Where Did You Go, Joe?

Where Did You Go, Joe?
Some random Remembrances on the brief career of a ’90’s environmental warrior.
by glaucon


Joe Pagen, circa 1994

In 1990, at 7am in the morning, 30 shivering college students stood on a long, lonely stretch of wilderness beach on the shore of Lake Michigan. Nordhouse Dunes is a pearl of undeveloped federal wilderness shoreline just north of Ludington. It was early May, and the wind blew cold out of the west and across the tops of the breakers. Junipers and jack pine studded the 140 foot high dunes that rose only yards from the shoreline, but our attention was focused on picking up and disposing of less beautiful objects on the beach: hypodermic needles, tampon applicators and other flotsam of every description.

College students don’t get out of bed on a Saturday morning at 3am to make a sleepy drive from Lansing to Ludington for nothing. We were there for one reason, and one reason only: to learn from someone the likes of which we’d never seen before. His name was Joe Pagen.

Joe was the Executive Director of Michigan Environmental Defense (MED), and I was the Canvassing Director. And the students gathered on the beach were canvassers, activists, environmentalists, nature lovers, tree huggers and just plain crazy for being there that early on a cold Saturday.

The Great Lakes are the fresh water crown jewels of the world, and Lake Michigan is the diamond. Carved out by retreating glaciers and coveted by citizens and lawmakers from states living in what Marc Reisner aptly calls the Cadillac Desert, they were a living example of the glorious beauty that Joe and the rest of us there that morning loved so much.

Who was Joe Pagen? Joe was a former corporate executive, turned recluse, turned activist and canvasser. We were all canvassers.

The Canvassing Gig

Door to door canvassing is not an easy gig. Anyone who has done it every day for 6 months or longer knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Dogs are not your friend. People are sometimes rude and hostile, or just plain indifferent. I’ve been hit on the head with rocks, bit several times in the ass by unhelpful dogs, and even shot at once. You sweat in the summer and freeze in the winter. Your feet hurt constantly, and you’re usually thirsty and hungry. There’s always one more door to knock on. And just when the world seems every bit as forbidding as you always feared it really was, you meet someone.

Like a manifest angel, they give you a lemonade when you’re hot, or hot chocolate when you thought your bones would shake themselves to pieces from your shivering. They invite you in, they sign your petition, they sometimes even give you dinner, they write you a fat check to help you save the world, and they make that simple, caring, human connection that drives you crazy because you feel guilty for doubting your deeply held, and possibly naive faith in the goodness of people.

And you say to yourself, “Okay, it’s not so bad. I can do this again. I can go out and knock on 100 more doors tomorrow.”

As Canvass Director for MED, I trained them and sent 40 or 50 out each day in smoke-belching suburbans to trudge up and down along the manicured lawns of the vast housing tracts of suburban Michigan. And I learned everything I knew from Joe.

Joe in the Wilderness

A rising star at a young age in the corporate world, Joe Pagen was the National Fleet Manager for Coca-Cola when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the mid 1980’s.. The medical establishment gave him little hope or means to fight it. Typically, he decided he’d fight it on his own.

He sold all his possessions, quit his job, and moved into a tiny, rustic cabin in the northern Minnesota wilderness “to meditate and heal.” Three years later, strong and healthy in body and soul, his Parkinson’s in apparent remission, he emerged from his self-imposed isolation like a modern Jeremiah Johnson.

He went to work for the Hudson Bay canvassing organization, a subcontractor for many activist organizations at the time, and shocked them with his skill and passion at convincing others to support environmental causes. He was asked to become the Canvassing Director for the Michigan United Conservation Clubs (MUCC). There he raised millions of dollars and was the genius-engine behind the hard-fought passage of the 10 cent bottle-return law in Michigan, which led the nation. He was ranked the top environmental Staff Director in the nation for 3 years straight in ‘88, ‘89 and ‘90. He was articulate, talented and passionate. There were many who believed it was just a matter of time before he burst onto the national scene.

I’ll always remember one of Joe’s stories, a story about Mahatma Gandhi. I can’t tell it like Joe did, and I never got around to researching whether it was true or not. It’s not profound, but it tells you a lot about how Joe lived his life.



Joe taught us all not to wait for that one inspiring moment, song, movie, book or person, but to create our inspiration out of the whole cloth of our own inner world. It’s one of the hardest things to do and success at it is the difference between a passive acceptance of events and an active, conquering vision that sees clearly and acts decisively. There was little room in Joe’s world for those who didn’t share his passion or, more importantly, those he didn’t judge to be a potential convert. Every action, or decision not to act in his life, from the nearly insignificant to the profound, was based upon a calculation of its impact on the goals he set for himself. Joe was a “perfect storm” of activist talent, passion, intelligence and diamond-hard discipline. No one doubted he was going places.

That “perfect storm” crashed into the immovable object in the person of Tom Washington, the Executive Director of Michigan United Conservation Clubs (MUCC) in 1991.

Joe, MUCC and the "raging bull," Tom Washington

MUCC was the largest umbrella organization of state conservation clubs in the nation, and still is. And Washington was feared and respected by the press, state lawmakers, and his own employees. For years, Washington had ruled over his fiefdom like a feudal lord, dispensing pronouncements on issues as diverse as gun control, hunting and fishing, wetland regulations and many others. And because of the huge base of hunters and sportsmen he could mobilize at a moment’s notice, those pronouncements carried significant political weight.

Joe’s problem was not with hunting and fishing. He tolerated it, and even accepted it on a philosophical level. He wrote an article for MUCC’s flagship publication “Michigan Outdoors” about hunting from an environmentalist’s perspective and, within certain ethical and conservation guidelines, found it to be defensible. Joe’s problem with Tom Washington was more personal. It had to do with personal ethics.

When Joe resigned as Staff Director from MUCC in 1991, he sent a series of letters to the MUCC Board of Directors alleging inappropriate, and perhaps even illegal, use and abuse of MUCC personnel and resources (MUCC was a non-profit organization) for the personal monetary enhancement of Mr. Thomas Washington. Emergency meetings were held by the Board, and Washington ended up keeping his job, but only by the slimmest of margins. A subsequent IRS investigation was unable to find sufficient proof of the allegations to take action. As a lowly canvasser for MUCC, I was in no position to make a judgment on the merits of Joe’s allegations. The evidence I saw seemed pretty damning. But I didn’t hear the testimony or see everything presented before the Board. What I did have direct experience with, however, was that Washington was not a nice man to work for. He would have made John Bolton look like a saint. More than a few MUCC staff would retire to the bathroom and disgorge their breakfasts before being called on the carpet in a meeting with Washington.

A longtime member of Safari Club International, the walls of Washington’s office had more exotic animal heads hanging from it than it had wall space. His private bathroom contained a curious oddity. A baboon that he’d shot and stuffed sat next to the toilet, its fore-fingers pointing toward each other with a roll of toilet paper hung between them. Suffice it to say that I was more than a little unnerved during my thankfully brief visit to the loo. Not a hunter myself, and being legitimately curious about its fascination, I once asked Washington why he hunted. As I asked him the question, we could hear the siren of a fire engine on a nearby street. Washington pointed in the general direction of the siren, and said “Do you hear that? People will gather to watch the fire because they get pleasure out of seeing the pain and suffering of others. I hunt because it gives me pleasure to watch animals die. Simple as that.”

Joe had stood up to Washington regularly, but clearly saw that his environmental rhetoric and focus would have to be toned down and subsumed to gun and hunting issues if he wished to stay with MUCC. When he left, it was typical of Joe to tweak the tail of the dragon on his way out the door. Some employees quit and went with Joe, including myself. Many that stayed thanked Joe for permanently gelding the raging bull.

Joe sold his car and his small sailboat and used his meager savings to start a non profit organization that he named Michigan Environmental Defense (MED). He invited me and others along for the ride, and we gladly accepted. Tom Washington kept his job and went on to become the President of the National Rifle Association before he died.

Joe and MED

Fish and wildlife professionals, and conservationists in general, are some of the most uncompromising and knowledgeable environmentalists in the world. This was certainly the case in the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR), where environmental interests and fish, game and forest interests, had merged in a common cause to make it one of the toughest state departments overseeing environmental issues in the nation.

Republican Governor at the time, John Engler, saw it otherwise. According to Englerlogic, the DNR was “out of control,” in the sense that it wasn’t firmly under the thumb of him and his corporate buddies. The DNR was poking its “activist” nose into combined sewage overflows, toxin levels in groundwater, heavy metal and PCB emissions from industrial incinerators, and other “alarmist” issues that had nothing to do, ostensibly, with hunting and fishing. And worst of all, they were goddamned serious about it. This was more than bothersome to certain people who gave large amounts of money to help get Engler elected.

So Engler had a great idea. He decided to divide the DNR into two separate entities. The DNR people would still be responsible for fisheries, wildlife, forestry, parks, boating, and conservation officer programs, and the new department would be staffed with Engler’s bureaucratic buddies, and they would have jurisdiction over the orphan rump that was left, including air and water pollution, toxic cleanup, landfills, and many other environmental protection and land use regulatory programs and they’d call it something fancy and important, to make it sound like they were actually going to do something to protect the environment. “The Department of Environmental Quality,” or DEQ, sounded like just the ticket.

Thus, in one fell swoop, Engler’s executive order succeeded in dismantling a decades-long tradition of professional biologists’ and conservationists’ control over decisions regarding the health and well-being of Michigan’s ecosystems and by extension, the health of its citizens. Aldo Leopold would have wept. Many environmentalists did.

Joe and us at MED and other environmental groups fought back the best we knew how. See, for example, this article by the Detroit Metro Times: “Engler Eyes the DNR.” (http://www.metrotimes.com/johnengler/11_32eng.html) But Engler was more than popular, he was riding a crest of unparalleled public support from widespread tax cuts.

We also fought plans to make Michigan a major repository for radioactive waste. We fought the plan to store high level radioactive waste in dry concrete casks only yards from the shore of Lake Michigan at Palisades Nuclear Power Plant. We provided education programs on recycling to grade schools throughout the state. We started the now popular Adopt-A-Beach program here in Michigan. We made headlines in the Detroit Free Press by mailing 15 crates of garbage collected from Michigan beaches and traced to Wisconsin, back to then Governor of Wisconsin, Tommy Thompson.

There’s a long list of our fights, our accomplishments and our failures.

Here’s Joe from the MED constitution:


Where’d You Go, Joe?

Where are those idealistic youth who stood shoulder to shoulder, and arm in arm, and who went out to battle in the late ’80’s and early ’90’s? Did their idealism simply dissipate with their youth? Has the uncorrupted, fiery yearning in the soul become just another casualty in the consumer/media juggernaut that promises you everything you don’t need in exchange for everything you do?

There are still Michigan chapters of national groups doing great work in my state, like Clean Water Action and Public Interest Research Group, and I write them a nice check when they canvass in my neighborhood, but they aren’t grassroots in the sense they are born and bred from Michigan soil. The Great Lakes also deserves such a cadre of home-grown environmental warriors.

I can’t believe that Joe’s inspiration, and the inspiration of others like him, exists only as a faded photograph and newspaper clipping. I know that the love of wilderness still bangs around in my aging breast like a bowling ball in a steel drum. I thank Joe for that.

As we stand on the edge of an environmental meltdown, I shoulder on the best I know how, and keep asking myself, where have all the Joe Pagens gone? If ever there was a time for warriors of his stripe, the time is now.

Clinton won in ‘92, and Joe left Michigan for the Vast and Beautiful Graveyard of Dreams called California in ‘93, and he left me in charge as Executive Director of MED. But Clinton’s victory was a double-edge sword for many environmental groups. Volunteers and private funding sources dried up. Bill had won, after all, and the environment was getting better. The real struggle was over. Why give money any more to activist groups? We fought hard to stay afloat, but it got tougher and tougher. People had other issues to worry about.

I’m not a money person. I never claimed to be. My wife won’t let me within 10 feet of a credit card. But I did learn something: when funding sources dry up, you have to cut the costs somewhere. But when you’re giving everything you have to save individual trees, it’s hard to see the forest. Financially, I made some bad decisions. But morally, I can sleep well at night. For example, I paid for medical insurance for my employees and canvassers, even though I knew we couldn’t afford it. Soon, we fell a little behind in our payroll taxes. My last act was to pay off the IRS, and pay my activists their full wages by selling my car and most of my possessions, before closing the doors of MED for good. It was one of the lowest points in my life.

Joe and I subsequently talked a few times by phone, but he dropped off the face of the earth. I’ve looked for him, maybe only half-heartedly, but he’s vanished like a morning mist.

Perhaps, deep down, I fear his righteous opprobrium for failing to keep MED afloat. It’s not an easy monkey to carry on my back, but I think he’d understand.

Where is he today? I don’t know. I like to think he’s kicked the ass of Parkinson’s for good and is lounging under the bright wilderness stars he loved so much. I look for him at each trailhead, then adjust my pack and keep on hiking. If you know Joe, or you happen to see him on some barely accessible wilderness path, tell him thanks for teaching me how to give up the candy.

-glaucon

find him; he sounds like the kind of man who would enrich anyone's life, as do you. Thank you!

:)

Maybe Goleta or Santa Barbara CA? Davenport FL? Best of luck reconnecting!