Searching for a better way/Neahtawanta

April 27, 2008

Talking with Sally Van Vleck and Bob Russell can either be highly motivating or deeply depressing. The couple eats and breathes the state of the planet and peace, which has gone arguably downhill since the first Earth Day in 1970.
In their quest to change the world for the better, they run the Neahtawanta Inn, a rambling and quaint turn-of-the century house on Old Mission Peninsula with a big porch overlooking Lake Michigan. All is quiet at the inn right now (except for the birds), but the place will be hopping once summer tourists return.
In the meantime, Sally and Bob are highly involved with Bioneers, a local and national group that has captured the interest of college kids and youngish adults. They also run a nonprofit for progressive change called the Neahtawanta Center.
Van Vleck and Russell have remained true to their activist core, and are a force to be reckoned with. Van Vleck grew up in the heyday of the Vietnam War, the child of activist parents who took her to hear
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in high school. She protested for peace on the MSU campus, where she earned an education degree. She married Jim Olson, an environmental attorney, and moved here in 1972. Eight years later, she helped found the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council.
Russell moved here in 1979, after teaching science and biology in Ann Arbor and Australia. He met Van Vleck when they both served on the Oryana
co-op board. They also worked together at NMEAC, and both worked to stop a mall in the downtown Traverse City in the mid 1980s. They later married and founded the Neahtawanta Center in 1987. They have four children and three grandchildren between them.
Here’s what the couple have to say about our world:

NE: What inspired you to form the Neahtawanta Center?
Russell: First understand that the Center is different than the Inn. The Inn is how we make a living with paying guests, and the Center is a nonprofit LLC.
We decided to break away from NMEAC and form the Center because we wanted to go beyond the sole issue of environment — we were interested in peace and justice and interpersonal relationships. It’s all connected. People may not think about it, but war is very destructive to the environment.
Van Vleck: It was a more holistic and personal approach to first instill a sense of inner peace through yoga and then to take that attitude into our community and our world. We have yoga space here at the Inn where you can take one of my classes.
In the early days of the Center, we did some conflict resolution workshops, which drew a wide range of people. Essentially, people learned how to listen to one another and gained skills in resolving conflicts more peacefully. We still collaborate with NMEAC, but leave the environmental lawsuits to them.

NE: You’re a unifying group — you try to bring together all the different progressive groups.
Van Vleck: We do. We work with other peace and justice groups to organize local activities. And we held a progressive summit in February and are following up with another gathering on May 9. It’s an opportunity for organizations and individuals to come together, talk about upcoming events and find out what others are doing. We also have a calendar of all the progressive events that can be accessed from traversepeacealerts.org
Russell: That way groups will not schedule on top of other events.

NE: So each year, the media focuses on Earth Day and the environment. Has much changed since that first Earth Day in 1970?
Russell: I was at the first Earth Day 38 years ago in Ann Arbor. I think our planet, our civilization is in much worse shape. We’re now causing global system damage. When our population was smaller, the damage was more regional. Forty percent of our oceans are stressed; 90 percent of our world’s largest fish are gone. There used to be herds of fish in the ocean. Now there are hardly any. And, of course, there’s climate change.

NE: But we do have a better grip on containing toxic chemicals.
Russell: Not really. We have just shifted them to other parts of our planet—China, Southeast Asia. We have not shifted our chemical or manufacturing processes. We have just shifted the toxins out of our view.
Van Vleck: We, along with many other people, have been talking to people about global warming since 1980. We’ve personally been talking and studying and sending alarm bells that we can’t keep doing business as usual. Now it feels to us that people are taking it a little more seriously. Change is happening. We’re being called on to examine our lifestyle and to make changes and to do it quickly. The Bioneers movement offers practical solutions to help reduce our negative impacts on the Earth.

NE: How does your lifestyle reflect your own convictions? Obviously, your 14-mile drive from Traverse City takes fuel.
Russell: You’re right, it does. So we consolidate our trips as much as possible, and we drive a four-cylinder Volkswagen. We’ve bought organic food at Oryana since 1977. We’re vegetarians. I wear stuff for years and years. My clothes are second-hand or handmade. Our inn was designated as a green lodging steward through a state program because we use nontoxic materials, and we’re as energy-efficient as much as possible. But we’d like to do a lot more; we’re looking into a solar system to heat our water; it’s just very expensive to make a 100-year-old inn energy efficient but we continue to look at ways to do that.

NE: Do you ever get tired of saying “no” to yourself when you want new stuff?
Russell: You know, there’s a great website called the storyofstuff.org and a book you should read, “Deep Economy” by Bill McKibben. An excellent point is that stuff doesn’t make you happy. When you get to a certain point — when you have food, shelter and health — more stuff adds almost no more happiness to your life. A happiness index was published last year, and it measured the relative happiness and wealth of all the countries in the world. One of the surprising things was that Nigeria ranked very close to our own country. Now look at the wealth of our country and the wealth of a Nigerian. They’re almost as happy as we are.
What does that tell you? Stuff doesn’t buy happiness. Yet our economy is based on a constantly growing GDP. We buy and make more stuff every single year. Now India and China are going that way, but they won’t ever achieve our standard of living because the planet won’t support it. When I was born in 1950, there were about 2.5 billion people. Now we’re getting close to seven billion. There’s an understanding that we’re running out and that’s exactly why we’re seeing food riots ripple across the world.
Van Vleck: There’s the idea of a threshold, a tipping point where a lot of shortages converge at the same time. Scarcity of water, fuel and a stable climate.
Russell: And we still hear people argue about the theory of peak oil. How can they argue this? Our supply of oil is not infinite, and it’s not just oil. Natural gas is running out; we need to move away from using natural gas to make fertilizers to grow food. Now we’re seeing a water shortage to grow food, so the countries that no longer have enough water to grow their own food are importing water from us in the form of beef and grain. That’s why grain prices are so high.
Here’s what I see is the big picture. Our country seeks dominance by building military power. China seeks dominance by building its economy. If you look at who owns the money in this country, it’s China. When it all crashes, who’s going to be in control?
And yet, we’re in denial. We’re in this mindset of a consumer economy where we want to keep growing our GDP, and the only thing on our mind is what we’re going to buy next.

NE: And I think it’s a consumer model that makes life stressful. Advertising is everywhere — billboards, gas pumps, t-shirts, cups, pens, and cars. When I Google something, it seems like every 10 seconds, I’m asked to buy something.
Russell: I think the media also plays a part in this. The media used to be a news source, and now it’s a marketing tool. There’s no balance in journalism anymore. How long are they going to give equal time to people who say climate change doesn’t exist?
Van Vleck: Remember when they gave equal time to tobacco companies that claimed there’s no medical evidence that smoking is harmful to your health?
Russell: I think the real problem is that a lot of news is driven by corporate advertising. Kids can recognize 40 corporate logos, but not five native plants.

NE: Ah, but without advertising, the Northern Express wouldn’t exist and I wouldn’t be sitting here talking with you.
Russell: True, but I think more media should accept some guidelines—agree not to accept advertising from tobacco companies or from energy companies misrepresenting how green they are.

NE: So what else is wrong?
Russell: There is no civic leadership — people go into government for their own personal gain or for power. It’s pitiful in Michigan that we’ve had to battle so hard to make alternative energy 10% of total energy by 2020. Ten percent! Or to raise the CAFE limits to a measly 27 mph by 2020.

NE: What’s the number one thing wrong in your mind?
Russell: We are a market economy, but the market cannot deal with externalities — imposing a cost for polluting the earth or land or water. Corporations treat the commons like it’s their capital, and when it’s gone, they don’t lose anything. But we do. We lose the resource, and they’ve made money. The economists think of the planet as a subset of the economy, but the economy is a subset of the planet. The economy is outgrowing the planet and eating itself up. We’re now feeding food to our automobiles.
We’re no longer citizens in this country. We are consumers. George Bush told us we could support the war by going shopping at the mall. Around 10 years ago, TCAPs (the Traverse City school system) published its goals and many of them were about educating and teaching kids how to be better consumers. What about how to be a better citizen in a democracy? A really good book is “The Unreasoning of America” by Susan Jacobi.
Van Vleck: She’s one brilliant woman.
Russell: It’s not a quick read, not a self-help book. It talks about how our educational system is failing to prepare students for the coming challenges they will face as adults.

NE: What’s your solution?
Van Vleck: I think wind and solar are solutions. And keeping your world as local as possible — food, transportation, and entertainment. If people quit eating meat, it would make an enormous difference in resource use.

NE: How does the Neahtawanta Inn play a part in this?
Van Vleck: It’s a place to relax and get re-energized and inspired to make changes. People see sprouts growing on the counter or our compost bucket, and say, “I used to do that.” Sometimes we inspire people to get directly involved in what’s going on in their town.

NE: What do you do for yourselves when you get overwhelmed or discouraged?
Russell: Being actively involved is an antidote.
Van Vleck: I remind myself we don’t have to fix the whole thing. I can’t fix the problems in other parts of the country, but I can construct my life here to make a difference. The little things do add up. It’s not all gloom and doom. The churches, the environmentalists, the media are breaking through apathy and denial. There are many people around the world working for positive change. We are all interconnected. There is hope.

NE: So tell me how you’d fix the world?
Russell: We need to demand that the market tell the truth about externalities. What I mean by that is there is often no cost to corporations for degrading our water, air and land, yet it reduces the capacity of the earth to function. We need to impose the true and entire cost so they do their business differently. For example, there should be a cost for dumping carbon dioxide in the air. But now there’s no feedback. My worst fear is that it’s too late.

NE: I hope it’s not. Personally, I’m getting rid of my van and buying a car with almost twice the gas mileage.
Russell: I think the quickest and most profound change is to gain efficiencies in manufacturing. Make the most out of the fossil fuels we have left. We need to look at solar and wind energy. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t think a windmill looks good on Lake Michigan, then go to the website, ilovemountains.org. You’ll find out where your electricity is coming from — a plant in Muskegon that buys coal from Appalachia. A company blew the top off a mountain to get the coal you use. Is that what you’d prefer?

NE: Other ideas?
Russell: We need to retrofit old homes and buildings to save energy. We could create a tremendous number of green collar jobs just by doing that. There’s a lot of potential in Michigan for a green collar industry, but we need the leadership at every government level to take it seriously. I’m not seeing it.
Van Vleck: And we need fair trade, not free trade. Our manufacturing has moved to countries because labor is cheap and they can just dump their stuff into air and rivers. With fair trade, our trade agreements would require just and safe labor practices, a living wage, and environmental laws to prevent pollution.