preserve what we have.”

A RENEWABLE (AND AFFORDABLE) ALTERNATIVE

The region is seeing more and more investment in renewable energy, but that’s not necessarily because large numbers of people are worried about climate change. The biggest reason so much wind and solar energy has been constructed in the past few years is because it’s become affordable.

Dan Worth, clean energy policy specialist at Groundwork Center in Traverse City, said people who promote renewable energy are discovering that the economic case, rather than the climate change case, is the best way to win converts.

Renewables require state and federal incentives to be attractive, however.

“We’re finding, nowadays, the economic case is all you need to make to sell it,” said Worth, a lawyer who spent a decade working for a nonprofit that encouraged universities across the country to implement climate neutral policies. Last year, Worth and his family moved to Glen Arbor.

“Now that the economics are coming along, we don’t have to make the environ mentalist case.”

That’s what Tom Gallery, owner of Leelanau Solar, has found.

A lot of Gallery’s work has been in Northport, where a nonprofit group is studying and promoting the goal of running the village on 100 percent renewable energy. While they aren’t close to achieving that goal yet, Northport produces more renewable energy per capita than anywhere else in the state, Gallery said.

Gallery said he’s discovered that solar is attractive to people because it makes financial sense, at least as long as state and federal incentives are available.

“The people who are doing it right now are engineers and bankers and accountants because they can understand the numbers and they can understand the process,” Gallery said. “And, of course, farmers because they understand energy better than anybody.”

Gallery, a former automotive engineer, said homeowners who install solar do it to save money rather than save the earth.

“That’s not a big motivator these days,” he said. “It’s money; it’s economics.”

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