How Sue Inches Transformed Environmental Advocacy—And How You Can Too!

And today we have with us Sue Inches, who I've had the great pleasure to speak with once before with Love Maine Radio many years ago, I guess 2015 is what you said? I believe so, yeah. So that was a bit ago. And Sue is an environmental educator. She's an author. She's been so many things. So I'm kind of interested to explore creativity and the human spirit here today on Radio Maine where you're listening or watching. Thanks for coming in today, I'm so glad to be here today. Thank you. Yes, you and I shared the beauty of the kind of North Yarmouth area. How long have you lived in this area? Oh, forever ago. So we first moved to Yarmouth in the 1980s and now live in North Yarmouth. So I've been around this area for quite some time. Yeah. And what was it that drew you to this region? I had a job at the Maine Audubon Society in the early 1980s, and we moved here for that. So that's how we got here. And we have never left. This corporate marketing thing. That seems like a pretty big leap from where you were to where currently are. Tell me about that. That's interesting because it turns out not to be that big a leap. I always knew that I wanted to be in communications. I've known that since I was in elementary school. And so the way that I initially sought to do that was to work in advertising and marketing. And so I was in the marketing department at Hannaford, the grocery store chain. I worked in the corporate headquarters and an opportunity came up to work for the state marketing Maine seafood. So I took a position as the Director of Marketing with Maine Seafood. And as I was in that position, I observed that the lobster industry was really well organized, and in fact, they're very empowered. They would say things like, well, we need a meeting with the governor, and then they just call up and get a meeting. And I thought, wow, that's really amazing. They can actually influence public policy that way. And so I became kind of interested in that. And then what happened was I got assigned to a committee to do a big conference on fisheries, forestry, and agriculture, and where most of the people who are on that organizing committee thought, oh, this is just extra work and I'm not getting paid extra for this. I thought, wow, this is kind of a cool opportunity. So I threw myself at it and really did a great job. And it turned out that that work was recognized because I was offered a position as a senior policy advisor for the governor from doing that work. And so I had never been in the State House, I had never lobbied before, but what I discovered in that job was that all the communication skills from marketing actually transferred beautifully to public policy work. It was pretty much the same skills. I was just marketing ideas as opposed to products. And I loved it because I could then work on issues that I really cared about. So that's how I made that transition. And tell me about briefly the work that you did. You were with two different governors here in the State of Maine, and tell me what some of the major things that you focused on. I worked on a lot of different issues. As I said, I was in the fisheries area for about seven years, and most of that time was more as a program director. I had a lot of programs. There was funding for those programs, so I was running a lot of programs there. But as soon as I moved into public policy, then I worked on many different issues, which was just great for me because I do get bored easily. So I would be working on, let's say, solid waste management for a year and a half, two years. And then I would move to something else like land, use the Growth Management Act and work on that for a couple of years. And then I would move to energy and work on that for a couple of years. So I really enjoyed it because it's all the same skillset, but just different issues that I got involved in. So it was a very rich and rewarding time for me. So when you say it was the same skillset, tell me about that. Tell me about, I know this interesting communications, this was from very early on in your life. What types of things were you able to translate across different areas? Well, of course, the first thing you do when you're working on an issue is issue research. So you need to understand what is the context for this issue? Why are we interested in energy efficiency? Let's say issue research is sort of the start of it. Then one of the things that I've always been interested in is public engagement, citizen engagement. So I had the opportunity to run citizen engagement processes. We'd have meetings in different parts of the state to gather input, to understand the issue, to understand what people wanted to do. So that was a wonderful, and I learned all about how to be a facilitator. I became a trained facilitator along the way, how to create meetings that would open the space and gather input, and then how also to put closure on things and decide how do we narrow this down and create a goal that we're going to move towards. So I learned all the citizen engagement pieces, and then also just the ability to organize ideas. So in government, you get a whole lot of stuff coming at you, and one of the skills is to boil that down into what's important. In fact, this was something I did often with legislative committees, is I'd say, okay, here are the three things you need to know about solid waste. And so I was good at boiling it down and giving it to them and saying, this is what's important about this, and then they could go to work from that. So those are some of the skill areas that I developed along the way. It seems like a natural progression then that you would become an educator and an author because the ability to distill this information and put it out there in a summarized but usable form then lends itself really nicely to that next phase, the phase that you're currently in. So tell me about that. Yeah, that's actually true because in doing the public engagement work, I learned how to create exercises and activities to get people engaged. And you do the same thing in teaching. In fact, in teaching, I've often had to teach three and four hour classes. Those are really long periods of time to keep people's attention. And the way that I would do that is by mixing up what we would do. So there might be a little bit of lecture, but they're also going to be writing exercises, small group assignments. I even created debates for my class to debate each other. So I had learned how to engage people in different activities. So that was important. And then the other skills of boiling down information and making it presentable absolutely is something that you need to do in teaching. And even in writing a book that was really helpful to me. It's like I saw how to organize it. It's like what chapters do you want? What order to put them in? How do you present this information in a coherent sequence so that people can understand it easily, enjoy reading about it and that sort of thing. So yes, I think the marketing communication skills translated into the teaching and writing as well. I'm interested to hear contrasting and comparing where you and I were talking 10 years ago about a recent trip that you had taken to Denmark, and recently you went to probably a slightly less glamorous, but also really important place, and that's Cancer Alley. And I'm not even sure people who are listening might know what Cancer Alley is. So compare and contrast, give me a little background on these things. Yeah, so it's really interesting. So I've always been interested in social change. How do people change their view, how they think? And it turns out that one of the most powerful tools for social change is to actually go somewhere else and talk to the people there. And I had known this from my fisheries work way back because we took a couple of trips to, we went to Iceland, we went to Japan. The purpose of those trips was to talk to people and find out how do you grow scallops as an aquaculture project? So I had learned about that, that if you actually can go somewhere and meet the real people, that changes minds. And so in 2015, as some of your listeners will probably recall, Paul LePage was governor of the state, and he was not in support of renewable energy or environmental protection at all. And so my thought was at the time is I want to keep that discussion alive. We need to keep talking about renewable energy, clean energy. And so I organized a trip to Denmark for leaders across the state. So we had legislators, CEOs of businesses, nonprofit directors, all go on a trip to Denmark where we talked to the people there who were in the wind industry. We went to an anaerobic digester where they created energy out of dairy waste. So the idea was to talk to people and really stimulate conversation and new ideas. So that was the purpose of that trip that I talked to you about 10 years ago. And then you're right, I did just take another trip, what I call a purpose tour, and we went to a place, five people on this trip. We went to a place called Cancer Alley. Cancer Alley is an 85 mile stretch of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to This stretch of river is one of the most industrialized places in the country. There are 150 petrochemical plants along the river there, and people still live there as well. And so the interesting thing is that the pollution there is sort of, it's very toxic. It's one of the most polluted areas in the country. The risk of getting cancer there is 50 times higher than the average in the USA. So there's a problem around the air quality there. And I had done some research on this area, and I'd written about it. There's a little bit in my book about it, and I had taught about it in classes. And so I knew there was some really powerful organizers, local organizers down there. And so I really wanted to meet them. I really wanted to meet them and see what they were really like to see if my analysis of them was on track. I didn't really know. And I said, I just need to meet these people in the flesh. So I organized a trip. This trip was sponsored by First Parish Yarmouth, which is a church that I'm a member of, and five of us from the church went, and it was profound, profoundly moving to meet these people. What I saw were organizers who were joyful, they were committed. They had great courage and faith, and they are standing up to polluting corporations and also to the state government there that basically looks the other way and doesn't care about public health. So it was really inspiring. And we went two days after the election, and boy did it give me some perspective. I mean, I'm worried about some in our national government as most of us are, but when I saw what these people were facing, I thought, okay, if they can face this, then we can face whatever we need to because they've been working on this for a long time and nothing's going to stop 'em. When you're thinking about the teaching that you do, you're bringing information from your book, but you're also bringing things that you're learning about as you go along. So if you were to go into a classroom today, given what from Cancer Alley, how would you apply the information from your book and also what you recently learned? It's so funny you're asking me that question because I actually am teaching a class today, this afternoon. Yeah. And so that very question, I have actually been working on what am I going to say to this class of students this afternoon? And as I sort of might've mentioned before, that there are certain principles for creating change that those principles stay the same no matter what the issue is that you're working on. So I use the Cancer Rally situation as a case study, and it's a really wonderful and relevant one for the issues everywhere today because one of the things that I love to talk about in that case study is the power of organizing. Because the people that have organized in Cancer Alley are people who had no experience organizing. They had no connections to anyone in authority, and they had no money. And so they could have easily said, well, this is awful. We're victims of this awful stuff. But they didn't do that. They said, no, we deserve clean air and clean water here in our community, and we're going to stand up and we're not going to stop until we get that. So these are people of great courage and faith. They're coming from the heart. They're coming from what they care about. And so I show my students that, and not only, so what happened, and the story goes like this. So the people decided to stand up and organize. They got some T-shirts printed, they made some signs, and they went and stood out on a field where they had been a permit for a plastics plant. And they just sort of kept doing that. And within a year, they had attracted funding from Michael Bloomberg's Beyond Petrochemicals Project. They had attracted technical assistance from a group called the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, which is a group that, it's a nonprofit. They've been involved for about 25 years. And what they do is they offer training and mentoring to grassroots groups. So they got some training. They were taught how to approach funders. They were taught how to set up a nonprofit organization, and then they had legal representation from Earth Justice who went to court for them, and they won a court case to keep this plastics plant from. So the point is, and this is what I teach, is that sometimes you just need to stand up for what you believe and the resources can flow into you, which is what happened to these people there. So it's a really good lesson that we just sometimes need to stand up, even though we don't know exactly what to do or where it's going to lead. The act of standing up is the first step, and it opens the door. First of all, as I've already mentioned to you, I have not read your book yet, but I plan to. I usually read the books before I talk to the people, but what's the name of your book, Sue? It's called Advocating for the Advocating for the Environment. And where can people find this? The book actually has national distribution, so it's online, it's in bookstores across the country. It should be pretty easy to find it. If you are somebody who's interested in reading, advocating for the environment, and also bringing it into maybe a book club. Are there some questions that you would suggest that book clubs can explore based on reading your book? Well, that's really an interesting question, which I haven't been asked before, but I think the first half of the book is called Learn to Think Differently. And in that part of the book, it's really questioning many of the assumptions on which our whole culture and economy is based. So I think good questions are to discuss that. Okay, so how do we get here and what do we need to change in order to be more in touch with the Earth in order to create a culture and an economy that is actually sustainable? Because the way we're going right now, we can't continue to pollute at the level that we are and survive basically. I mean, most people know this as climate change, but it's also true of toxic chemicals. We can't keep putting toxic chemicals, plastics into the earth, into the land, into the air and water. We can't keep doing that forever. We can't keep emitting greenhouse gases forever. So there has to be a change in order to become sustainable. So asking questions around that, well, what needs to change in order to change that? And the first half of the book is basically about that. And how can people reach out to you if they'd like you to come teach for them, for example? Well, I have a website at my name sue inches.com, and also a substack. I do a newsletter every other week. And so either place you can contact me And I have read your Substack, actually. So you do a very nice job. And I think what I like about Substack is you're able to kind of bring things into sort of encapsulated form so you can get in there, you can read something really meaningful, come away with something, and then if you're inspired to do more research, you can when you have more time. So it's a great medium. Yeah, it is a great medium, and I know that I don't have people's attention for very long. So what I do really in my Substack is I try to present just one thing. It's like a nugget. Here's a short thing you can read and you'll understand something new. So that is the goal of my Substack. I don't just run on and on. Some people do. I very definitely don't do that. I intend to get you for a moment, give you something meaningful, and then you go on to whatever else you need to do. So yeah, I love that medium too, and it's really a good one for all the major change we're going through right now. I had thought about writing another book, but I'm kind of on hold with that because I think people need more immediate information and it takes a long time to put a whole book together. And I think the issues are quite immediate. So I need to be able to give people little nuggets like every other week right now. Well, it's really been a pleasure to catch up with you after a decade. Let's hopefully not make it another decade, but I know you've done so much and I'm just in awe of what you've accomplished. So thank you for coming in. Well, thank you so much, Lisa. This has been a real pleasure. Thank you. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle. You have been listening to or watching Radio Maine. I've been speaking with author, advocate, environmental activist Sue Inches, who has just recently finished her book Advocating for the Environment. And you can find her, as she said online. I encourage you to read her book to maybe reach out to her for a class I've already learned quite a bit today. So I suspect you'll also learn things from Sue Inches. And as always, I would love to invite you to the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine, where you can talk with people like Sue Inches if she comes to one of our gallery openings and other interesting people who love to explore creativity in the human spirit today. Thank you very much for coming in. Well, thanks so much for having me.