Life with Big Green: A Memoir

By Wayne Schmidt

Here is my story, unlikely and unvarnished, of life with Big Green – that is, my nearly three-decade relationship with one of the biggest environmental groups in the U.S., the National Wildlife Federation. Along the way, including thirteen years on NWF’s staff, I saw environmentalism from the inside and witnessed firsthand its fundamental failure. I learned why environmental groups will never gain sufficient political momentum to save the earth, however noble their intentions.

My trajectory within NWF took me from an obscure regional job to executive positions at its headquarters near Washington, DC. I worked in the shadow of an enigmatic boss who was one of my best friends – the brilliant, complex, and maddening Mark Van Putten.

I was by Mark’s side as he achieved the pinnacle of an environmentalist’s career – President & CEO of NWF – only to crash and burn before my eyes. It is a woeful tale of friendship failed – my conservation crusading partner transforming into the boss I could barely abide.

What was that all about? Why didn’t my partnership with Mark succeed? Why couldn’t we make a do-gooder organization of immense potential work better? Why can’t the environmental movement get its act together? And, how did my once sweet calling – working to protect nature – turn so sour?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne Schmidt
• Release date: May 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310584060

Book preview

Life with Big Green:

A Memoir

By Wayne Schmidt

Copyright 2014 - Wayne Schmidt

Smashwords Edition, License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Preface

Forward

Chapter 1: Saving the Great Lakes

-----MVP

-----Dow vs. the Dioxin Monster

-----Bass-O-Matic

-----Mohave Lode

-----Dr. Science

-----GLI Good!

-----Hormone Copycats

-----The Business of Big Green

-----Pipe Dreams

-----Being the Boss

-----Environmental Justice?

-----Swan Song

Chapter 2: Building a Green-Enough Castle

-----Called to Northern Virginia

-----How Green Is Green?

-----MVP’s Masterpiece

-----MVP’s Achilles Heel

-----Environmentalists’ Shit Hits Fan

-----Building It Right

-----Green Enough

Chapter 3: The Rise & Fall of MVP

-----Bowling Alone

-----The Big Tent

-----The Trouble with MVP

-----Good Cop – Bad Cop

-----Typo Tyrant

-----Mr. Showbiz

-----Conservation Gumbo

-----Walmart Is Evil

-----Sucking It Up

-----Fixing MVP

-----Chopped Liver

-----Quitting in Secret

-----Un-quitting

-----My First Inkling

-----Big Green Kabuki

-----Life after MVP

Chapter 4: Last Days with Big Green

-----Screwed

-----A Jovial Kindred

-----Happy Interlude

-----Good Enough Is Good Enough

-----God Trumps

-----Climate Change Tears

-----Doomed to Mediocrity

-----Boorish Firings

-----Culture Clash

-----The End

-----Postscript

Chapter 5: Cooking Frogs

Author’s Note

PREFACE

Here is my story, unlikely and unvarnished, of life with Big Green – that is, my nearly three-decade relationship with one of the biggest environmental groups in the United States, the National Wildlife Federation. Along the way, including thirteen years on NWF’s staff, I saw environmentalism from the inside and witnessed firsthand its fundamental failure. I learned why environmental groups will never gain sufficient political momentum to save the earth, however noble their intentions.

My trajectory within NWF took me from an obscure regional job to executive positions at its headquarters near Washington, DC. I worked in the shadow of an enigmatic boss who was one of my best friends – the brilliant, complex, and maddening Mark Van Putten.

I was by Mark’s side as he achieved the pinnacle of an environmentalist’s career – President & CEO of NWF – only to crash and burn before my eyes. It is a woeful tale of friendship failed – my conservation crusading partner transforming into the boss I could barely abide.

What was that all about? Why didn’t my partnership with Mark succeed? Why couldn’t we make a do-gooder organization of immense potential work better? Why can’t the environmental movement get its act together? And, how did my once sweet calling – working to protect nature – turn so sour?

My previous ebook of memoirs, Bare Naked Wayne, tells of my earlier years working in the Great Lakes region’s environmental movement. I left out, however, a major part – my adventures with Mark – so I could include them here.

A word about my use of quotations. I’ve included few references. You’ll just have to trust me that the quotes are real and accurate, as recorded in my personal records and journals.

It’s been nine years since I left NWF. I’m retired, and I don’t do conservation anymore. That’s now for other, presumably younger, environmentalists. As I hope my story here shows, however, I do still care.

–May Day, 2014 - Cottage Grove, Oregon

FORWARD

It felt like one of those perp walks you see on TV. You know, where some guy in rumpled clothes is hustled off to the courthouse as he tries to block his face from the cameras so no one he knows will recognize him on the six o’clock news.

No cameras tracked me. From the office windows above, curious eyes peered out only in my imagination. I carried my pathetic little box of plants, knick-knacks, and dreams across the parking lot to my car unnoticed. Few knew I had been fired. My own staff in the National Wildlife Federation’s communications department had learned of it only minutes before, when I told them I had been dumped, smiled, said goodbye, and vanished.

It was an ignominious end to my 30-year environmental career. I left for the final time the headquarters that I had built for the nonprofit organization – a modern, native-vine-clad office building on a forested site in Northern Virginia, near Washington, DC. Not built with my own hands, of course, but managed its creation as NWF’s construction project director, overseeing the general contractor and architect, tracking the $20 million budget, and signing off on every detail – down to the eco-friendly plumbing under my perp-walk parking lot.

For years, I had thought about that last walk, eventually pining for it, even while reaching the peak of my career as a vice president of one of the nation’s handful of Big Green environmental organizations. (Big Green is the collective name for the nation’s largest environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, and National Wildlife Federation.) Within NWF, I had hop-scotched across well-paying, prestigious positions. So why had I come to hate my job? For in truth, when I got the boot in 2005 – sure, it was dispiriting – but mostly, it was a relief. How had my environmentalist career come to such an awful conclusion?

My life with Big Green started when I first crossed paths with NWF in 1977, as I attended its 41st annual meeting in Washington, DC. It was my second year working as Staff Ecologist for the Michigan United Conservation Clubs (MUCC) in Lansing, one of NWF’s state-affiliate organizations.

For me, NWF was The Big Time. Watching its annual meeting held in a swanky hotel up 16th Street from the White House, I was impressed. And intimidated. It all looked so professional. The MUCC volunteers I worked for seemed like numskulls compared to NWF’s meeting delegates. I was just starting out as a professional environmentalist, and everything about NWF looked glamorous to me – and completely inaccessible.

Imagine if when you’re 30 years old, as I was at the time, that a fortune teller would spell out the next 30 years of your life. Who would believe such a story?

One day I would be in charge of planning and running those same NWF annual meetings that scared hell out of me back then. I would write the events’ scripts; choreograph the whole, weird shebang. Be part of NWF’s inner circle and assistant to its CEO. Build that headquarters building. No, not me. I wouldn’t have believed such a story.

►Return to Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1:

SAVING THE GREAT LAKES

MVP

In 1982, when NWF opened a regional office in Ann Arbor, it hired to run it Mark Van Putten, a young attorney fresh out of law school. The Great Lakes Natural Resources Center, similar to a handful of other NWF centers around the country in places like Boulder, Montpelier, and Anchorage, would focus on environmental law. It would rely for much of its work on legal interns from the University of Michigan Law School, just a block down the street from NWF’s office, which was upstairs in a ramshackle frame-house adjacent to the campus.

Mark’s hiring was no fluke. He had been a star pupil at the U of M’s Law School. He had helped launch its environmental law society, which had pushed NWF to create its new regional center in the first place. After a shaky start with a director who didn’t work out, NWF turned to Mark (who had just started working for a big Grand Rapids law firm) and offered him the job. Mark had found his calling.

A skinny little guy tilting forward in perpetual hurry, his hair a dark mop, a thin chevron mustache riding his lip, Mark was unimposing at first impression. But despite his boyishness, there was something in his eyes – an intensity, a burning fever fueled by this young man’s environmentalist fervor and his unmistakable brilliance. He usually was the smartest person in the room – a quality at once his gift and his curse, as his career eventually would attest.

Mark seemed determined to live up to his suggestive initials, MVP. Right from the start, anyone could see that he would be a force to be reckoned with – a most valuable player, a wonder-boy. He had the analytical mind of a lawyer, always arguing with impeccable logic, and a debater’s ability to think on his feet while under verbal attack.

No matter the circumstances, at work Mark wore a tie, yet carried in his back pocket a bandana – sometimes red, sometimes blue, sometimes a corner hanging out – which he might quietly but ceremoniously unfold to blow his nose. I always saw his kerchief as a residual Sixties counter-culture statement, attesting to Mark’s suppressed flower-child core. On the Road with Jack Kerouac and all that.

Like me, Mark came from a stolidly-religious, Republican family. He attended Christian schools in conservative Grand Rapids through his undergraduate years at Calvin College. Like nearly everyone else that age in that era, he got laid, smoked pot, and liked rock and roll. Unlike them, however, he was an active Republican Party member. Most important of all, Mark loved the Great Lakes and wanted to save them. Often, he bragged in morbid metaphor, When I’m cut, I bleed Great Lakes blue.

A sense of place was among Mark’s driving conservation philosophies. He once explained to me:

I believe that we are where we are. That geography and topography matter – not just as scenery, but in defining our individual character. I am Great Lakes born and the Lake Michigan shore with its dunes helped make me who I am. Our loss as individuals and as a society of this sense of place is the root cause of all modern environmental problems.

The focus of NWF’s new regional center in Ann Arbor was going to be on fixing pollution of Mark’s place – the Great Lakes. Industrial poisons, such as PCBs and dioxins, and pesticides were hurting people, especially those who ate Great Lakes salmon and trout that had concentrated the lakes’ pollutants in their bodies.

I was six years into my career at MUCC when Mark arrived in my life. I had gotten pretty good at fighting all manner of environmental outrages, and suddenly (because MUCC was linked to NWF as its state affiliate), I had a new partner in my crusades.

We hit it off well. After all, the main reason I had first gone into the profession of environmental advocacy in 1975 had been because I wanted to do something to help save the Great Lakes.

Mark and I were branded as the Mutt and Jeff of Michigan’s environmental politics because we regularly showed up in tandem at meetings of government boards and agencies, raising hell about one pollution travesty or another. I carried the considerable reputation of MUCC, with its lobbying clout and an activist magazine that went to 100,000 members. I was fearless and would say anything to anyone in power if I felt it was what ordinary people would say if only they could. I would proclaim, not what I thought or what MUCC wanted, but, with the lovely conceit of youth, that "the people of Michigan believe…"

Mark carried the prestige of NWF, with its $100 million annual budget, and backed by his very real threat to sue any polluter that got too far out-of-line. Both of us loved nothing more than talking trash to reporters about polluters, and then seeing ourselves quoted in print or interviewed on TV.

We both were driven, but Mark’s inexperience showed. He welcomed my coaching, even after I once pointed out that his eyes bugged out when he got too intense during a television interview. TV’s a hot medium, I told him. Be cool.

During one exasperating public hearing over some now-forgotten polluter, a fight which we clearly were losing, Mark and I huddled in the hallway during a break. Mark declared that he was going to have to do something dramatic, perform some antic, since there was nothing left to lose. I calmed him and advised, You have to fight another day. Nothing’s worth falling on your sword. There will always be another battle.

Over the decades, Mark would remind me of both incidents, ostensibly, as a compliment to my mentoring in his early career. I suspect, however, that my bug-eyed critique bothered him at least a little, given how many times he brought it up.

Mark was the kind of friend you invite to your wedding.

With his wife, Colleen (1984)

By all accounts, Mark and I were a good one-two punch. We had to be. Our adversaries were lobbyists for all-too-real Brobdingnagians – Ford, GM, Amway, Monsanto, utilities, sometimes cities; all their associations like the Michigan Chemical Council, the Michigan Manufacturers Association, the state Chamber of Commerce, the Farm Bureau; and, especially, that sanctimonious giant, the Dow Chemical Company.

Dow vs. the Dioxin Monster

I had it in for Dow back in the 1980s. The chemical-making behemoth spewed an obscene stream of toxic wastes from its world-headquarters manufacturing plants in Midland, Michigan, directly into the Tittabawassee River, which flows into Saginaw Bay on Lake Huron. Dow’s water and air pollution included a deadly form of dioxin – perhaps the most toxic compound known – that had tainted downstream and downwind soil, water, mud, fish, and animals. Plus, of course, any people who were exposed to Dow’s invisible offal.

The main fight centered over Dow’s need to renew an expired permit to dump its wastes into the river. In 1981, I was harassing state regulators who were charged with limiting Dow’s pollution. I publicly accused them of being intimidated by Dow and its battery of scientists and lawyers, unquestionably the best talent money can buy, I conceded. When asked if MUCC was singling out Dow, I responded to a reporter from the company’s hometown newspaper:

You’ve got to wonder, with Dow being one of the biggest chemical plants in the country and discharging thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals every year, how they can continue to do this legally.

I was among a handful of gadflies doing all we could to curb Dow’s environmental poisoning – fighting with state bureaucrats, raising hell in the press, trying to shame Dow into cleaning up its pollution. Nothing was working. That’s about the time Mark showed up with his fledgling NWF center and law student interns, just itching to take on a big, nasty polluter.

Mark threatened to sue Dow to halt its water pollution, and MUCC agreed to join the lawsuit. As a result, Dow, MUCC, NWF, and Michigan’s Department