Fall 2002

Local Heroes: Seven extraordinary ordinary people make the planet a better place.

Let us introduce you to seven ordinary Americans. A good mother, a retired principal, a man who runs a bicycle shop. Just regular folks whose stories, odds are, you won't see on prime-time television. But there is something that sets them apart: when it comes to the environment, these everyday heroes aren't content to sit back and do nothing. One bought a wind turbine, one filmed life in Cancer Alley, and one has been swimming for weeks on end -- all to make the country a little better for the rest of us. Exactly our idea of what heroism really means.

The Long Hauler
by Patty Wentz

On June 4, Christopher Swain began a rather unusual journey. That's the day he squeezed into a hooded black drysuit and jumped into the headwaters of the Columbia River. His plan is to freestyle the entire 1,243 miles of the river -- from Canal Flats, British Columbia, to Astoria, Oregon -- in order to call attention to the environmental troubles of the river that defines the Northwest.

Swain, a thirty-four-year-old Portland, Oregon, resident, is a triathlon-trained athlete, and this is not his first "advocacy swim." In 1996, he swam the lower 210 miles of the Connecticut River in support of universal human rights. That feat, he says, taught him two things: "People pay attention when you get into the water, and when you get out of the water they want to know what you found there."

Even though he can't see what's there, Swain knows he's swimming through swirls of sediment laced with the runoff of decades of river industrialization -- dioxins from paper mills, heavy metals from mining, and PCBs from the electric transformers of fourteen hydroelectric dams. He'll also swim through sewage and even nuclear waste (near the Hanford Nuclear Facility in Washington State). What really keeps him up at night are the pesticides, many of which are neurotoxins. "But if you want to advocate for water," he says, "you gotta get wet." The Canadian Broadcasting Company is running regular updates on his progress. So is a heavy metal radio station in Portland, Oregon.

In Swain's mind, the pollution and the dams, not to mention depleted salmon runs and a dying estuary, are good reasons for spending five hours and ten miles a day in water as cold as 38 degrees. "It's too much for people," he says, "so they tune it out. Just Hanford alone is enough to put anyone over critical mass. We only protect and restore things we have a relationship with, so I have an idea to put the river in the public eye. That's why I'm swimming."

The Image Maker
by Sam Martin

Austin, Texas, videographer Laura Dunn doesn't like to go to the movies. Most Hollywood-style storytelling, she says, has a way of dulling the imagination. So when this twenty-six-year-old gets behind her digital video camera, she's not looking to make box-office hits.

"I see a lot of environmental devastation around me, a lot of people being hurt, and a lot of people saying, 'What can I do about it?'" Dunn says. "I'm making movies to inform and empower people."

Dunn just wrapped up her fourth film, Become the Sky, a 57-minute poetic treatise on the inner workings of the Texas energy industry. (It's due out from Two Birds Film in October.) If it's anything like her last independent film, Green, which earned her a student Academy Award in 2001, industry executives should brace themselves for a little criticism. Green documents communities living (and dying) in the shadows of 150 petrochemical plants operating along the hundred-mile stretch of the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley. Dunn, who was born in New Orleans, opens the film with a thirteen-year-old who describes what it's like to live with cancer. She also interviews a chemical plant worker who reveals how his employer dumped heavy metals in the river, obfuscatory government officials, and residents of a community whose homes sit on top of a Superfund site. All taken, it's a damning look at life in an area where industry has run amok.

During the making of Green, which she shot over two years with a grant from the Texas Filmmaker Production Fund, Dunn slept on strangers' couches, ate plenty of gumbo, and even hired an ex-Vietnam helicopter pilot and a cinematographer specializing in aerial photography to fly her -- illegally -- over the chemical plants. (Luckily, there was no one waiting to haul them to the county jail after they landed.) Maneuvers like this one go a long way to explaining her success: She simply doesn't stop for roadblocks.

"I spent a year on the ground getting to know people who were dying," Dunn says, her eyes flashing with anger. "So when I got up in that helicopter, I didn't care about the consequences. So many people say don't do this or don't do that because it's dangerous. But I'm more concerned with losing my spiritual life than losing my physical life."

The next stop for Dunn is the Middle East, where she'll begin work on a documentary about water resources in Israel, Jordan, and the occupied Palestinian Territories. "I knew early on that I'd have to fend for myself," she says. "Now the only thing that brings me hope is going out and meeting new people and engaging the world. I love chasing a story."

The Airess
by Eric Hansen

The house will be full of a chemical odor mixed with the smell of burnt coffee. It can even have a tinge of a skunky smell," says Corrales, New Mexico, retiree Joy Tschawuschian. "I take one whiff of it, get a headache and burning eyes, and go out to the garage to get my bucket." There, a couple hundred yards from computer-chip manufacturer Intel, Tschawuschian uses her "bucket" to collect an air sample -- a random grab of airborne chemicals. The device is little more than a bag in a bucket with valves on top. But wielded by Tschawuschian and other members of the Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP), it is an important first step in addressing residents' fears that air pollution is making them sick.

Intel built its plant just outside the Corrales city limits in 1994, but even after scrubbers were installed on its stacks and volatile organic compounds lowered to less than 100 tons a year, residents still complained about frequent headaches, rashes, sleepless nights, and nausea. So SWOP swooped in. In November 2000, an employee of the twenty-two-year-old social-justice nonprofit learned how to build and use the buckets, originally commissioned by Ed Masery of Erin Brockovich fame, and then contacted Tschawuschian, who agreed to lead the Bucket Brigade.

Over the next year, she took sixteen samples and helped teach two other families near the Intel fence line how to use the devices. Analyzed at a lab in Simi Valley, California, the samples have contained chemicals ranging from methylene chloride, a known carcinogen legal under Intel's permit, to silane, a silicon-based compound.

Intel claims the chemicals SWOP has found may have come from other places. "There's no way to identify the source of a chemical except at its source," says Intel spokesman Terry McDermott. Fumes from nearby gas stations and dry cleaners easily contaminate samples, he says.

SWOP knows its bucket samples aren't absolute proof that Intel is the culprit, but then how, asks Tschawuschian, does it explain chemicals that aren't found in emissions from gas stations and dry cleaners? The state says it plans on doing an emissions inventory of the area someday soon, but has yet to come up with the money. In the meantime, SWOP is fund-raising -- sometimes by literally passing around a jar -- to buy a sophisticated monitor that can analyze up to fifty compounds in the air simultaneously. Price tag: $100,000. With $30,000 more to go, they hope to have it by the year's end -- the ultimate Christmas gift to the community.

The Lead Lady
by Tara Hulen

Whitlynn Battle's transition from ordinary single mom to crusader for environmental justice began in a Birmingham, Alabama, doctor's office.

As she waited with her daughter, Destiny, for the girl's two-year checkup, Battle read a magazine article about the dangers of childhood lead poisoning that hit too close to home. Those most at risk of learning disabilities and other health problems caused by lead poisoning, she learned, were poor African-American children under six living in houses built before 1978 (when lead paint was banned).
"I remember thinking, 'This is like having a ghost in your house,'" Battle says.

The doctor dismissed her concerns, but Battle wasn't having it. "I threw one of those first-time-mommy fits, and she decided to test my kid just to get me out of there," she says. As it turned out, Destiny did have an elevated blood lead level, but not high enough to warrant help from understaffed local public health agencies.

In disbelief that so little was being done to treat such a preventable problem, Battle did her own research and found grant money earmarked to start a lead-education workshop in Alabama. But the grant had to be given to a local nonprofit agency, not an individual. So Battle made a somewhat sneaky plan. She invited parents and public health, housing, and education leaders to a meeting of a childhood lead-education group, and after the fifteen attendees settled into their seats, Battle made an announcement. "I told them they were the board for this new organization, 'Come up with a name for it.'"

Few of the new board members had any background in grassroots activism. Battle's only advocacy experience was joining a campaign and lawsuit that had kept a garbage transfer station out of her neighborhood. "Nobody was trained to do this work," she says. Yet five years later, Citizens' Lead Education and Poisoning Prevention tests about 3,000 kids a year and helps families find safe housing and abate lead problems in their homes. Battle, forty-four, is its volunteer executive director. Though she has debilitating lupus, she keeps the effort moving even when she herself is bedridden -- making calls to help families work through red tape and holding government officials' feet to the fire.

"We've created activists, we've created technical people living in this community," she says. "We're not waiting on the cavalry to come and save us. We took the lead, decided what we needed the cavalry to do, and gave them their roles instead of the other way around."

The Wind Reaper
by Jon Swan

The day of the ribbon-cutting ceremony was, appropriately, very windy. At the base of the newly erected 750-megawatt turbine, attendees braved thirty-mile-an-hour gusts, while above them three blades sliced away at the Iowa sky. When Harold Overmann, the retired superintendent of Spirit Lake's schools, stepped to the microphone, he pointed out that over the past hour, the 180-foot-high turbine had created enough energy to power one Spirit Lake residence for a full six months.

This was actually the second wind turbine that the school district of Spirit Lake, tucked up in an empty corner of northern Iowa, had bought and built in the past eight years. The first one, at 250 megawatts, saved the schools some $20,000 a year. Once the second is paid off, the annual savings from both could be as much as $125,000.

How is it that a school district with 1,300 students in a sparsely populated section of the Hawkeye State managed to install the first large-scale wind turbine in the Midwest? Overmann gives the credit to the students themselves. "I went into this biology class on Earth Day 1991 to talk about the need to preserve the environment," he recalls, "and the students challenged me as I had never been challenged before. 'If the school is so interested in preserving our environment,' they asked, 'why do we use Styrofoam cups in our lunch program? Why do we rely so much on fossil fuels?' They really grilled me."

Overmann, a hearty, no-nonsense native Iowan, became obsessed with clean energy. He and Jim Tirevold, the building and grounds manager, spent months researching biomass before stumbling upon the obvious project. Spirit Lake and its 4,000 residents live some 200 feet above the Iowa grasslands on Buffalo Ridge, a 75-mile-long rise that's been referred to as "the Saudi Arabia of wind energy."
The local utility company was hardly impressed with Overmann and Tirevold's plans to buy themselves a turbine. "The utility was telling our community that no other school district in the country was doing such a fool thing, that it was all just an ego trip for the superintendent," Overmann says.

But the school board stood behind the two men. So did Iowa's Department of Natural Resources, which provided a low-interest loan, and so did the U.S. Department of Energy, which kicked in a grant. In the summer of 1993, the first turbine provided all the electricity the elementary school needed, as well as a surplus.

Since then, wind power has made its way into Spirit Lake's curriculum, and if the high-school physics teacher is right, every year the new turbine will prevent emissions of 2,648,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, 3,777 pounds of sulfur oxide, and hundreds of tons of other pollutants.

Easy Rider
by Eric Hansen

I was anchored in suburbia for years," says Eric Sundin, of his time as the owner of an international shipping company, "before I finally understood that if we're going to make any headway with our transportation, we need to stop driving around all the time. It just seemed to me that the bicycle was near perfect for this. Except for arriving at work perspiring."

It was ideas like this that led Sundin to undertake a minor personal revolution. He sold Sunmar Shipping, downsized from a McMansion amidst malls to a simple Craftsman home in Seattle, traded an hour-long drive to work for a 1.5-mile bike commute, and in 1997 began peddling the no-sweat solution to America's transportation problem: electric bikes.

Sundin's shop, Electric Bicycles Northwest, is now one of the largest EB importers, testers, and retailers on the continent. And sixty-year-old Sundin has sold more than 1,000 EBs personally, a record in America's modest 15,000-units-per-year industry. Sundin stocks nine different makes, each with a slender rechargeable battery built in above the pedals, which lets a commuter crest steep hills or hit 20 miles per hour on the flats without emitting a single puff of greenhouse gases.

His four-employee, five-year-young business earned only $400,000 in revenue last year. But Sundin isn't sweating it. "Frankly, if it is going to be a huge commercial success, I'm not sure I particularly care," he says. "I need this business to pay for itself, but I enjoy it because the bikes seem to enrich customers' lives. And coming into the shop every day is a little bit of activism."

The Bodyguard
by Kimberly Lisagor

When a motorcycle gang threatened to encroach on a San Simeon, California, elephant seal rookery last year, Ann Grossman took it upon herself to politely shoo them away. The slight, fifty-six-year-old grandmother, who barely tops five feet, hardly looks like a highway bouncer. But as one of the first volunteer docents for Friends of the Elephant Seal, Grossman does what she must to protect the massive mammals that come to a mile-long stretch near Highway 1 to mate and give birth.

"They're very territorial animals," says Grossman. "They get creeped out if you're in their space." Indeed, the long-nosed giants have been known to chase human invaders down the beach -- and although a full-grown elephant seal can weigh 5,000 pounds, it's capable of scooting across the sand at 25 miles per hour. In her five years as a docent, the unflappable Grossman has only heard of one man getting bitten. ("He had an instant butt reduction," she jokes).

Grossman answered an ad for docent trainees in 1997. At the time, she was volunteering at the information desk at a historical mansion called Hearst Castle and bemoaning the fact that she was stuck indoors on beautiful days. Now she spends about three hours a week at the rookery. Her hope is that every time she teaches a child about the local wildlife and coastal history, she's helping to create a new generation of advocates.

Thought to be extinct in the 1880s, northern elephant seals have made a major comeback. In 1990, about a dozen appeared near a local lighthouse. This year, more than 8,500 have come ashore on their biannual migration from Baja California to Alaska. Most show up for the breeding season, December through February, when bulls fight for the chance to procreate. This is also the most popular time for visitors. "It's like a three-ring circus," says Grossman. "Sex and violence on the beach."

But life at the rookery isn't always so dramatic. On a calm morning, a handful of tourists wander the trail to the cliffs. Waves crash on the offshore rocks and bubble slowly over the sand. A yearling shimmies toward two huge adults, and Grossman sighs. "You never get tired of standing here."