A Life of Loving Lakes

I am a child of Pisces, and so, will ebb and flow like the tides between heart and head, meander like a river slowly working away at the obstacles in my path, and ultimately find the stillness of my soul in a pond.

I have always loved lakes. One of my earliest memories is of wading in Wesserunsett Lake (Madison, Maine) on a warm summer day and hearing my mother scream “Don’t go over your head! You’ll drown!” I decided to believe her, and to this day, do not put my head under water. I never progressed beyond “advanced beginner” in swimming classes. And yet I excelled at sailing and canoeing, and spent much of my summer time on or near the water in the Belgrade Lakes region of Maine (the original locale of Ernest Thompson’s play, On Golden Pond). “It is not so much the boat itself, or even sailing, as the idea of it. There is something so complex yet pure about the relation of wind and sail, so absorbing about the need to balance conflicting forces.” [1]

Immediately after graduating from college, I started my “ideal” job as the first Executive Director of the Cobbossee Watershed District, Maine’s first and only regional agency devoted to protecting and improving water quality in 28 lakes and ponds in the Winthrop Lakes region. Lake water quality management is the product of watershed management. Noted ecologist Eugene Odum wrote, “it is the whole drainage basin, not just the body of water, that must be considered as the minimum ecosystem unit when it comes to man’s interests”.[2] For two decades, the focus of my life was on the interface between land and water, watershed and lake basin.

With funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Lake Program, the Watershed District initiated major lake restoration projects on Annabessacook Lake (Winthrop, Maine) and Cochnewagan Lake (Monmouth, Maine) to eliminate phosphorus recycling from lake bottom sediments. The Watershed District also spear-headed the construction of 50 manure storage facilities on dairy and poultry farms throughout the watershed. The results of these efforts were slow to appear, but ultimately water quality in the lakes did improve dramatically.[3] With success in lake restoration, we began to focus more on protection of the gains we had made in lake water quality. Lake restoration may be measured in terms of observable gains in water quality. Lake protection, however, is usually measured in terms of failure, i.e. in terms of loss of water quality against the status quo.

In his book, Restoring The Earth, John Berger described my transition from lake restoration to lake protection this way:
[Gordon says] “The lake is going to be sensitive for a long time, and we could lose it again, very easily, if we don’t protect it. The agonizing thing is that you can never stop protecting the lake.” True to these words, during more than twelve years of work as director of the watershed district, Gordon has never taken a formal vacation. “This is my recreation,” he said. “It’s a hobby, a passion. I wonder what I’d do on a vacation.”[4]

Despite this passion, I eventually felt burnt out. Perhaps the “cost of caring” was too much, as Christina Maslach might say:
If all the knowledge and advice about how to beat burnout could be summed up in one word, that word would be balance. Balance between giving and getting, balance between stress and calm, balance between work and home --- these stand in clear contrast to the overload, understaffing, overcommitment, and other imbalances of burnout. “To give and give and give until there is nothing left to give anymore” means that one has failed to replenish one’s resources. Unless more fuel is brought to the fire it will eventually use up all that was there to start the flame --- and then die out. In a similar way, unless one has fueled oneself (with knowledge, rewards, strength), the fires of compassion can be all-consuming, leaving nothing but emotional ashes.[5]

While burnout may have been a factor, I also found the need for new intellectual and spiritual challenges to be compelling. Emerson wrote of "a foolish consistency" being "the hobgoblin of small minds". Thus, change is essential to our growth as spiritual beings. Abraham Maslow wrote that "life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day."

I have also played for many years with the questions of what we know versus what we believe in science and public policy. As an example, consider the science and policies involved with phosphorus mitigation in northern lake watersheds. Phosphorus controls for lake water quality protection can be a particularly difficult "sell" to the public. Maine lakes typically experience nuisance algae blooms when total phosphorus concentrations reach 15 parts per billion (p.p.b.). Most Maine lakes have 5 to 10 p.p.b. of phosphorus. Our goal was to prevent any increase of more than 1 p.p.b. for the foreseeable future by allocating increments of acceptable phosphorus loading over all the potentially developable land in a lake watershed. This process required dealing with tiny fractions of a part per billion -- far less than could be detected by the best laboratory analysis. At some point, I realized that I was no longer dealing with science, but rather asking property owners and developers to put their faith in us as “high priests of phosphorus.” In high-quality Maine lakes, water quality protection could be considered a "faith-based initiative," where property owners were expected to curtail their short-term economic interests for the sake of a long-term goal of lake protection by means that could not be scientifically measured! Having spent almost twenty years advocating for the science of lake management, I felt uncomfortable about the speculative nature of our lake protection methodology, even though I had been one of the primary architects of this approach.

Ironically, it was during this time that I became far more involved with Paganism. While I had “felt Pagan” since the age of 10, I did not make spirituality a major focus in my life until the late 1980’s. During dinner at a national lakes conference, a colleague turned to me and said “I’m a Pagan; you probably don’t know what that is.” Needless to say, an interesting conversation followed, and we found that several of our colleagues were also searching for some form of alternative to traditional religion with an environmental context. I found myself becoming more involved in my Pagan spiritual practice, and less committed to my environmental career. Ultimately, I took a decade off from public service before volunteering to serve on my county soil & water conservation district’s board of supervisors. Now, I view my environmental service as a primary means of fulfilling my spiritual path. To me, this is sailing -- the balance of conflicting forces that Susan Kenney describes in her novel.

Notes
[1] Susan Kenney, Sailing (1988) pg. 6.
[2] Eugene P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology (1971) pg. 16.
[3] Norah Deakin Davis, “Cobbossee Lake: National Success Story”, Down East (January 1988) pp. 60-61.
[4] John J. Berger, Restoring The Earth (1985) pg. 41.
[5] Christina Maslach, Burnout – The Cost of Caring (1982) pg. 147.