Rebeccah Sanders: Natural Resources Council of Maine

Today I have with me in the studio Rebecca Sanders, who is the CEO of the Natural Resources Council of Maine. Thanks for coming in today. Thanks for having me. I know you're a very busy person because there's a lot going on with the natural resources of Maine, so this is time out of your day, but I appreciate it. Oh, well thank you. It's great to be here. There's a ton going on because Maine is such an amazing place with incredible resources. Our natural environment is part of Maine's economy. It powers our communities, and I like to think that Maine has a unique ecological ethic and culture that you don't find other places around the country. Well, tell me about that. The ecological ethic and culture. So Maine I think is different in that when we talk about environmental issues in many other places that can be really divisive, that can be partisan in nature. But in Maine it is really part of how we live our lives, and everybody across the political spectrum really values our environment, keeping it healthy. People are able to access it so they have a personal relationship with it that makes this possible for us to really think about how we can be progressive and sort of centrist at the same time. Yeah, that's really good to hear because I know that as somebody who's lived in Maine for a very long time, I have a great love for the environment. And also I know other people who probably don't share the same political views as I do. I don't really know. I don't really ask, but we also share the great love of the environment. So I think this idea that you can be kind of centrist and accomplish what you need to or would like to accomplish on behalf of the natural resources, it's important. Yeah. What we have found in Maine here at the Natural Resources Council of Maine is that we're able to often pass first in the nation legislation around climate change and resource protection because of that environmental ethos of Maine's communities. So tell me about some of the first in the Nation work that you've been a part of, either through the Natural Resources Council as a body or yourself personally. Oh, sure. The Natural Resources Council of Maine has been around since 1959, and it was formed by a group of citizen activists that really cared about the Allagash River, and we've grown pretty significantly from there. And one of the people that we like to claim is somebody that's part of our history is Senator King, who was our lobbyist in the 1970s, and some of the first in the nation legislation that he helped to pass was the bottle bill, which powers Maine's Recycling Program. It's how you get those five and 10 cents and 15 cents back when you go to a redemption center and also helped to ban billboards on the main turnpike. So that is, if you know when you cross into Maine, all of a sudden your driving experience is different, you can sort of jump right into Maine because you are not assaulted by visions of advertisements everywhere that you look. But instead you have this beautiful line of trees that welcome you and you can say, I'm home. One of the pieces of legislation that we just passed was an offshore wind bill, and that is extraordinarily exciting is we're looking at the future of Maine's economy and we're thinking about what will it mean to have an economy that's powered by electricity instead of by coal and oil, which leads to a lot of instability for people with pricing in addition to the issues with carbon and climate change. And one of the ways that I think this is a unique bill, and we had a unique approach that was very main centric, was that this wasn't just an environmentalist bill. This was a bill where when we were thinking about putting offshore wind into the Gulf of Maine, we worked with the fishing community, we know that they have some really significant concerns about impacts on the fishing grounds. And so we worked with them to find some solutions to bring them along, and that partnership allowed us to pass this bill and I think will allow us to get wind power into the Gulf of Maine sooner than we would otherwise and in a way that can actually benefit communities. What is the traditional concern that somebody who does fishing for a living brings to the table when you talk about wind turbines or wind power? So when we're talking with the fishing community, it really is about unfettered access to the fishing grounds. We know that the fisheries are changing as the Gulf of Maine is warming. It's the fastest warming body of water in our oceans globally, and that's pretty significant. And so that's changing the composition and availability of their fisheries. So they want to have as much accessible to them as possible without having to have concerns about how the turbines might affect their access to their grounds. So in this case, we actually excluded one of the lobster fishery area, a lobster fishery area, one which extends through much of the Gulf of Maine and then down into a bit of Massachusetts so that they would be able to fish as they traditionally have, and at the same time think about how we're going to be able to get those turbines up and out in a way that's not going to affect them. You may not know the answer to this question I'll ask you anyway. I've heard that one of the concerns about at least the earlier generation of turbines is noise. And I know that when my husband and I would drive through upstate New York, there were a lot of turbines along the way, but there were also a lot of farms underneath the turbines, and so it seemed like some sort of coexistence was made possible. So what has been done to mitigate noise concerns and other sort of near distant effects on the environment? Well, I think one of the ways that this is really unique and when we think about the Gulf of Maine is that because of that partnership with the fishing community, the wind turbines will be so far offshore. We're talking about 40 miles offshore, that it shouldn't disturb people in their homes. They won't be visible from shore. So that is a way that there's lesser impact on people. Now, there are concerns always about wildlife, and we work very closely with Maine Audubon on thinking about where the turbines need to be cited even within the Gulf of Maine to lessen their impact on birds and other wildlife. You have a pretty significant history with the Audubon, I understand, with actually National Audubon. So that's interesting that you already have that background coming in and now you get to utilize it in a slightly different way. Yeah, I spent almost a decade at the National Audubon Society and started in the Chicago office and built out a Great Lakes program where we also did work on offshore wind. And then throughout my time there I moved up into a role eventually called the Chief Field and Strategy Officer, where I oversaw all of Audubon's work across the country. And our work at Audubon is really a couple of different pillars that make it up and I think really informed my role now at the Natural Resources Council of Maine. We think of course about birds as the, I like to say that was the lens at how we made all of our decisions are we making a good decision for birds and then the systems that support them. So we would work on conservation of land and habitat. We would work on policy to make sure that the investments in land protection we had would be maintained into the future. And then we worked with a huge grassroots contingent of 2 million members across the country that cared about birds and the environment and work to really empower them to take action on behalf of birds. I think it's fascinating that you also have a background in ecological and environmental anthropology, which I didn't actually know was a field of study at all, but it makes perfect sense. Tell me about that. Yeah, I love to talk about this. So my background as an undergrad, it was in environmental science and in anthropology and mostly because I had a hard time deciding if I really wanted to work out with people or if I weren't wanted to work out in nature. And then I went to grad school at an ecological anthropology program. There are only one or two of those in the country was at the University of Georgia where I split my time between the anthropology department and the hard sciences in ecology and biology. And really this is a study of how people interact with the environment, how do we make decisions, how does our surrounding environment shape who we are and shape culture? And I feel like that work really helped me understand that any decisions that we make, any policies that we advocate for have to be like to say relevant for communities, that it addresses a community concern and resonant. It's something that they really want. So not to impose something top down, but really to spend time listening to what communities need, really spending time also then with the data of what's happening in our environment, what's happening with economies and shaping policy to address all of those things together holistically. It seems like this engaging of stakeholders and building coalition incredibly important also could be somewhat time consuming and also requires skills that really cross a lot of different disciplines. Is that true? That is true. I think just on the coalition building part, it is critical for us to get people to the table because we might think we know what they need and want, but we need them there to actually tell us. And very quickly, when you're talking about policy, things get pretty wonky pretty fast, and so you need to have the people that really understand those issues. It allows you to take a little bit more time upfront to go faster at the end point. And we need to go fast with the challenges we're facing on climate change, managing coalitions, it's really fascinating. It's a small political environment that you're working in. Everybody comes to the table within an agenda and you have to kind of craft how people are going to engage with each other, make sure that you're really understanding people's intentions and then building the solution with them. One of my very first jobs as an executive director in a leadership role of a nonprofit was with the Chicago Cultural Alliance in Chicago where I'm from, and this is a coalition of now it's about 50 heritage based or ethnic community organizations and museums. And if you want to talk about politics, you talk about community politics within communities and between communities in a big city like Chicago, it's pretty fascinating. That was a lot of the sort of proving ground for me and how I want to think about how do you bring people together and do that in a way that is, I'd like to say outcomes focused. We want to get to some solutions and we want people to feel empowered along the way. Nobody wants to come to be asked to sit at a table and then not really be asked for their opinion. It shouldn't be an exercise just to check a box. You want to engage people in a way that actually helps them feel like they're part of a solution. And that outcomes piece is also really critical because I think oftentimes we will bring people into a situation, learn what they want, and then say Thanks anyway, and then we'll go do something else and say, well, we asked them, but this is what we really think we should do. And when people having worked my side is healthcare, but having worked in healthcare a while, if you're bringing along another possible initiative and people are most likely going to say, well, we tried that five years ago, seven years ago, 10 years ago, it didn't work, we're not going to do it again. So if you actually can't show that what you're doing has made a difference, people are going to lose trust. Yeah, I love that. I encounter that quite a bit and I like to say the world changes and we can try things again. Our conditions have changed on the ground, but I have the saying where I like to say, don't ask somebody a question if you don't want to hear their answer, especially if you're going to go up to somebody and the answer and you're not going to listen to it, why ask that question? It only leads to conflict. So I really spend a lot of time thinking and talking to my teams about who are those people that we want to talk to and what does it mean to have an authentic relationship with them. One of the places I think we've seen some challenges in the past year in particular with Maine's indigenous communities, with the Wabanaki people, and when we talk about things like renewable energy where they haven't necessarily been well historically across the country, they haven't been part of the conversation. And here in Maine certainly, and so trying to find some ways to understand how we develop a renewable energy economy here in Maine, how that is respectful and inclusive of the Wabanaki tribes and doing that means that we have do have to ask questions and we have to hear the answers, and then I say, heed what people are telling us. So you have to take action on what you hear. That might mean the outcome is somewhat different than you thought it was. Maybe you're a wind farm in a slightly different location to avoid tribal lands or as we're talking about a large wind project in Aroostook County up way up north, do we adjust how the transmission line goes through private property and main farms so that we again, think about how people support themselves. We don't want to impact that negatively, so what does that mean about the flexibility that we have to bring to the solution set that we think we need going forward? I'm glad to hear that you're doing that with the Waki people and also with people from northern Maine because there's not, my husband happens to be from Northern Maine and there's not a lot of people up there. They're all still pretty important and they really care about where they live. So just because there are a lot of trees, you can't just say, well, I'm just going to put this thing here and you won't mind, will you? I mean, this is where people choose to be and it doesn't really matter how dense the population is. They care deeply about where they're from. They do. We're all Mainers, and so we all have a voice and we have to find a way to bring those voices to the table. I spent my first sort of longer trip in this role was up to Aroostook County and I had spent time there when I lived in Maine 20 years ago working with the university system and was very eager to get back, and I spent this week talking to a number of different community organizations, a number of our members, and one of the things that was really heartbreaking to me is that people said they felt like they had been abandoned by the environmental community, not necessarily that they weren't getting what they needed, but that they weren't being heard. They weren't being asked for input, they weren't being asked to contribute to the solutions. And so we've made a commitment to spend much more time up in the county along with some of the other more rural counties in Maine because as you said, everybody should caress about this should be asked to be at the table. We want people to be able to go and vote and be educated voters, and that's hard to do if we don't speak to them regularly. It's inauthentic if you come in at the last minute and say, I need you to come and take a stand on this issue and then I'm not going to talk to you for five more years. When we think about those more rural places, we have to think about how we invite those folks and set a place for them at the table. It interests me that you also, you're a military spouse, which all the things that you've just told me it doesn't, not necessarily for or against being a military spouse, but certainly there is some flexibility you've had to have in your own life. Your own job you said is AP three pilot with Brunswick Naval Air Station when it existed. Is he still currently serving or is he retired? No, he's in the civil service, But yes, when I first moved to Maine, we were here because Jim, my husband was AP three pilot in Brunswick, and so spent three years in Maine and then left to go to Sicily actually for three years, which is not a very difficult assignment to have. I can tell you it's great food and wonderful people and wonderful weather, and it really meant thinking sort of differently about my career. I was somebody that went through college and graduate school thinking I was sort of going to come out and immediately start working at a large nonprofit organization in DC or New York or San Francisco, and then he was assigned to be here in Maine. And so I sort of had to stop and think about, well, what's important to me so that I can support him and his role and also still find something that I felt was a meaningful way for me to contribute. And that meant I worked for the University of Maine system on a college access program called the Main State Gear Up Program, and it's still around in some form here, but we worked with about 45 schools and communities around the state to low income schools to have children and their families feel prepared for and comfortable with. The idea of going to college. And in a state like Maine, that's very different than thinking about doing this type of work in Chicago where you're in, everybody that you might be talking to is in an economic center, and so then go to college, they can stay in their community, they'll have some place to work. But in Maine, we had to really think through the fear that parents had, that their kids would go to college and then leave the family business, leave the community in which they grew up. And many of those parents also had not spent time on college campuses while in other parts of the country. This program was really geared towards just the kids. We actually spent a lot of time with the parents and invited them onto some of our campuses, say out in Mcha or at Oro to help them feel comfortable in that kind of space, feel like they belonged and then felt ready that this was an okay thing for their kids to do. This was this opportunity for me, which is really unexpected to understand that those big solutions, you might have the big federal policy to get more kids into college, can't just live at that large high level. You really have to think about what it means for the people that it's touching. And that really shaped my worldview and talking to community members in these small enclaves throughout Maine to help them really feel comfortable with what we were asking them to do, Trust us with their kids. I Love that. The common thread throughout all of this is your willingness to essentially show up and have a conversation with whoever it is, whatever it is, whether it's within the arts and cultural alliance aspect of things and the educational aspect of things and the environmental aspect of things. But it's really that is a basic foundational thing we all need to do if we actually want to make change is we need to listen to one another, Right? You can stand on the mountaintop and shout about what change you want to make and you can plant a flag, but as soon as you're not there to defend it, it's going to topple. And so I think a lot about what it means to have durable solutions. And I mean really personally, if I'm going to spend this much time and energy on issues, I want them to stay in place if I'm not able to be there all the time. You don't always want to be looking over your shoulder. And I think the best way to do that is to bring other people along, have them, don't advocate by yourself for the change you want to see in the world, but advocate with an army of people behind you. And like I said earlier, you can't just ask them to show up when you have something you want them to stand up for, you actually need to build those relationships to make that solution happen. Well, this happens to be kind of a pet topic of mine because I've been finishing my doctorate in leadership studies and my job is in leadership, and I've done other work in leadership. And I think it's interesting because it used to be, again, the great man theory was the original theory of leadership and first of all was a man, It doesn't Help either one of us, but it was a very long time ago. But it was the idea that you had one and they had to be tall because apparently being a tall man is very good for leadership. You would just tell everybody, go forth and do what I say. That is not the way leadership now has evolved at all, especially in a complex world. No, and I think some of the change we're going to see in the next couple of decades with the generations that are entering and then graduating from college now entering adulthood, I think they have a very different worldview. They want to be at the table from the start. And I think about this of course in managing a team, but also when you think about electoral politics, if you think about issues from international events to climate change to gun policy, the younger generation is really activated. They want to be at the table, and so it's a collective leadership that needs shaping and guiding. I often think about it as leading from behind, so everybody feels empowered, but you do need to provide some direction and you can do that through mentorship and through, again, providing some solution sets that people can choose from and letting people actually step up in a different way. You don't always have to be, I know we're in front of two microphones right now, but you don't always as a leader have to be the person that's at the microphone. I think a lot about who else on my team or where I work with other organizations, how do we empower multiple voices? That's important for the people that are being empowered, but when you work with the public, it's also really important for them to see different people that they might relate to differently. So yeah, I think it is really changing from that. Great man. And you said definitely it was a man and sometimes it still is, and we're working through this. I think this is part of the change that's in process now to something that is much more collective and I think empowering more broadly. And when you talk about mentorship, we even talk about reverse mentoring now where we have people who are from perhaps we'll say younger, but generationally different group, come in and talk to people who were maybe we were educated a few decades ago, so our experience of education is different, our context is different. So even that kind of co-creating of whatever the current present we're at the evolving edge is what they're saying. I Love that idea because it's not just I am going to come in and say, please follow me. It's we're all in This together And we have to move this somewhat unwieldy, I don't know, centipede, millipede, whatever it is, to the finish the blob. It doesn't even have feet. I guess it's amorphous, but we all, in order to actually have sustainable change, we all have to participate in order to feel like this is something that we truly want to do. Yeah, I think really central to this is understanding that everybody has a set of expertise they bring to the table. I love that idea of reverse mentoring. I haven't really thought about that as a concept intentionally. And so I think will think about that in my work going forward. What I have often found thinking, going back to that role, I talked about the Chicago Cultural Alliances. We had all of these community organizations that had deep cultural knowledge of the communities they served, and they were often asked to provide solutions to some of around how to connect with their community or what a potential challenging issue might be in their community and work with say the government to help solve that. But they were never compensated for their knowledge in the way that you would compensate somebody that came in from one of the big consulting firms or maybe had been at a larger institution with some fancy titles. And so really we really tried in that organization sort of flip the table and say, if you want folks to come in and help engage their community or help advise you on this, we expect them to be compensated for their time. And I think that's the case to now when we're talking about young people. We think of young people coming out of high school and college and entering the workforce as if they're coming with totally green and without knowledge of the world. And I don't Think that Is quite the same as it used to be. People really start working and thinking about these issues when they are young, when they're adolescents. When I think about environmental issues, they oftentimes, if they go to college, they're getting hands-on experience because the education system has changed so much. We just held a rally before the land use planning, commissions hearing on a proposed mine up near the Kain region, and there were about 60 people that testified, 51 of those testified against the mine. And what was really exciting about that is that the youngest person to testify was 15 years old and she talked about the future she wanted to shape for herself and future family, and probably about 30 to 40% of the people that spoke were under 30 and they could speak with knowledge and passion and connection to those issues in a way that was really inspiring to see. I think the more that we can empower those voices, they're the people that are going to be inheriting what we leave them. I think a lot about being a transitionary leader between generations, someone that's Gen X, we have one large generation ahead of us and some large generations behind us. And this is really thinking about when I'm thinking about environmental issues and climate change in particular, I want to create space for the younger generation to make the solution set that they want going forward instead of dictate to them because I won't be here to face the implications of it. Yeah, I think that's really important because in my field healthcare, I mean, we're going to need people to take care of other people. I mean, we have some people who are 70 who are doctors and they are going to retire and they're wonderful. They have great things to say. My generation, gen X, we also have done a wonderful job. And also people who are coming along behind, they're going to be the ones who are going to be tasked with really caring for our communities. So it's a very similar kind of parallel discussion and just saying, well, you need to wait until you're older and then you'll know what I know that doesn't really work because some of what I know is probably irrelevant to the conversation these days, and if I keep coming forward myself and saying, I know the stuff and you do not, then that's just going to cause just a barrier that won't enable co-creation. Right. And I think the demographics of work are going to change really quickly. I think we're seeing this post pandemic as the boomer generation really moves towards retirement. Gen X is a small generation, so those positions are going to be backfilled actually very quickly by younger generations. Again, I really believe that it's a little bit different than dictating what the future should be or what we're going to do now, only thinking about the now, but really part of leadership is how we think about what the future is. How do we start making decisions now for the future that we want to see, and then bring in the voices that are going to actually be there leading in the future. Very well said, and a good way to end our conversation, actually. I feel like you and I could continue this conversation for quite a long time. A lot of synergy between I believe our experiences in interesting ways. I've been speaking with Rebecca Sanders, she's the CEO of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, and I invite you to learn more about the work that they are doing and hope that you'll spend some time thinking about the great state of Maine and how we can protect it for future generations. Thank you, Rebecca, for joining me today in the studio. Thank you for having me. This was a real pleasure. Thank you.