NMEAC AT 40 As the environmental nonprofit celebrates a milestone, they’ve got a lot of successes to look back on, but not a lot of young people signing up to take over.
By Patrick Sullivan Sally Van Vleck remembers the day, 40 years ago, when she and three other women sat around a kitchen table in Traverse City and decided to become environmental activists. They were concerned about the storage of spent fuel rods at the Big Rock Point Nuclear Power Plant located just off the shore of Lake Michigan in Charlevoix. They’d started out thinking they were anti-nuke activists but realized that this new threat to the region demanded they expand their scope and think about dangers to the environment as a whole. “It was the proximity to the lake that brought it to our attention,” Van Vleck said. “It was really because my husband at the time was involved in environmental issues and he was reading all this stuff.” Her husband then, well-known-Traverse City-based environmental attorney Jim Olson, eventually persuaded the women that they should organize a nonprofit in order to be taken more seriously and to raise funds. He also suggested the name: Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council, modeled after other nascent environmental groups across the state. “He wanted an environmental advocacy organization up here,” Van Vleck said. “It was his idea, and we were like, ‘OK.’” That name, shortened to NMEAC, might sound clunky and dated today, but in 1980 it contained the energy and enthusiasm of an environmental movement that was new and eager. Its four female founding members wanted a seat at the table. And if they didn’t get one, they were ready to litigate. FROM NUCLEAR WASTE TO A MALL As NMEAC celebrates its 40th anniversary (actual celebratory events have been put off until next year, due to the pandemic), the nonprofit has a long list of accomplishments, near accomplishments, and even noble failures to celebrate, but the group also looks a lot different. The four women who launched NMEAC in 1980 were, at the time, in their late 20s or early 30s, as was Olson, who was in his 30s. Today, despite a clear increase in environmental awareness across all of society — from school kids to senior citizens — the average age of a NMEAC board member is
about 70 years old, and its longest-serving board member recently turned 90. Van Vleck remains a NMEAC supporter, but in many ways, even she’s moved on after those energized early days, which started with the fight against Big Rock (after a protracted battle, NMEAC was not able to influence how nuclear waste was stored at the site, but the nonprofit did outlive the plant, which shut down operations in 1997); gained steam with well-intentioned though somewhat awkward hazardous household waste disposal effort (the group partnered with Dow Chemical, which used incineration to get rid of hazardous waste, which NMEAC opposed); and made an indelible impression
environmentalists saw the proposed six- or seven-story structure as a potential blemish on the beauty of the quaint downtown. NMEAC recruited young attorneys Grant Parsons and Michael Dettmer to take on their case, and they discovered that part of the area where the mall was supposed to be built, in the parking lots between Front Street and Grandview Parkway, was deeded city parkland; to sell it to a developer, the city had to get approval through a public vote. Bayview Mall lost the election. “It was going to literally block the bay. It was called the Bayview Mall, but nobody would be able to see the bay from downtown,” Van Vleck said.
“The biggest one by far was stopping the Bayview Mall from being built downtown,” she said. “It was a very big issue that split the community. … That’s what put NMEAC totally on the map.” into the fabric of Traverse City by 1986, when it fought and stopped the development of what was to be Bayview Mall. Van Vleck recalls NMEAC’s foray into hazardous waste disposal with humor and believes that although the program didn’t last, the effort was worthwhile because it caused people to think more about the products they buy and what happens to them after. “We were just dumb and young, and we didn’t realize the extent of the problem,” she said. “We didn’t expect to be inundated with toxic materials, and we didn’t know what they were. … I think it raised awareness more than anything.” The Bayview Mall, on the other hand, presented NMEAC with its first chance to stop a development in Traverse City. “The biggest one by far was stopping the Bayview Mall from being built downtown,” she said. “It was a very big issue that split the community. … That’s what put NMEAC totally on the map.” Many downtown business owners believed the mall would bring people downtown and, as a result, into their doors, too. The young
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THE 17-YEAR FORE! NMEAC’s next big fight would take place over a proposed golf course in Leelanau County, near Glen Arbor on the shores of the Crystal River. By now, Van Vleck said, they’d had learned to partner with other like-minded groups to leverage their influence. In this case, NMEAC partnered with the grassroots group Friends of the Crystal River, which had sprung up specifically to oppose the proposed golf course, and this time, they went to court with Olson arguing their case. Despite the fact that no golf course exists today on the shore of Crystal River, Van Vleck is reluctant to call that one a victory. The legal proceedings took 17 years. “It was brutal,” Van Vleck said. Around that time, Van Vleck and Olson separated, and Van Vleck took a step back from NMEAC and partnered with Bob Russell, another long-time NMEAC supporter. Together, the couple decided to focus on peace and justice issues in addition to environmental issues, and to further that goal, they started the Neahtawanta Center on the Old Mission Peninsula.
From left: Sally Van Vleck at a rally at the Open Space back in the ’80’s. “I believe it was a rally about chemical contamination of Lake Michigan,” Van Vleck tells Northern Express. Ann Hunt, an activist from the Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination, at a water protection event with NMEAC, protesting the potential contamination of Lake Michigan by Big Rock Nuclear Plant. Friends and enviro-fighters Ann Hunt and Sally Van Vleck join forces again when Greenpeace brought a ship into Grand Traverse Bay as part of its Zero Discharge Campaign.
Ann Rogers, the longest-serving board member, who recently turned 90, said she was too busy with her teaching career in the 1980s and early ’90s to get too involved beyond donating money, but that all changed when the Michigan Department of Transportation and Traverse City officials proposed widening Peninsula Drive — where she lived — from two lanes to four lanes. The move would have wiped out gardens, a stone fence, and lots of lawn space separating houses from traffic. Rogers said she was particularly upset that the change, proposed to take place between Bryant Park and the intersection of Center Road, would mean 70 or 80 trees would fall. Rogers, who was later elected to the city commission, said she got active in NMEAC once she realized that MDOT needed to get official approval from Traverse City to go ahead with the project. Rogers doesn’t exactly look back in fondness at that period in her life, but she said she is satisfied that NMEAC prevailed in the end. “We fought it for several years. Those were rather anxious times,” Rogers said. “There were a couple of people on the road who said, ‘Oh, you can’t fight City Hall.’ But we did. And we won. We organized the neighborhood and worked very hard to get the city to say no to it, and it took a lot of work.” The nonprofit’s next big fight would be to question what was going on with the thenpolluted Boardman Lake. A Traverse City business, Cone Drive, had inherited a problem: Helicopter blades had been manufactured at the factory it inhabited, and pits, dug decades earlier to store used oil, was leaching into the lake. Rogers said she doesn’t blame Cone Drive or even the original polluters — people simply didn’t grasp how watersheds worked in the early 20th Century — but she said NMEAC had to force the state to ensure
