Vermont Environmental Consortium

May 15, 2007
ANR Sec. Crombie: Man in the Driver's Seat, Hot Seat
by
Daniel Hecht

Being head honcho of the Agency of Natural Resources has to be a tough job.

The public now understands the dangers of global warming, and urgently wants government to protect Vermont from its effects. We’re now keenly aware of water, wind, fields and forests as potential sources for the energy we’re worried we’ll run out of. Advocates seeking stringent protection of endangered ecosystems lock horns with developers wanting to do business unencumbered by so much regulatory red tape. Wind power supporters battle with advocates for forest ecosystems and pristine ridgelines. Dairy farmers, already facing tough sledding, now have to deal with water quality problems triggered by manure spreading.

The ANR is the agency that deals with these issues, and Sec. George Crombie is its designated driver, steering it through this obstacle course of contentions and uncertainties.

Yet he seems remarkably unintimidated by this responsibility. He acknowledges that his agency faces daunting new challenges and must be restructured to cope with them. But he’s also confident he can make it happen by applying a holistic approach to problem-solving, one modeled on natural ecosystems.

George Crombie comes to his current position and outlook from long experience in environment-related activities. A New Hampshire native, he earned a bachelor’s degree from UNH and a master’s in public administration from Northeastern University. He worked for thirteen years as public works director in Durham and then went on become Burlington’s first public works director, a job that required uniting three departments and managing one of the largest pollution abatement efforts in Vermont’s history, the $56 million Lake Champlain cleanup project.

He left that job to serve as regional director for the Massachusetts Dept. of Environmental Protection, but then was invited by the Douglas administration to sit in his current hot seat. He and his wife now live in Warren; their three children are grown and they have six – soon, seven – grandchildren.

To describe his vision for the ANR, he frequently uses the term “web.” Ecologists use the term to describe the complex interweave of living things in nature: an elaborate set of connections, all parts interdependent. The ANR should model itself on a natural ecosystem, one that integrates not only animals and plants but also diverse parts of the human community.

He admits that this often requires reconciling competing forces. Hydropower is a good example: “If we build a dam, we need to ask, ‘What’s its impact on fish, on habitat?’ But we also need to ask, ‘What’s the impact if we don’t get this renewable power?’”

Finding constructive answers to such questions requires better information, so the agency will need to put more emphasis on research and to use new technologies that can provide good data and model solutions. Puzzling together this information will require an interdisciplinary approach, so the agency must create teams of people with diverse skills, experiences and perspectives.

In Crombie’s view, this more inclusive ANR will need to include input from environmental scientists and administrators, other agency administrators, educators, community representatives – and, yes, business people.

Inclusion of the latter group is likely to cause trepidation among traditional environmentalists. But Crombie points out that huge changes have occurred in the years since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. In those days, we mostly just blundered and plundered along, blithely unaware of how our lifestyle damaged the environment; now, we’re much better-informed, and most people share a genuine concern for the environment.

Back then, businesses did not know or care much about environmental impacts; now, all larger companies maintain offices devoted to compliance, and more and more are adopting explicit commitments to sound stewardship. Civil engineering firms keep environmental scientists on staff to minimize the impacts of building roads and bridges. Federal agencies, even the military, now operate with guidance from their own environmental offices; universities teach environment-related subjects, instilling environmental expertise into most professional sectors.

In short, many protections have now been build into the basic fabric of our society. The agency George Crombie envisions is aware of this and adapts its programs accordingly. It embraces the needs of various constituencies and harmonizes human activity – including economic development – with environmental protection.

My cynical side argues that the profit motive will always try to exploit nature for selfish advantage, and should be strictly controlled. The environmental purist in me fears that the Malthusian doctrine applies: no matter how cleverly we attempt to preserve the natural world, the collective appetite of a growing human population will exceed nature’s ability to provide.

But the optimist in me says that George Crombie is right, and that we’re smarter now and can find solutions; that the whole system will succeed when its parts work together.

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Daniel Hecht is a novelist and executive director of Vermont Environmental Consortium. For more information on any Green Grapevine topic, contact vec@norwich.edu.

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