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There are so many people doing such great things for our green world; their passion and determination shines all around us. It is difficult to single out just one person to be the representative of those to whom we owe our gratitude. But that might be exactly why John Batdorf is such a good choice; he is quick to point out that he is a relative newcomer to ecological education and acknowledges the great efforts of those who came before him and those around him, particularly the Webster family, founders and owners of the Upland Hills Farm and Phil Moore, director of the Upland Hills School, and co-founder of Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center (UHEAC). John, as the executive director for the past year and on its board for four years oversees the operations and development of UHEAC. Its mission is to “design, fund and facilitate programs which support a sustainable relationship with the natural world and each other.” He found his way to UHEAC because of a developed interest in “sustainability.” But that isn’t where he started out.
John was born and raised in Grand Blanc, MI, south of Flint. After living in the Netherlands for a year, then attending Michigan State University where he earned his degree in psychology, John walked down a couple different, but related, career paths such as selling door-to-door, and being a sales then store manager. Upon returning to Grand Blanc, John founded his own software company named CIVITEC. For 15 years, he and a growing staff developed and maintained systems for the medical field throughout Michigan. Although the company was not intentionally about ecology or green economy, these themes were certainly developing in John’s consciousness. The company logo looked suspiciously like a recycle symbol, the name was coined from the Latin word for community, and his proudest achievement was an employee profit-sharing and self-evaluation program that helped turn the struggling company into a success. In 2000, when faced with a major rewrite of the software, John decided to sell the business and take some time to “find himself.” For several years, John dabbled in business consulting and entrepreneurship, and pursued a variety of personal growth experiences. This included a men’s group formed at Renaissance Unity church, where at one meeting a man introduced John to the concept of “sustainability” through an article about the book The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler. This article, which spoke about the impending consequences of the depletion of oil, steered John’s life in a new direction.
John decided that sustainability was the most important work he could do and recognized that his concern for the environment and social justice coupled with his business experience could be utilized in working with an environmental group. He was introduced to UHEAC by his sister who had moved from Lansing to Rochester to send her children to Upland Hills School. UHEAC’s mission matched John’s goals and interests, so he jumped at the chance to join the board. The Upland Hills organization was experiencing a significant expansion in its energy education programs, under the direction of Chris Tarr, and John wanted to help expand that effort by promoting a major outreach event which eventually became the Earth Day Expo.
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Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center has afforded John (as well as the Center’s thousands of visitors) the opportunity to learn more about our effects on our environment and what we can do to change our impact. Although he acknowledges the role of government in setting common sense regulation and is hopeful about the current US and state government enthusiasm about green energy and jobs, he advocates “more carrot than stick” market approaches with incentives and support for sustainable technology and products, like renewable energy. He is particularly excited about an approach used successfully in other countries where utility providers buy power generated by businesses and individuals, a program called “feed-in tariffs.”
John would also like to see Michigan support a major effort to develop “sustainable community” – to produce, share and enjoy locally the things that we need to sustain us. Several exciting ideas and programs are emerging to promote this effort with names like “Transition Towns” and “re-localization.” These are not about isolationism, but rather about developing relationships among healthy communities that are inter-dependent, not co-dependent or exploitive. Local producers and stores can provide so much of what we need, and they do their work with a smaller footprint on the environment and far more positive impact on the local economy.
Michigan, and the United States, has great potential for making changes, but there are certainly challenges. John sees the greatest hurdles being the lack of unbiased information and the lack of good choices. He cites that we know a lot about the price ofproducts, but little about their true costs. For example, we have higher health care costs due to the pollution of some companies who “externalize their costs,” and there are societal and economic costs of outsourcing to low-wage labor. These costs are difficult to see because of “our remarkable, but impersonal global economic system which bring consumers and producers together from around the world without any direct connection to each other.” John does point out that there are many things we can do on our own initiative, but when the information we receive is limited or distorted, the sustainable choice will only be made by a few who have the necessary time for research and the financial resources to purchase green products that, unlike most available products, are not subsidized by the current political system and infrastructure.
These hurdles are by no means insurmountable and UHEAC wants to educate and motivate people to take both community and individual actions that promote sustainability. To those ends, UHEAC, in partnership with the Rochester DDA, is taking the 4th annual Earth Day Expo to Main Street and expanding it to two full days on April 18th and 19th. Earth Day is observed each year by over one billion people worldwide. The Earth Day Expo is Michigan’s largest Earth Day celebration and provides a variety of informative, earth-friendly and fun activities. John has inspiring hopes for this year’s expo. He notes that “this time of crisis on so many levels is also a time of great opportunity for making the changes that can lead to a better quality of life, stronger community and resilient local economy. We want the expo to be a place where people can meet some of the leaders in the green movement, see that we can rely on each other instead of distant decision-makers, and can start to make connections that build self-reliant and healthy community, which is our best hope to weather and then transcend the problems we face, and hopefully help to heal humanity’s relationship with the earth before it’s too late. Although the stakes are high, we want the expo to focus on opportunities and for folks to have a lot of fun in the process!”
It takes the passion and determination of many people to make the changes that are integral to a safe, healthy and green planet for generations to come.
Greg Lutz is a woodworker and community builder living in Royal Oak, MI. He can be contacted at
ygreggle@hotmail.com
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