Spirit in Action
Mary Rehwald - Ashland ECO-Municipality and The Natural Step
Mary Rehwald spear-headed the successful effort of the city council to declare Ashland, WI an ECOmunicipality, incorporating the Natural Step process. Mary is a member of Ashland's City Council and a Northland College faculty member. A life-long Unitarian, she has a special spiritual calling toward building community. She has a stong connection to caring for the earth and living responsibly upon it.
- Broadcast on:
- 19 Aug 2007
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I have no hands but yours to tend my sheep. No handkerchief but yours to dry the eyes of those who weep. I have no arms but yours with which to hold. The ones grown weary from this struggle and weak from growing old. I have no voice but yours with which to see. To let my children know that I am out and out is everything. I have no way to feed the hungry souls. No clothes to give or make it and the more. So be my heart, my hand, my tongue through you and will be done. The enders have my none to help and die. Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Above all, I'll seek out light, love and helping hands, being shared between our many neighbors on this planet, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. I have no way to open people's eyes, except that you will show them how to trust the inner mind. My guest today on Spirit in Action is Mary Raywald. Mary spearheaded the successful effort of the City Council to declare Ashland, Wisconsin, eco-munincipality, incorporating the natural step process. Mary is a member of Ashland City Council and an Earthland College faculty member. A lifelong Unitarian, she has a special spiritual calling toward building community. She has a strong connection to caring for the Earth and living responsibly upon it. Thank you, Mary, for including me in your very busy schedule. Thank you, welcome. I think you just came from over in Menominee, and you're going to be speaking shortly with the county board here in Eau Claire. Is that right? I'm speaking at the county courthouse, and it's an open presentation. Well, tell us a little bit about your work. I think that you're on the City Council up in Ashland. I think that you've had a major hand in leading the City Council to adopt an eco-sustainable way of functioning. Can you tell me what eco-sustainable means in the first place and what role you had in it? I wrote the resolution for the City Council to become an eco-municipality. We were the second city in the United States to do that. The first one was Washburn. Washburn has 2,000 people, and Ashland up on Lake Superior has 8,000 people. And the model that we borrowed and that we voted unanimously on the City Council to adopt is called the Natural Step, which is this wonderful scientific analysis that you use to reduce your ecological footprint in terms of all your city activities. So that was passed in September. It's part of an effort to get this movement going in the United States, beginning with local governments. And it was very exciting to pass it unanimously. There's a story behind that. And I think you should tell me the story. Well, the story that I think would be of interest to listeners is that our City Council in Ashland is no different from your typical rural Wisconsin City Council. I've been a City Council member for about 7 years, and I would say that the points of view represented on the City Council are all over the map that represent the sort of old Ashland and new Ashlandites. So I had organized a whole year before I brought this up to the City Council. We have 11 members. And if you can imagine this, I would say about 5 members generally vote together in sort of a progressive pro-environmental block. And the others I would have characterized as sort of voting all over the map, but that isn't a primary concern. So that's 5 of us, quote unquote, and 6 of them, quote unquote. And I didn't think we had a majority to pass this. But the City of Washburn, the mayor of Washburn, not just up the road from us. I mean, Blakely had passed an eco-municipality resolution the previous July, and her vote was 4 to 3. She knew she had the majority, and she wanted to be the first eco-municipality in the country. So she went ahead with the vote. And the three who had voted against it said, well, it isn't that we don't agree with your environmental goals. It's just that we didn't like, you know, something about the way of the process. They didn't feel involved. So what I did is I called up the 6 members of the City Council that I didn't think were on board. And I set up another public presentation of my slide show off my trip to Sweden. Everything we had been doing up in the community before that. And I invited them to come, and I said, you know, I don't want us to be divided on the Ashland City Council because the three people in Washburn who voted against it said they supported the concept. And I said, I want you to come see my slide show before the vote. And four out of those six people came. And I think they were very interested in the story I had to tell, which was a new story. One of the people, Raleigh Peterson, on our City Council, when I got through said that he really liked the framework I presented. And I would characterize him as born and raised in Ashland. And he said, I fish out on Lake Superior. And I probably eat fish three times a week, he said. I had seen him. I walked down by Lake Superior and I had seen him coming in and out in his fishing boat. He said, I recently had myself tested for mercury toxicity. And I have the 30th highest level in the state of Wisconsin. And then he said, you know, when you go out to Lake Superior, you can see 30 feet down. It's clear. He said, you can't tell these things. And he then listed the bad effects of mercury poisoning. And he said the DNR should be posting this on the landings. And I had known by that point that Wisconsin is one of like 19 states in the United States, in which today every single riverway and lake has fish advisory warnings for mercury. These are things that I know, and it was very interesting to see that consciousness through reality had reached through to somebody on the city council like Raleigh. So they voted unanimously to adopt the natural step in all of our purchasing policies and our decision making. And I know a lot of people don't know what the natural step is. Yeah, you spoke about the general concept and I'm curious about the details, what this framework really is, what is the natural step. And this is the concept that comes from Sweden, right? Right. The natural step was developed. It is a framework used around the world now. It has a national organization and there are like 65 offices around the world in about 20 different countries. And what the natural step is, is a way of analyzing what your business or government does that has four possible detrimental effects on the planet. And I have to say that Dr. Carl Henry Grobert is his name, R-O-B-E-R-T, it's like the word Robert. He developed this back in the 80s, the natural step, and he is an oncologist and he's also a pediatrician. The reason he developed a framework was because he was very upset about the rising rates of leukemia in Sweden. And he said he talked to many parents who were distraught, that were desperate to find cures for their kids. And his general take was that, you know, Sweden, which is one of the, has the five highest standards of living in the world, one of the top five. They have consumption rates that are increasing, they're a very technological society. And he suspected that there was a link between consumption, industrialization, and the spread of cancer. He's a wonderful speaker. His general framework is that the health of the planet depends on the health of our cells or the other way around. The healthy cell is the sort of canary for the planet. And our cellular structure, and I think most people are becoming aware of this, we're finding all sorts of persistent toxins that are in our cells, are in our body fat all over the planet, hundreds of them, and he was fully aware of this. So what he did is he sat down, he tried to develop four principles that anybody could agree on, regardless of their political orientation. That was his goal. And he came up with a natural step. And before he finalized what the natural step is, he ran up by 40 or 50 different scientists and Nobel laureates. And the natural step has four parts. And most of us who understand about the environment know these already. The first one is that we shouldn't do anything that promotes the use of fossil fuels. Because that stuff you have to dig up from under the ground. And it goes out into the air and we know that carbon dioxide is the primary cause of global warming. And that comes from our power plants and our industries and our cars. That's the first natural step is that you have to decrease dependency on fossil fuels. So that means a city or a person or a business can say, what do we do that burns fossil fuels? You know, whether it's gasoline or coal or whatever. So that's the first natural step. First systems condition is what he calls them. The second natural step is that in society we should not be increasing our production of synthetic substances that are going to become persistent in the environment. We know that hundreds of thousands of new products are produced every year. And they're basically aren't studies on what their toxic effects are. So that's the second natural step. The third one is that we should not be engaging in any practices that destroy our ecosystem parts. Like our forests and our water and our air quality and our good quality of soils. Those are all degrading right now because people haven't been paying attention to them. So the third part of the natural step for a city like Ashton would mean that in our comprehensive plan we would not. We follow the smart growth legislation in Wisconsin, which means we aren't going to start building things outside of town that don't already have sewer and water connections. Because that's a complete waste of resources. We should develop inside the city limits. It's called in fill. So that's how that plays out on a city level as an example. And the final part of the natural step is the social justice component that says we need to follow these first three systems conditions. And the final one is that people on the planet have equal access to their natural resources, which means you have to pay close attention to those living in poverty to those who make decisions about their lives that may be destructive to our natural sources of life. So that was what he came up with. And that's what people in Sweden and around the world use to evaluate their city policies. Whose garden was this? It must have been lovely. I didn't have flowers. I've seen pictures of flowers. And I'd love to have smelled one. Whose river was this? You say it ran freely. Oh, what it's called. I've seen blondes and pictures. And you tell me about that. Oh, tell me again. I need to know the forest I trees. The metals were green. The oceans were blue. And birds really flew. Can you swear that was true? Whose gray sky was this? A was is a blue one. At nights there were breezes. I've heard records of breezes. And you tell me about one. Whose forest was this? And why is it empty? You say there were birds songs. And squirrels and branches. And why is this island? Oh, tell me again. I need to know the forest I trees. The metals were green. The oceans were blue. And birds really flew. Can you swear that was true? And whose garden was this? It must have been lovely. Didn't have flowers. I've seen pictures of lovers. And I'd love to have spelled one. It sounds merry like you followed a very good consensus building process in terms of approaching this up in Ashland. Yet I still imagine that there must be people who look at this and say this is liberal fringe stuff. Why should we worry about the ecosystem? Don't we have to worry about business first? They put economic progress as they would refer to it as first. How does that fit into the system? Well, the way that fits into the system is every human being is a human being and we have certain values that we share. The first one is that we all want water that's safe to drink. There's a common value. We all want air that's safe to breathe. It's a big deal up where I live because we have such clean air. We all want food that's safe to eat. The information's coming out about our foods and if you go into any stop-and-go store at a gas station, it's about 95% sugar and dyes and things you've never heard of. I think that's a problem. My contention is that regardless of what business you run, that we all want to live on a planet that is not terminally ill. We want to believe and understand that the human species on this planet will continue to go forward. A lot of the information that's coming out right now is suggesting that that isn't true. All the global warming indicators. I just came from a meeting this morning in Menominee in which we had people whose primary concern is business. I started talking from that standpoint because we did a survey in Ashland and people still will continue to say that jobs are the number one issue. If you don't have a job, let's not talk about this stuff because you can't support your family. The word eco-municipality in Sweden, that ECO at the beginning, in Sweden it means economy or economics and it also means ecology, which means our relationship to nature. That's the underlying idea of the eco-municipality movement. So what we are trying to do is two things. One is, for example, part of an eco-municipality concept is to retain your local jobs, is to support your local people at home so that they can continue to work and have business there. The other part of an eco-municipality that relates to jobs is to create networks that are local. And the most stunning example to me are connecting with the family farms or the farms that surround your municipal community, helping those people sell their products in the community and, of course, the most likely continuous sources would be in the schools and in nursing homes, in colleges, universities, so that you work in collaboration with people in the public sector who serve food. And you try to break through that 1,500 mile an average that a bag of potato chips travels to our kitchen. It's astounding how far our food travels before it gets to the table. The trucking and the refrigeration and all of those things are one of the primary costs of food, but it also doesn't provide for people building community in a municipality that includes the farming members of the community. And so it helps build up the sustainable agricultural sector as well. Those are just a couple of examples. I've got about 10 questions coming up at the same time. One thing is you mentioned that this is a resolution that you adopted up in Ashland. What kind of practical steps are taken from that? As I understand, a resolution is a general statement of intent or desire for a direction. Are there concrete steps that follow from this? Yeah, there is a real concrete organizing process and we're just beginning it and it's called the ABCD process. The first step that we're taking right now is to raise awareness. You know, a year and a half ago, this wasn't being discussed in our city council or in the, I mean, there are good environmental practices that the city has adopted. They had sponsored a focus on the energy program from the state of Wisconsin, which helped them replace all of our stop and go signs. So their LED lights, they use much less energy and they don't have to be replaced. They saved the city money as well. And we've done some other things in city hall, but right now what's happening is people are starting to figure out how to discuss the natural step ideas inside the departments. So, for example, our public works director/city engineer, Christopher Bolt, is completely on board with these ideas. And he has about 40 people that he supervises in the city of Ashland. And he's made a decision to go on our next delegation to Sweden, which is going to be this June. There are eight of us coming from the Schwamig and Bay that are going back to Sweden. And we're going to get together as a delegation and figure out all the detailed questions that we want to ask. And, you know, a lot of people have asked me, why go to Sweden? There are lots of good examples in the United States and I agree with them. But what Sweden has to offer and why we're going back is that they've been doing this for 25 years. And to get the kind of experience that they have had and look at their successes, they aren't that different from us. So, they can answer a lot of our detailed questions of how they got people on board. They, in some cases, have reduced their dependency on oil in their municipal power plants from like 82 to 12%. The Swedish government just passed a resolution to be fossil fuel independent within 15 years. I mean, they're actually working on this. They aren't talking about this is a liberal idea or should we do this or not. The Europeans in general understand this much better than we do in America. And so they have a lot to offer us. They've got a great sense of humor. It looks like Sweden up north. I think it looks a little bit like Sweden down here in the Eau Claire area. And there are a lot of people of Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Danish descent who live here. So a lot of the general cultural orientations and attitudes that they have are reflected in a lot of people in our local community. But I got a little bit off track in terms of answering your question. What was the resolution that you adopted up in Ashland in particular? Did you say we will do this or we'll start this process? You mentioned there's the ABCD and I think you got to A. And so I think there's at least three more letters for you to spell out for us. I'm sorry, I carried it away. I'll answer first part of the question. Then I'll go to ABCD. ABCD is just how you organize. The resolution that we passed says that the city of Ashland will endorse the principles of sustainable community development, which follow the natural step that I just described, which is reducing dependence on fossil fuels, reducing dependence on chemicals and things that can accumulate in nature, reduces dependence on activities that harm life, sustaining ecosystems, and meets the hierarchy of present and future human needs fairly and efficiently. Our adoption of this resolution says that we will apply these four principles whenever possible in our planning, in our policy making, and in our municipal practices, which includes purchasing. In the next, I think four to five years, Ashland, through its public works department, is going to be involved in over $20 million of infrastructure work on sidewalks and highways, et cetera. To make decisions about all of those things, we're going to be looking at the natural step and asking the questions, "Are we doing this the right way so that we can reduce our ecological footprint?" That's what the resolution said that we passed in September in Ashland, but you also asked about the ABCD process. You asked specifics, and I said raising awareness is a specific. That's A, awareness. And I've been speaking all over the state in a few other places since I came back from Sweden a year and a half ago. And I still speak anywhere up north. I will go and speak to any school, community in the Schwamgen Bay area. So I'm continuing to raise awareness. Under A, we've also set up study circles up north. We have had 13 study circles in the Schwamgen Bay, which means we've had over 110 people decide to sit down for two months in small groups, eight or 12, and read this book, The Natural Step for Communities, which is a fabulous book about Sweden and possible scenarios in the United States. And what's come out, this is still under awareness, step A. And what's come out of those discussion groups are all this creative energy and ideas for how to change. Then B stands for doing a baseline assessment of what we're currently doing. If you're going to improve, you've got to know what you're currently doing. So we're just starting to figure out how to do that. How do we figure out as a baseline in Ashland? How do we measure how much we throw away, how much gasoline we use? I mean, we don't even know that because nobody's ever recorded it. So that's the second part of the ABCD process. And we'll do a baseline study hopefully of the farmers who live in our region. We've tried to write a couple of grants and haven't gotten them yet. To find out do they market locally? Do they want to market locally? If they do want to market locally, what keeps them from marketing locally? You know, is it the schools that say we can't buy it? Or is it the economics? What is it? So that's AB and then C is creating a compelling vision for the future. So it stands for clearing compelling. And that's what we did in our comprehensive plan as we tried to describe our city 20, 50 years from now. If you create a compelling vision, which is C, and then you look back at your baseline, then you can figure out what steps you need to take to go to that. And D is just develop a plan of action. That's the process for organizing. And up in Ashland right now, we're still between A and B. We're building awareness. We have been for about a year and a half. And I think after this delegation goes to Sweden, we'll have some really clear ideas of how to begin our baseline studies. I want to turn to some of the spiritual aspects of the work that you're doing. First of all, I guess I'd like to ask you about yourself. Do you have a particular spiritual orientation? Is there a background? Something that motivates you to be concerned about this kind of thing? Because there are a lot of people in our government who wouldn't be at all interested in pursuing it, at least not until they had a better idea of what it was. What motivated you, at this point in your life, to turn to this kind of concern? I would say my spirituality is connected to trying to figure out how to be optimistic. And I come from a Unitarian background, which looks at all religious ideas openly and supports the idea that the search for religious values or point of view is extremely important, and it's a lifelong search. I would say my main spiritual connection to the planet has to do a building community. That's why I'm doing this. And I have seen myself my whole adult life as a -- sometimes I call myself a community educator. Sometimes I call myself a community organizer. But I view our communities that we live in, our towns, et cetera, as living rooms. And we need to create public spaces in our living rooms that people feel comfortable going into and sharing ideas inside of. I lived in Madison for 20 years from 1960 to 1980 and had a back injury and made a real clear decision in my mid-30s that I would disappear into rural America because I couldn't take all the traffic and stuff in Madison. This is connected to my spirituality, and I've lived in two parts of rural America since I left Madison in 1980. One was in the mountain valleys of the Sierra Nevada, up in northeastern California, near the Nevada desert, and then living up in Ashland. Our lake superior, I consider, a natural wonder of the world. And that's how I think a lot of people view living up on the Great Lake. It is gorgeous, it is there all the time, and it still has a decent water quality compared to other bodies of water. I am concerned about fragmentation in our consciousness in the world. With the media, the way it's designed and shorter and shorter sound bites that come at us from the television sets, I think that people are looking for interconnectedness and ways to not only work in community with people, not in a hostile way, but in a community way where conflicts are resolved, but they're also looking for the interconnectedness between human beings and between them and plants and animals and the natural world. So that's pretty much my spiritual orientation. You know, I could cite certain things that have had an influence on me. There was a video that came out. John DeGraft made this video called Afluenza. I don't know if you've ever seen it. It basically talks about the drive in this society and what we're propagating around the world to be consumers. You know, to think of us in society as animals that buy. I mean, I have to fight that every day. I think most people in this society have to fight that title that we've been given. I'm a consumer. This is from our advertising. I think people are trying to connect with the support system on the planet for our well-being. That analogy that Dr. Carl Henrik Rober uses in Sweden of the cell is a symbol of the health of the planet. The health of the cell, I just buy 100%. I've had breast cancer and I know many people who have breast cancer and many people who have cancer today. And it seems like the places I go, people say, "Well, our cancer rate is real high here." And things like that. And people are too busy to study that. I mean, these are just little examples. I talked to my brother on the phone who lives outside of Chicago. Everybody in this house had a really bad cough this last week now. It could be just a bad cough or it could be something that comes from particulates in the air. When you start reading the literature, it's really sad. Clean Wisconsin, for example, has said that they estimate that in the state of Wisconsin alone, from the particulates that come from power plants, 440 people die a year. Now, I'm not sure how they made that estimation, but I don't think this is a good thing at all. What does the natural step have to say about relationship of its principles and things like growth and consumer? You mentioned that as Athloins points out, we are being turned into consuming entities. And there's a certain part of our economic structure that holds tightly to this concept. Is the natural step anti-consumer? Well, I think that's the wrong question to ask. The natural step doesn't say if it's anti-consumer because I don't think it uses the word "consumer." The underlying concept is that the earth has a certain carrying capacity. It can support so much life. And if you look at what humans do in economy, which is the man-made industrial part of our existence where we manufacture things and we use things, that is growing faster than our carrying capacity will allow. So they don't say, "Is it anti-consumer?" The natural step asks the question, "Is what we are doing contrary to the future of life for the human species?" It's a very different question. It's outside of the consumer model. Dr. Roberta uses this image of the funnel. So if people can think of two lines that are coming together, narrow and narrow, and the top line is descending. And these are deteriorating life systems, fisheries, forests, air quality, et cetera. Our natural world, the quality of it is deteriorating, is going down. And then the line that's coming up to meet it is the increasing population. And here we do have a little bit of consumerism and the increasing things that people want. Afluenza is the only word I can give it. And if we don't pay attention to these two lines coming together, there's no way we can create a sustainable society. They're going to intersect. So the natural step says we've got to figure out how to improve the quality of the natural world. And we've got to stop contributing so much to its deterioration. So that line will level out. And yes, we do have to pay attention to increase in population and our consumption levels. We have to not continue to grow all the time in terms of how much we consume. If we can get those two lines not to intersect, then we have a window opening to develop a sustainable society. Some people would say we're off the edge and we don't have time left to do that, but we need to try to do that. So, for example, I filled up my car with gas yesterday morning when I drove down here. And, you know, I was telling the guy I filled up my car, well, yeah, I just got over 40 miles to the gallon. I have a Toyota Tercel that was made in 1996. And I don't want to sell my car because right now it's hard to find anything under $12,000 or $11,000 that burns at that rate. They're all much higher gas consumption. So the natural step would say, listen, come on, there are consumers out here like myself who want to buy a car that gets good gas mileage and doesn't cost a fortune. My question about the possible opposition of growth in consumer to the natural step is partly a question about what experience you've had in dealing with business leaders. Maybe the question is, does Walmart move to town here and build a big plant or that kind of question? I'm sure there's some people who perceive their interest as opposed to what the natural step asks that we look at. Of course, there are people who oppose that. In our local region, some of our business leaders have expressed concern of this is going to cost more. Is this going to take away jobs to have these kinds of requirements? To me, I say, well, first of all, we're trying to recruit more companies that are sustainable and we're trying to get current companies that are here to adopt these practices. So that we can market our region as a green place to come to. The second one about the jobs, the three concerns, I think, of our local small businessmen. And I just say local business people and I'll speak to that before Walmart. They're afraid this is going to cost them more. They are afraid they're going to lose jobs and they think it's kind of a vague guideline. So those are the issues that we need to address and I think that it will help our job economy up north to attract more businesses that are sustainable. In terms of these guidelines being vague, I don't consider these vague guidelines. But to use less fossil fuel in my day to day life or in the business that I work in is something that I can measure if I sit down and decide to do that. When it comes to Walmart, I think Walmart opens a new store here every three days and they want to open a super Walmart in Ashland. So we have the same issue that other communities have. And because Walmart has been criticized so much, they've just opened two "green" in McKinney, Texas and Colorado and they're putting out a lot of positive publicity about these green Walmart's. Of course, they're still sort of pushing products that are made so cheaply that very few people in the United States can compete with those working conditions around the world. I think everybody understands that. But we recently had a meeting up in Ashland with the Walmart developers to ask a whole series of questions about their practices. You know, every community is different. I don't think we have the political support up in Ashland to keep a Walmart from coming in that's going to threaten local businesses. But we do have a lot of people that are asking them to change their practices if they come in. I don't know what's going to happen because we don't have the zoning in place to require them to do any of these things. So it's an ongoing dialogue. I want to ask a few more questions related to the spiritual roots of what you do, the spiritual outlook that you, Mary, bring to this. And I'm assuming other people bring different frameworks to it as well. One of the complaints that is heard business people, in particular, economic interests versus this kind of holistic view of the planet and of our health, is that we're saying that snail-darters are equal to people or people's welfare. I can't have my job because the snail-darter may be endangered and so on. How do you end up looking at the various species, the various cells of full life on the planet? How do you equate their relative values? How do they fit into your spirituality? I agree with the idea that if there's anything you can say about a human species, it's sort of a super species. The human species has the power right now to destroy living systems on the planet. And it's going forward at a fairly rapid rate in that direction. And it's using a model of consumption that I think is neurotic. When people bring up the snail-darter versus jobs issue, of course they want everybody to say jobs are more important than the snail-darter. They're completely avoiding the fact that if you imagine the world as this big circle and then you imagine two circles inside of the world and the inner circle is what you would call economics or the economic model. Those are the cars we drive, the streets, the cities, the manufacturing, our flow of goods, our technology, everything that we do that uses resources. So that's the inner circle. The circle around that one inside the circle of the earth, let's call that social or cultural. And that has to do with all of our different religions, cultures around the planet and there are thousands of them. And then the outside circle of course is the natural environment that we live in, which is the earth. It takes in solar energy, it creates plants that we can eat, it's a living system that we live on. So that economic circle in the middle, let's say it represents jobs, in my mind, well first of all I think historically has grown so that we're reaching the outer limits of the natural world that can support us. If you pick something like the spotted owl in California or the snail darter as indicator species, some of these species tell us there's something wrong with the health of this ecosystem that we're living in. I lived out in California where the old growth forests were for about six and a half years. And my understanding, for example, the spotted owl, which is another indicator species, spotted owls don't live in fragmented forests, they only live where there's enough room for them to fly around. And I think most people know that the rainforests are being cut down at a rapid rate around the equator. I think most people know that some of our logging practices in terms of clear cutting are having huge impacts on soil, air and water and aren't regenerating themselves. So they're just indications of the health of the system that they're living in. And I wouldn't blame the snail darter or the environmentalists that understand that connection. Just like I wouldn't blame Dr. Carl Henry Grobearer for saying that the health of the cell is an indicator of the health of the planet. A cell is even smaller than an indicator species. Mary, I'm not interested in particular creeds, but I am interested in kind of the general spiritual principles that you carry with you. And one of those, for some people, is that Princeton's human life is precious. Some people feel to a lesser degree than animal life, or plant life is precious. So someone like me, I'm a vegetarian for the last 30 years, perhaps has more consideration. I balance the welfare of animals, perhaps more in my philosophy than other people. I'm curious what your spiritual beliefs have to say about other life forms besides the super species of the human. Is there value of the snail darter, the whale, the whatever it is in and of itself, or is it only important in so much as it supports humans? I believe that there is value in and of itself, and I believe that our life forms on the planet are interrelated. I sort of subscribe to the Gaia thesis that the organisms that live in our biosphere around the planet are somewhat similar to a functioning organism. When you get part of that system out of balance, it affects the whole. I'm not saying that in my own daily practice, I follow these principles because it's very hard to do it. I step on ants. I have been known to kill wasps, etc. But never any mosquitoes. I never kill a mosquito. But no, I don't believe that other animals are here to be secondary to the human species and that they should serve us or we should dominate over them. And does that relate to any of your original religious upbringing or your Unitarianism? Maybe you were raised Unitarian, I don't know. I was raised Unitarian and I don't know where I got these ideas from. If somebody were to say, "Where did you get these ideas from?" I'd say, "Well, I got them when I was in junior high school and at night I would put my pillow on the windowsill and look up at the stars out of my bedroom window." I could say I got these values from consciousness when I was a kid that every time I went outdoors and felt the wind or breathed in fresh air and the smells of nature, I felt more alive. I would say that's where I got it, was living on the planet. But I'm sure I was in a religious environment that talked about nature and had a very tolerant approach to what we learned from our experiences around us. I never grew up in an environment that said you had to believe one thing or the other. Can I try to quote a poem here? And I think many listeners know this poem by Mary Oliver. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on bended knees through the desert for a hundred miles repenting. And here's my favorite line. You only need to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Talk to me about despair, yours, and I will talk to you about mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, the soft pebbles of the rain are going over the green trees and the valleys, the prairies and the mountains. Meanwhile, the wild geese high in the clean blue air are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the earth offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place in the family of things. Now, there's a poem by Mary Oliver called "Wild Geese" that really speaks to me. And all I know is when I read that poem, I thought bingo, gee whiz. I mean, those are pretty mundane responses, but it speaks to me. [Music] [Music] Born in the Rockies of high-mountain streams running down the valley, the ocean in its dreams, gray through heron, graces the shore, the water rushing before. Don't dam the river, leave the river alone, don't dam the river, for the river is a home, don't dam the river, let the river survive, the river, the river is alive. Feel the current rising, toward the great deep by the spy, the lightning, and the green forest wide out by meadows, the golden eagle flies, the mountains touching the sky. Don't mind the mountain, leave the mountain alone, don't mind the mountain, or the mountain is a home, don't mind the mountain, let the mountain survive, the mountain, the mountain is alive. The desert's waiting, red rock cannon walls, hot sun is beating, one coyote calls sagebrush fragrant in the stillness of the heat, desert fires burning, burning the steady beam. Don't pave the desert, leave the desert alone, don't pave the desert, well the desert is a home, don't pave the desert, let the desert survive, the desert, the desert is alive. Tall grass is waving, miles across the sky, rock fields remembering, the buffalo hunters cry, song to seasons, circles by the streams, sweet grass burning, the breeze, fresh and clean. Don't plow the prairie, be the prairie alone, don't plow the prairie, for the prairie is a home, don't plow the prairie, let the prairie survive, the prairie, the prairie is alive. Feel our mother hurting, know that scars are done, breathe in your courage, as the struggle has begun, live like a prayer now, in praise of one. We are, we are all alive, live like a prayer now, deep in your heart, live like a prayer now, cause we are all apart, live like a prayer now, if we want to survive, we are, we are all alive. We are, we are all alive. We are, we are, we are all alive. We are, we are all alive. You said, Mary, that one of your fundamental values, one of your fundamental essences of your spirituality is building community. It strikes me that that's hard, it strikes me it's very hard when people see themselves as representing a different ideal. How well are you able to do that with the Walmart representatives and the capital punishment advocates and the people who love to kill animals for the sport of killing animals? Well, my idea of building community, first of all I think it's very easy. I do feel despair sometimes for our natural life systems and I sometimes feel despair for the human species. But it's easy and it's fun to build community. There are many people who feel the same way I do. I feel that I live in a culture and I could live this way anywhere in any culture on the planet today. There's a tribe, I don't know how to explain this, it's like finding your tribe and the fact that you want to ask me these questions that deal with spirituality tells me that maybe you're in the tribe and maybe people who are listening to this and haven't turned off the radio yet, maybe they're in the tribe as well. There are millions of us. You know, eco-municipality is an Anglo-Saxon word and it's boring as George Orwell says, "municipality" it sounds governmental and well it is. And a lot of our spiritual experiences aren't connected to that kind of language. But for me, building community has to do with sharing creative ideas, finding people that want to work with you on those creative ideas, having the opportunity to build our homes the way we want them to be to have people come in and celebrate. I don't know, to me community building is centered around the creative spirit that people have and spontaneity that they experience with each other. So it doesn't include a lot of the things that upset us. Mary, I think you work at Northland College, don't you? What's your role there? Are you a doctor of environmentalism? No, Mary Ray Wall, that's my name. I used to be the director of the Lifelong Learning Center at Northland. I organized from 1990 until 2004 all their community outreach programs. I organized an evening degree completion program for adults going back to school. I organized graduate courses for teachers, etc., sort of their continuing ed department. And since I left Northland in a year ago, October, I still teach a couple of classes there. One is on regional culture history and economics, but I don't have my doctorate. My original training is in French and education. I've taught French in high school level and college level for many years and also taught history in the English. I've also taught courses on oral history interviewing techniques. I'm sure that we haven't covered everything in this interview that folks are going to want to hear about. If they want more resources, can you give me websites or other resources that they could go to to find out this information? Yeah, there's several. The Natural Step has its own website. I'm sure it's www.naturalstep.org. It may be tns.org. The Natural Step. If people want to find out what's happening up in the Chawamagan Bay area where I'm on the city council in Ashland, they can go to a website, theallianceforsustainability.org. The Alliance for Sustainability.org. And you can read about our sustainable Chawamagan initiative and the eco-municipality resolutions. And if people are interested in traveling to Sweden, all they have to do is to go to Google and type in sustainable Sweden and they'll get their sustainable Sweden site, which lists the upcoming tours that are happening in Sweden. Another group I would recommend in Wisconsin is Clean Wisconsin out of Madison. And I'm assuming all of these are cleanwisconsin.org. I don't know. A thousand friends of Wisconsin, which is also out of Madison. Clean Wisconsin deals with water quality and energy and other issues like that. A thousand friends of Wisconsin has dealt with land use planning issues. And a thousand friends of Wisconsin is the main contact for the trip to Sweden right now. I know you've got to run over and do your presentation. I want to thank you for taking time here. It's great that you brought back this little piece of Sweden to us. And it's beautiful that you're keeping Lake Superior and the North Country as beautiful as God made them. Thank you very much, Mark. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] You've been listening to an interview with Mary Raywald, Ashland City Council Member and advocate for the natural step process involved in declaring Ashland an eco-municipality. You can hear this program again at my website at northernspiritradio.org. Music featured in this program has included "Whose Garden Was This?" by Tom Paxton. "Live Like a Prayer" by Magpie and "Earth Anthem" by The Turtles. The theme music for Spirit in Action is "I Have No Hands but Yours" by Carol Johnson. Thank you for listening. I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. You can email me at helpsmeet@usa.net. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. I have no higher call for you than this. To love and serve your neighbor. Enjoying selflessness. To love and serve your neighbor. Enjoying selflessness. [MUSIC] [MUSIC PLAYING]