The Path Least Taken: Environmental Adventures of a 1983 Unity College Alumnus.

 I am honored to be here and in being the first Unity graduate sponsored by the Lapping Lecture Series. Although I am not here to reminisce about my wild and crazy…I mean studious days at Unity, there  are events I mention because they were crucial to who I am, my path, and where I am today.

I graduated high school in 1979. At the end of 1970s, interest in the environment was going through a slow metamorphosis--traditional natural resource management and outdoor recreation were still dominant, but subjects like conservation law enforcement, environmental policy, and ecotourism were not yet popular. As my friends became carpenters, mechanics, or went to school, I never got the sense that they were passionate about it. I was different; I had a deep love for the outdoors. My passion was to become a wildlife manager. I did not know what this meant, but it was what I thought I wanted. 

As I arrived at orientation, I was somewhat shy, lacked confidence, and was an average student. For the first time I was surrounded by many who shared similar values and passions about the environment, during a time when studying the environment was still not considered practical or necessary. 

During the orientation, I was presented with mortifying and sobering news; I was informed I had to take remedial writing because I failed the writing placement test. The writing teacher, Dan Rienberg, was amazing; we both discovered I had a natural talent for writing, which was never seen or encouraged in high school.  Oh, I dreaded the first day of that class, but have been thankful ever since. 

Unity’s highly supportive culture was to be so important to my personal and professional development.  One of the most striking features were individual faculty who took an active role in my “educational” development, earning my trust and deep appreciation for the powerful role of mentors whose impact goes far beyond four years. While many were involved, three highly influential mentors standout as continuing to play a direct and indirect role in my life: Dot Quimby who has been a mentor to every Unity student; Wilson Hess, who at the time was my lacrosse coach and history professor; and David Purdy, Professor Emeritus of Political science. 

In the summer after my junior year, working on a bobcat-hare relationship study in the Dead River area of western Maine, I did some major soul searching and came to the difficult realization that I was not interested in wildlife management. Namely, I was not cut out for fieldwork in remote areas. Deciding to quit when you have invested three years on a particular path without knowing which direction to head next, can be foolish.  The few weeks following my decision was tumultuous; college was not cheap and I was about to enter my final year. What should I do?  I headed back to Unity in early August and met with Wilson Hess. Through various discussions, we realized my nascent passion for environmental politics; but policy did not yet exist at Unity. 

In the fall, I changed my major to environmental science, which enabled me to escape organic chemistry, and enrolled in some of Dave Purdy’s political science classes. There of course would be a price for dropping out of organic chemistry; I was to be 1 credit short of a diploma. 

In discussing this situation with David Purdy, he helped me realize that I could follow my newly discovered passion and fulfill my graduate requirements at the same time.  He convinced me to try for a summer internship with the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC. There was one small glitch, I was a mediocre student.  As much as I loved some of my classes, I was busy bartending in Waterville, was active in Student government, was very active in lacrosse, and well, liked to party. The result was a less than impressive GPA.  But, as always, instead of being told I could not do it, Dave, Dot, and Wilson all told me to follow my passions. 

In the spring of 1983, I applied for the internship at EPA to work directly for a deputy director in the Office of Toxic Substances. This was a great time to be an intern at EPA.  I arrived a few months after the final remnants of the Reagan-ear fiasco, of trying to eliminate the EPA, had subsided. The administrator had been fired; there was document shredding, jail sentences, numerous firings and resignations, employee hit lists, congressional oversight hearings, and FBI investigations. Cool... My colleagues’ stories opened my eyes … I was witnessing environmental politics and policy no longer from a hard plastic seat in a classroom, but in the trenches. 

There was one problem; it was an internship that was ending in August. With the little time I had in between working and immersing myself in the culture of a cosmopolitan city, I was trying to find a job.  There was a hiring freeze at EPA so options were limited. With three days left in my lease and the day before my job ended, I found a temporary six-month job drafting correspondence for EPA. I was basically hired for my writing ability. Huh?  If they only knew four years earlier I was enrolled in a remedial writing class (Thank you Dan Rienburg).  

Success in life is not limited to the realm of skill, knowledge, and initiative, there has to be timing, or luck. Two days before my temporary writing job was to end, the mail clerk was thrown in jail. My boss offered me the job with a potential future advancement to a regulatory information specialist.  I did not want to stuff and seal envelopes with EPA documents, but how could I say no--steady employment and potential, albeit ambiguous chance for promotion to a job I really wanted. 

A few months later, someone quit and I was promoted to serve as a regulatory information specialist. This involved manning a toll-free regulatory hotline to answer questions regarding the Toxic Substances Control Act.  On my third week on the job, EPA issued its asbestos-in-school regulations, which stated, basically, all schools had to inspect for friable asbestos, and if found, they had to notify the local PTA, notify the employees, and post notices. If anyone had any questions, they were directed by the notices to contact our hotline. 

This was not fun.  Imagine having to field phone calls from highly emotionally charged mothers and fathers trying to explain to them that, well yes, asbestos is a known human carcinogen and there is no such thing a safe exposure level, but the best thing is to leave it place.

After about a year, I switched to a different EPA regulatory hotline that dealt with Superfund, hazardous waste, and underground storage tank regulations. My job was to answer regulatory questions from lawyers, consultants, and state agencies seven hours a day, five days a week. 

After having lived in DC for three years, a feeling of stagnation crept over me.  I wanted to experience something different than just answering telephones. I wanted to try fieldwork. Part of this drive to retry fieldwork was a function of my office in EPA.  What was I doing there?  I needed to get away and outside. 

After sending numerous resumes to every environmental company in North Carolina, I finally landed a job for an environmental engineering firm in Raleigh doing fieldwork and environmental compliance work.  In this job, our clients were private industry. I learned a lot and developed a new respect for industry. Many of them were just trying to do the right thing. So I kept busy learning and appreciating my new experience in the field investigating hazardous waste sites, sampling under all sorts of conditions and with all sorts of chemicals, including deep sampling in hard Carolina clay in the middle of summer wearing non-breathable protective gear. As a side note, after I was there for six months, I was assigned to a new boss who, as luck would have it, was a former professor from Unity, Jan Sassaman. 

One of my more interesting tasks came about because I was the only employee who was not a geologist or engineer. As it turns out, I actually got to use my wildlife management skills. Our firm was hired by a company that had “lost” 10,000 gallons of toluene from an aboveground storage tank, which the state believed had emptied into a wetland downgradient of the site. My job was to conduct a biological assessment and population assessment of vegetation, small mammals, and to collect fish and trap small mammals to analyze them for toluene. 

My company also tasked me with writing an environmental regulatory compliance manual for internal use, which I did.  Having spent three years answering regulatory questions on a daily basis, I was a walking regulatory encyclopedia. 

After a year with this company, three things had become obvious.  First, I realized I was not really suited for southern culture. Second, the company’s expectation of my dedication toward their profit structure and what I thought was reasonable did not coincide. Third, I pitched the idea to the company that we should publish my regulatory masterpiece and they were not interested.  This book had been my love. Their rejection prompted me to contact a lawyer who told me that if I was interested in publishing this book, I should quit my job, stay out of the environmental field for six months, and then try to find a publisher.  I packed my u-haul, moved back to Washington, and quickly found a job in my old field of bartending.

Although bartending while in college was fun, after only a few months, it was no longer so fun or affordable in Washington. I missed the environment.

I quickly found a job working for an environmental consulting company that worked for the EPA and the Department of Energy.  My first job was to assess the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear repository’s effect on the endangered desert pupfish.  Again, much to my surprise, my wildlife management experience proved to be crucial.  While at this company I had the opportunity to work on some amazing projects; I was conducting Superfund site assessments, environmental impact assessments, economic cost-benefit analyses, and human health risk assessments. 

At the age of 26, I finally completed my first book, a 325-page entitled The Complete handbook of Hazardous Waste Regulation. I kept thinking back, hmm, remedial writing to book author, thank you Dan Rienberg! 

I actually enjoyed the research and writing, and began writing other regulatory compliance books and articles. Life was pretty good.  One outcome of my writing is that it became a condition of my employment; I would work 32 hours per week, giving me full time benefits, and allowed to take every Friday off to “write.”

With the publication of my book, I was invited to the professional seminar circuit. While the pay was great, the traveling and demanding audiences were a burnout.  What I enjoyed most, was the teaching and this, I discovered, was become my true passion. 

Possessing only a bachelor’s degree, there are not many opportunities to teach environmental policy.  But, initiative coupled with timing equals success.   In 1993, I contacted the USDA Graduate School in Washington, DC, which has a philosophy of having practitioners teach working professionals.  I pitched my environmental policy idea and they said yes. The first day of my class, I faced 40 students, many older than myself, passion and excitement quickly ameliorated my stage fright.

During this same time period, early in 1993, my publisher, which had focused on technical books, wanted to break into the trade press for the general public.  They believed that the environment was their avenue, so they requested me and another author to each write a book suitable for the general public on the environment. 

This writing process consumed about a year of my time. Two weeks before the publication date, I received a phone call from the publisher.  “We have a new president, and we are revising our strategy, we are no longer interested in the trade press.” Crap.  They decided to release it anyway, but with only minimal publicity.  This meant I had to do my own.  Letters were sent, excerpts provided, and phone calls made. All this effort resulted in about a dozen radio interviews and about a half dozen, local television interviews. 

In response to one of my elicitations, I received a call from the local Fox Television station, which produced a nationally syndicated, critically claimed children’s show called “Not Just News.”  They were looking for a youthful looking, hip, and environmentally knowledgeable person.  On the other hand, when I told them I would work for free, I was there man. So, I became the Green Guy on the show. Kids would ask environmental questions and I would answer them, although I never actually saw any of the kids.  But, the show got cancelled after a year--there went my acting career. 

In addition to teaching, writing, attempted acting, and my regular job, I was also engaged in another type of work on the side, litigation support.  One of the benefits of possessing vast amounts of regulatory knowledge is that if there is a lawsuit, lawyers are willing to pay you.  However, I would not work for just anyone.  The firm I was connected with worked exclusively for environmental groups and labor unions seeking redress.  

Most of the work was mundane researching and analyzing reports and company records and looking for regulatory errors or basic non-factual statements. One memorable experience involving striking members of the United Steel Worker’s Union in LaPlace, Louisiana. I was requested to fly down to meet some union reps. We entered a clean room at the union center (clean, they explained, as in having recently been sweeped for eavesdropping devices).  Later that evening, they asked me to join them on the picket line.  Based on a court order, the picketers could have only two individuals picket across the front entrance of the steel mill once every three minutes.  My picket partner was the steelworker’s national health and safety representative.  As I looked toward the front gate, about 50 feet away, I saw big, gnarly looking, private security guards filming, recording with a giant microphone, and taking photos of our every move.  My host told me they wanted the company to film me so they knew the union was bringing in some heavy hitters as we talked about regulatory compliance issues. Tis unnerving to see a mean-looking brute packing a gun filming and listening to your every move. I wanted to give them their money back. 

The following day, two local union members and myself went out searching some back bayous to look for where the mill’s trucks allegedly had been dumping some hazardous waste.  We had hoped to find some evidence. We were in an old pick-up truck with a bench seat where I was sandwiched between two burly steelworkers.  I vividly remember asking the driver, “what if we run into some of the mill’s truck drivers” He laughed, reached under his seat, and as we were jostling about the back roads of the bayous, pulls out a 357 magnum, waving it around as we continue our jostling (I’m sure it was loaded) and said, “I aint friggin scared with this bad boy.”  Now I really wanted to give them their money back. Luckily, we saw no trucks and I was happy when I saw Louisiana from inside the airplane window. 

My regular consulting job was working for the EPA.  Again, I was doing a multitude of exciting projects. Based on opportunity and interest, I started international work; I worked on the international Basel Convention treaty dealing with international exports and imports of waste, analyzed the European Union's commercial hazardous waste treatment market, and compared European solid waste incineration policies. My company secured contracts with the U.S. Army in Europe to train soldiers on pollution prevention.  I made sure I got in on this project and after a few trips to Germany realized I wanted to try living in Germany. Through some heavy lobbying, I secured a position with my company to conduct environmental compliance assessments of the army in Europe while also developing hazardous waste management plans.  

Conducting compliance assessment was a sobering experience.  The army in Germany, has sub-standard equipment and occupies facilities built either for Word War I or II. Basically, they treat the environment similar to how we treated it the 1970s. Doing compliance assessments was like shooting fish in a barrel. For the soldiers, it was sort of a cat-and-mouse game as they were often busy trying to run around hiding the hazardous materials for a variety of reasons while I was trying to find them. Oddly enough, there are many padlocks in the army, but no one ever has a key.

What was disturbing was the seemingly lack of care and respect over the environment and worker health by the U.S Army in Germany.  Again, I gained valuable field experience and understood many challenges faced by the common soldier trying to do their job. The opportunity and the experience of living abroad and traveling all over Europe was incredible; I learned a lot about the military, but I also learned a lot of America as I was viewing it from within a different cultural context and perspective. 

Nearing the end of my second year living in Germany, I began to think ahead about my next move. Living abroad, for all its great opportunities, can also be a challenging and lonely experience.  It was time to think about returning. So, I made contact once again with my Unity mentor, Wilson Hess. Based on our discussions, he proposed a crazy idea, “Travis, you love teaching, you have a lot of knowledge and experience, why not go to grad school and become a professor?” 

Hmm, why not.  Sure it would take a lot of hard work that would require me to relearn a lot of forgotten knowledge in preparation for my GREs. Ahh, there was the issue of having a mediocre undergraduate record, which could be a problem as I wanted to focus on getting into one of the better environmental policy programs.  This would turn out to be a rather daunting task and I pondered whether the reward was worth the risk. Ironically, the project I was working on received a stop-work order. Since I was stuck in Germany with no work, I studied for my GREs, and sent letters to potential schools. The reward was worth it; I demonstrated a strong writing record, and  teaching and hands-on policy experiences to overshadow a poor GPA. So, at 36 years old, I headed off to the University of Maryland. 

Following the completion of my master’s degree, I decided to continue on this path by enrolling into a Ph.D. program so I began looking for schools. Meanwhile, I received a phone call from Unity asking me if I had interest in running a pilot program in North Carolina to provide hands-on experience for environmental policy students.  I was so excited about this, although this excitement was quickly tempered when I was told that had just a few weeks to get there and deliver a program equal to 15 credits. This was such a great experience, we talked and studied policy on a daily basis, visited the waste management operation of a large hog farm, mining sites, landfills, recycling sites, state offices, environmental activists. We learned about wetland delineation, site assessments, and regulations.  

While in North Carolina, I decided to go back to Washington, DC for my. Ph.D. This was another hard three years of work, but the end result was worth it.  At that point, as much as I thought I knew, I realized how little I actually knew in the grand scheme of knowledge.  There are so many paths, so much knowledge, so many opportunities, and learning and experiencing are lifelong endeavors without ending. 

And thus, a new path, or should I say, a new direction in the same path began, just as my mentors said would happen. I secured a job as a professor of environmental policy at the University of Southern Maine. 

So, I look back at my days in Unity, and appreciate that I developed important skills and the realization that to fulfill ones desires, be sure to take initiative. When I changed my major at Unity, I had no idea where it would lead or what I would do.  I followed the more difficult, the riskier path, but the reward could not have been greater.  But, while you cannot rely on other people for your success, this doesn’t mean you should not engage and elicit the help of other supportive and caring people.  I do not believe I could have achieved what I am today without the sage advice and calming words of encouragement from my Unity mentors. As I look back on the less traveled path, it has been a great journey, and as I look forward, I see that it will continue to be a great journey. And to Dan Rienburg, wherever you are, realize you made one hell of a difference in at least one person.