T h e Fut ur e Ain ’t Wh at It Used T o Be
As another Earth Day nears, nationally renowned environmentalist, author and Northern Michigander Stephanie Mills shares thoughts on where we’re headed here on spaceship Earth and why local economies should fuel the journey.
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t was 1969, Mills College in California, and for Stephanie Mills, everything was about to change. She stepped up on stage, cleared her throat, and delivered a college commencement speech that catapulted her into the national spotlight. Paul Ehrlich’s bestseller, The Population Bomb, had come out the year before, and young Stephanie Mills had been galvanized by its message that we humans were up against it, that we were staring into a future of calamitous strife, war, and famine, victims of our own reproductive success, and our overuse of Earth’s finite resources. There she was, a nice, studious young woman from a nice, middle-class family, telling her generation that the most responsible, the most moral thing to do with their lives would be to have no children. It was such a controversial, even revolutionary idea, that it gave rise to a whirlwind period of speeches and media interviews. Everyone, it seemed, wanted an explanation, and the pace—and the pressure—took a personal toll. After the furor died down, Mills caught her breath and settled into the world of environmental activism in California’s Bay Area. For more than a decade, she worked with some of the great luminaries of the environmental movement, like Stewart Brand, founder of Whole Earth Catalog and the Sierra Club’s David Brower. Activism was satisfying, and they had an unmistakable impact. But by the mid-80’s, the situation had changed. The political winds had shifted, the environmental movement had become more Washington-centric, and work was getting hard to come by. Mills had become increasingly interested in an emerging concept called bioregionalism. She had begun to dream of living a simpler, quieter, more localized life, a life amid the splendors of nature.
Traverse, Northern Michigan’s Magazine | apr ’11
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