Bob Russell’s germinating seeds

By Timothy Young
Sun contributor

One year ago, on a warm August night along the south shore of Big Glen Lake, there passed a man that many in our community loved, however, few of the countless people he touched will know his name. Bob Russell died last August 23 at the age of 62. He was many things to many people, from Eagle Scout, Internet guru, opponent, activist, organizer and more. I recently had a chance to reflect on Bob’s life with his widow, Sally Van Vleck, on that very deck on Glen Lake where I last spent time with him. Together we shared some memories and talked about his co-founding of the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council, the Neahtawanta Research and Education Center, his leadership in the Bioneers movement, as well as the role he played to bring consensus around Traverse City’s state-of-the-art waste treatment facility that returns drinking-quality water back to the Boardman River. Like most who knew him, we seemed to agree that it was not his more visible accomplishments that will mark his life nearly as much as the impact he had on the people he touched along the way.

What Sally found rewarding was the number of people that reached out to her after Bob’s passing. “Many of them would be people you might consider to be from a different walk of life than Bob, but they all spoke of the intelligence and impeccable integrity he brought to all he did.” It was quintessential Bob to walk into a room of potential adversaries and later leave that room having earned their respect, if not their support. Yet it’s safe to say that he was confident that if he didn’t gain their support, it was just a step in the process and the timing wasn’t right. Bob was the kind of guy whose knowledge always seemed to be a decade ahead of popular perceptions. He was campaigning for such things as water conservation or community recycling long before they were popular values we now take for granted. He was never afraid to be the guy bringing new and transformational ideas to the table.

While many of our long departed community leaders have well deserved monuments erected in their names. That was never Bob’s style and most would agree that he wouldn’t want that. He was more intellectual firepower behind the scenes and didn’t seek the spotlight. He understood that when developing a resilient community, like farmers, most of the work happens long before you even plant a seed. And he was happy simply building the soil of our collective understanding, planting seeds of knowledge and letting the community benefit from the harvest. And about the time a project or idea got its legs, Bob would slide out the side door in search of his next mission. Like the phrase common among Palestinian olive farmers who say, “they planted so we can eat, so we plant so they can eat,” I think this explains why Bob remained fully engaged and never shortened his vision even when cancer shortened his life.

Following the gardening analogy, I can better understand what will truly mark Bob’s life in Northern Michigan. Just as seeds lay dormant in our soil for decades, only to sprout when conditions are right for their germination, Bob has planted many ideas and dreams within our collective community intelligence, knowing that “their time” would not come in his lifetime. However those seeds, though anonymous, will surely grow in perpetuity, nourishing future generations.

Book Club continues Bob Russell’s work

Bob was an avid reader, and to carry on his legacy, last year a group of friends organized the Bob Russell Resilience Reading Project to share some of Bob’s favorite books around community resilience.

Traverse City and the surrounding areas owe much to Bob Russell’s civic engagement and leadership over more than 30 years—including one of the cleanest sewage disposal plants on the Great Lakes, preserving of the Barns and surrounding property for the public’s use and management, and prevention of a shopping mall where today’s Sara Hardy Farmer’s Market enjoys such huge success.

Much of Bob’s recent work has focused on creating the discussions needed to push resilience planning to the forefront here in the Traverse City region.

Resilience, as applied to human communities, comes to us from an understanding of the fundamentals of the resilience we see in natural systems all around us. Resilience thinking starts with a deep recognition that man-made communities are intimately connected to the eco-system, to Nature. Nature provides for us in the form of eco-system services: clean air, water, healthy soil and other resources of many kinds. Healthy eco-system services are the source of all wealth and sustainability for human communities. Yet, resilience is really about adaptability, not sustainability. We must plant the seeds of resilient strength in our communities, ready to adapt to a future of change that we cannot forecast but which promises to be far different from the past.

To learn more about Bob’s vision for community resilience, visit Resilience-reads.org to watch three videos from Investigating Community Resilience, a project of the Neahtawanta Research and Education Center, featuring Bob in an interview with his friend and colleague Dave Barrons.

The next book in the Resilience Reading Project series is Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to create local, sustainable and secure food systems. The gathering will be Wednesday, Aug. 20, at 5 p.m. at Meadowlark Farm (6350 E Lingaur Rd. in Lake Leelanau). Droves of people have turned to local food as a way to retreat from our broken industrial food system. Now it’s time to take the conversation to the next level. That’s exactly what Philip Ackerman-Leist does in Rebuilding the Foodshed, as he refocuses the local-food lens on the broad issue of rebuilding regional food systems that can replace the destructive aspects of industrial agriculture, meet food demands affordably and sustainably, and be resilient enough to endure potential rough times ahead.

The discussion will be led by Stephanie Mills—a renowned author and lecturer on bioregionalism, ecological restoration, and community economics. There will also be a potluck, so bring local food to share and your own table service.

You can pick up a copy of Rebuilding the Foodshed, and all other books on Bob’s list, at Brilliant Books and Horizon Books in Traverse City.