Transcription of Tony Owens, MD, Natural Resources Council of Maine for the show Love Maine Radio #319: Tony Owens, MD, and Thomas Belluscio
Lisa Belisle: Doctor Tony Owens is a physician in the emergency department at the Maine Medical Center and an advocate for the environment. In 2007, Dr. Owens joined the board of the Natural Resources Council of Maine after his fourth child graduated from college. Thank you for coming in today.
Tony Owens: Lisa, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for having me.
Lisa Belisle: I must tell the people who are listening that you were one of my favorite teachers in the emergency room when I was a medical student and a resident, so I thank you for that, because I think doctoring is a lot about teaching, and it’s a lot about helping the next generations to come move through the ranks.
Tony Owens: Oh, thank you very much Lisa. Medical education is one of my passions, and I continue to do it because it brings so much joy and pleasure. But I have to turn around and tell you that your dad was one of my most important mentors early in my career and continues to be an inspiration, so I guess it’s all one big family.
Lisa Belisle: I think that’s probably right. Actually, my dad was one of my teachers too, so I have a lot of gratitude for all that he’s done for I guess generations of us now.
Tony Owens: Don’t we all.
Lisa Belisle: Now, he’s still doing this, so this is a good thing. I’m really, I love the direction you have taken in your life with the environment, in part because I too am very passionate about what’s going on in the environment, and I know that there are many physicians who have this interest, but not everybody who’s taken it to the level that you have. So talk to me about this.
Tony Owens: Well I think that when my wife and I first moved to Maine in 1975 to complete my medical training, the environment that we discovered in Maine just really resonated with me, and I think I’ve been committed to the protection of Maine’s environment since those early days. But as you mentioned in the introduction, in 2007 when our last child graduated from college in Maine at Bowdoin, it freed up some time and perhaps some resources that had been spoken for up to that point, and it allowed me to go back to half-time at my medical work, and then give me this additional to commit to community service. And I think there’s no higher calling than community service and protecting the environment, for ourselves and our children. So I was able to engage myself at that point within NRCM’s board, and they’re a premier advocacy organization here in the state. And it’s been a wonderful and very fulfilling experience.
Lisa Belisle: As an emergency room doctor you’ve dealt with, for example, children with asthma, or older people with emphysema, and it must have occurred to you in the course of your medical work that there’s a direct impact on what’s going on outside as to what happens inside of our bodies.
Tony Owens: Absolutely, and this could launch into a long monologue, but very briefly what we know is that we have one of the highest pediatric asthma rates here in Maine in the country, and that we have been unfortunately characterized as the tailpipe of the country, meaning that the exhaust from Midwestern power plants, often coal-fired, sweep eastward with the prevailing winds, and tend to exit our continent through Maine. And when that dirty air gets exposed to sunlight and moisture it produces ozone, and there are many days, especially during the summer, where we have high ozone rates, and that increases, you see a spike if you will in emergency department visits and offices for pediatric asthma, as well as older people with chronic lung disease. So that’s a real issue here. You wouldn’t think that Maine has this problem, but we do. My wife and I considered a trip out to the west coast this summer, because we’ve never been to Oregon, and they’re having some horrible forest fires. We didn’t go, and they’re complaining bitterly about the quality of their air. I often think that maybe if more people had this experience that produced this dirty air then we could all make progress in improving it.
Lisa Belisle: Is it because ozone is something that unlike smog or smoke from forest fires, we don’t see it, that this continues to be a problem that maybe we haven’t been addressing as aggressively as we should?
Tony Owens: I had the very interesting experience a couple years ago to go down to Washington, DC with a small group of Mainers from diverse backgrounds, Democrats, Republicans, but we all had a shared commitment to improving Maine’s environment. We had a chance to speak with our congressional delegation, and I was actually asked to speak to a Senate committee on this very issue. And you’re right, ozone and carbon dioxide are not, people don’t realize that they’re as powerful irritants as they can be at certain times. So I think there needs to be an awareness. One of the pictures that I tried to paint was these tall smoke stacks in the Midwest, letting all this carbon dioxide high into the atmosphere away from that community only to be blown as I mentioned earlier eastward to our area, where it becomes an issue. So yeah, I think we need more awareness. It’s a difficult issue to discuss because it’s such a political wedge in our country right now that doesn’t allow people to sit down and talk and understand each other’s point of view.
Lisa Belisle: Well, I don’t want to get too much into politics because that can be a little difficult, but I have had the experience as one I think similar to you that there is this difficulty with communication between groups, and it’s not that people who maybe supported the current president are anti-environment, maybe it’s that they didn’t feel heard when they had concerns that they themselves wanted to have addressed. So how do we open up the conversation between the groups?
Tony Owens: Yeah, I wish I had the right answer, or a prescription for that. I think that we all have to have a change of heart and be willing to listen to one another, understanding that everybody has a valid point of view, and then I think as those conversations get started and mature we can hopefully gain better understanding. I’m sure everyone has legitimate points to make. I learned that with my trip down to DC. But nonetheless I think there are certain fundamental facts that I need to try to find ways to bring to people in a fashion that they can understand, and bring them over. So I try not to further those divisions. I’d rather find ways to bridge them, and conversation is one of the things we need to have. I think most people, probably 95 percent of us, really agree on many, many things. But we focus on that five percent where we disagree and it makes it hard to move further along.
Lisa Belisle: I think for me it has been more than 20 years now of working with patients of all different sorts, who come from all different backgrounds, and the chance to have conversation and build rapport, that has really given me the most insight into exactly what you’re talking about, that a lot of this isn’t, we aren’t divided strictly. You can never really assume by talking to someone that you know what their viewpoints are.
Tony Owens: Yeah, I find that in my work as an emergency physician, much of what I do is teaching, with medical students and residents, and I try to model behaviors hopefully that are positive and constructive and helpful. But one of those things is really focus on listening to patients, pulling up a chair, rather than lurching over people at the bedside as this sort of typical physician, to better understand that I’m there to listen and sit down, eye to eye contact. I think those are important things that I think younger physicians need to learn. But I think that’s all part of good communication and putting me as the physician on an equal level with the patient so that we’re all moving in the same direction and there’s not an issue of hierarchy there but one of communication.
Lisa Belisle: And at the same time as you said, there are some things that we know about. I can understand why a patient has been smoking for their entire life, but at the same time it doesn’t make it a good thing for their health. So to try to continue to find ways to share that information that’s potentially harmful is important, not unlike the stuff that you’re talking about with the environment.
Tony Owens: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think that’s one of the biggest public health issues that we have, is that so much of what we do as physicians and things that our patients suffer with are kind of self-inflicted and things where they need to make better choices, and we need to find better ways to make a better choice. It sounds paradoxical but I think that a sense of humor is an important piece of this dialogue. My dad used to work for Readers Digest, and they had a section there, I don’t know if it’s still in print or if they do, called “Humor is the Best Medicine” or something like that. And I’ll try sometimes with patients when I want to cajole and urge them in a new direction that they found challenging is to try to find some fun in the conversation that they can realize that I have a sense of humor and that they do too, and that humor and happiness are a part of healing.
Lisa Belisle: So how do you translate that into the work that you’ve done with the environment?
Tony Owens: Well I think as you mentioned earlier, having conversations with people is what advocacy is all about, whether it’s going up to Augusta to testify before a house senate subcommittee on a law or a bill that you think is important, or some other group where you think that you’d like to change their position or encourage them to push along with you. So listening to those points of view, finding out where there’s common themes, how can we work together, what questions do they have, what information do people need to make better choices, I think that’s all part of that listening and conversation. I enjoy taking young people up to Augusta, when I find that there’s a bill that they have an interest in. Most recently I took a young high school student up where there was a bill about plastic waste in school lunch programs stuff. So she can speak to this from personal experience, and bringing young people into that conversation, I think, is a really important part of my advocacy. Because I’m at the point where I’m not going to be around a whole lot longer, and I would like to have a legacy of young activists that will continue to advocate for Maine’s environment.
Lisa Belisle: What are some of the issues that you have been working on since you joined the board?
Tony Owens: NRCM has several areas of activity. One is currently climate and energy are very big. We’ve worked for the solar bill and energy efficiency and clean air. We work for the northern forest, been very involved with this Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, as well as helping the state agencies craft good regulations for the unorganized townships and make sure that those bills protect the Maine forests. Done a lot with rivers and clean water, involved very much with some of the dam removal in the Kennebec. We’re a key player in the Penobscot restoration project, which is huge, and very involved in the mining bill which was finally passed in the legislature this year to try and protect the high-quality waterways we have in Maine. We also have a little newer initiative on sustainability, which is really, it resonated especially with younger people for healthy sustainable communities, whether it’s food waste, gleaning… we had a big event in Portland last year with Feed the 5000 where we made lunch for everybody with leftover food. And we’ve been very involved on the federal level with Senator Collins being such a key vote in the Senate.
Maine has been put into a very pivotal position, because who has better access to Senator Collins than Mainers? So we’ve become a conduit, if you will, to help give Senator Collins advice when she needs it. So those are the main topic areas. But it’s an advocacy organization, and we do a lot of our work in Augusta with the legislature and the state agencies.
Lisa Belisle: So this for you is an interesting departure in a way. There aren’t a lot of doctors that have decided that they want to get into advocacy, that they want to be testifying, that they want to be as involved in the governmental process as you are.
Tony Owens: Well actually we just had a new physician join our board, I’m pleased to say. So he’ll be a physician joining me. I actually think there’s a number of physicians who have a passion, as you know better than most, it’s a busy career, especially if you have a family as well and you’re younger with all the commitments that go with that. As I mentioned in the introduction I’ve had the benefit of having a little bit more freedom now that my children are grown and educated and living elsewhere to have the time to commit to this. It is my priority, so… and I have the time to do that. And I encourage physicians to do that. We have a group in the emergency department that participates every winter on the eve of… December 31, New Year’s Eve. NRCM has an event called the Dash and Dip, where there’s a 5K-run around that day; then at noontime there’s a dip in the east end beach. I’m distinguished in having done it I think for seven years in a row now. So we have a team… it’s a fundraiser as well as an awareness raiser, so that we have a lot of fun with that.
And there’s a lot of people who I work with day-to-day, shoulder-to-shoulder in the emergency department, who when you’re not talking about patients in emergency medicine, you find, wow, they really have a passion for the environment. That’s why they live in Maine. So that I think sometimes those people just need to be given a little space and an opportunity to develop their advocacy. We started a program at NRCM a few years ago called NRCM Rising, which focuses on this under-40 demographic, and I’ll tell you that I do not own a cell phone, I’m not a computer guy, so communicating with that younger demographic has always been a challenge for me, but the NRCM Rising has its own methodology to recruit them. So their Dash and Dip team is now our biggest competitor with our emergency department team, so we have a fun back and forth on that, but… So there’s a lot of fun in this advocacy thing. I think there’s a lot of opportunities for physicians, nurses, ED techs, physicians’ assistants, our whole ED staff pulls together and is engaged in this. It’s a lot of fun.
Lisa Belisle: Was there anything about your earlier years when you were growing up that caused you to feel drawn towards environmental issues?
Tony Owens: I’m old enough, Lisa, that I actually had polio as a child. I contracted polio before they had the vaccines, so my childhood through the pre-elementary and early elementary years, I did well, but I was watched very closely, so my parents kind of shepherded where I went and what I did, and I developed a close relationship with a young friend in elementary school who lived on a farm. This was in Delaware, and I would go out to his farm on the weekends. That was supposed to be a healthy experience for me. And he and I really just enjoyed being out in the woods wandering around, and I think the seeds were planted… We would catch frogs and do all kinds of outdoorsy things. And then when my family moved to Connecticut, and I actually saw forests and hills, I said, wow, I love that. And then the opportunity to come to New Hampshire for college and Maine ultimately. It seems like it’s been this journey, and I feel like I finally found my home.
I believe if you remember back in the 1980s when the Maine Times was being published, they had a series of articles on this concept of bio-regionalism, which I strongly believe in. And I think that Maine is kind of my bio-region and I’m sort of connected through my DNA, and very happy to be here. It’s been a journey, but I feel that my advocacy has matured now, and I found the right things to be doing and the right way to do it.
Lisa Belisle: How do your children approach the environment? I’m interested in this because I have children who are college, I have one who is in medical school, I have one who’s finishing high school in a couple of years. And it feels different to me, the way that they look at the world, which makes sense. But I wonder if you’ve had a similar experience.
Tony Owens: Well I can tell you that all of my children have been supportive of the work that I’ve done in the environment. They make space for that. They’ll roll their eyes from time to time. They’ll go up into log cabins and spend Christmas holidays with my wife and I with a wood stove and sort of some different things. So they’ve been part of this journey with me. One of my children is actually on the board of the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust, so I feel that he’s been bitten by the same bug. So I think that they know this is important to me. I think that they’re in the busy phase of life, raising children, furthering their careers, so it’s a little more difficult for them to express it fully, but I’m hoping that as time allows, as they get further along and have a little more space, they’ll also be good advocates. I think they live responsibly now, so I think that they’re participants in this advocacy.
Lisa Belisle: I feel the same way that you do, and one of the things that I’ve noticed with my own children is that before there was a lot more of trying to convince people that maybe composting is a good idea, or maybe we should be careful about our plastics consumption. But the nice thing about this day and age is we’re still convincing people, but more and more people who are younger have been raised with these ideas and they’re saying of course, of course we want to engage in buying local foods, of course we want to try and keep our waters clean. And so at least as we continue to try to advocate for things that are important with the environment, at least we’ve made some small steps.
Tony Owens: Yeah, my wife and I about that same time when I went half-time, I also agreed to build this building at the Cape Elizabeth elementary school. It was an outdoor classroom for the elementary school. And I wanted to make the structure entirely from Maine wood and products, and my goal was to design a building that was so interesting that the kids couldn’t stop looking at it when they were there. I didn’t want to just make a shed. So I could design this, but I had some help from some friends, and we came up with this octagonal post-and-beam structure which we build over the course of the year, and then we built some raised beds. So my wife has been involved with the gardening project with the elementary school for the last 10 years. And it’s really fun to see these younger children learn about seeds and germination and the plants growing. But what surprises me is how much they already know through their parents and their friend and their preschool, I guess. So I think that this consciousness is there, it just needs to be nurtured and supported. This next generation, I think, is going to do very well if we can continue to give an environment to work with.
Lisa Belisle: And I agree with you that the tangibility and the living within the space is also very important, so when you’re describing being out on the farm when you’re younger and progressively heading towards the trees, I think that if you’re a child and your environment involves watching things grow, or seeing the water go by, I think that that makes a difference as to how you feel about your place in the world.
Tony Owens: Yeah, absolutely. As I said earlier, I’m not much of a computer person, but I’m always, my wife and I are constantly, oh my gosh, here you are out to dinner and everybody’s looking at their cell phone rather than talking with one another or seeing things around them, and it’s a world I can’t imagine, but I know it’s happening. I just want to make the real world as interesting for people as I can by pointing out things, whether it’s a wildflower walk, or an owl thing, or talking about beekeeping, or other things to make this world that we live in a tangible, living thing that I find fascinating and engaging far more than anything a computer could do for me. To try and make that experience, because I think that this whole issue of artificial intelligence and the direction the world’s going is a little scary to me, and I think that if we did get completely into that world we would maybe lose advocacy, and the environment would no longer become as important. I think that would be the wrong direction for the world to go in. So I’m pushing back against that.
Lisa Belisle: I agree with you, and I also know that sometimes I will look at my child and I’ll think, why is she on her cell phone? But then two seconds later she’ll tell me that she just pulled up some research that has to do with something that’s related to some topic. She’s not looking at the Kardashians. She actually wants to learn about the first Earth Day, or some of the initial legislation that was put out surrounding environmental issues. So I think that it would be great if we could continue to keep people in touch with what’s going on outside of them, and then use these relatively new tools to deepen their understanding of the history and the types of things that came before them that you wouldn’t be able to research if you didn’t have access to this sort of thing.
Tony Owens: I completely agree, and it’s not that I don’t use computers. I use them as you well know at work continuously, and they are a wonderful tool. But they’re not a substitute for experience, and I think that’s where I draw the line. If I feel like I need something experiential and grounding, I need to be outside getting my hands dirty and my feet wet. Sitting in front of a computer is not an entertainment for me; it’s something I would do to learn something.
Lisa Belisle: I’m on the same page. And it’s funny, I’ve seen in medicine, I remember when they started using, for example, monitoring for woman in labor, and they would monitor the heart rate and the contractions for the woman in labor, and it was such a great tool that there was a time where, then we all pulled back and we would watch the woman in labor from the nurses’ station, rather than go in and actually be with the laboring woman. And I think we’ve come back around again. The nurses, of course, weren’t really the ones who were doing that, it was really more in my experience the doctors. And I think we need to keep remembering that these tools that we have, they’re just tools and not to use them as something in between us and what’s alive, but also to use them as something that enhances our experience. And to still keep touching, and being aware, and using the information from our own senses.
Tony Owens: Yeah, I totally agree. It would be interesting… No, it wouldn’t, it would probably be frightening to go back to practicing a day in medicine like I did 25 years ago before electronic medical records, and my gosh, it’s almost too scary to imagine. The efficiencies that we have now. But I don’t know if the medicine I practice is any better, if my patients are any better. Maybe I can do more of it, but I … it’s a tool. I’ll leave it at that.
Lisa Belisle: I’m hoping that the people who are in medical school now will continue to work on all of the positive things that have been put in place, that you and I have experienced over the last few decades. So, if you had any goals or any I guess aspirations for Maine and the environment, say over the next 10, 20, 50 years, what would they be?
Tony Owens: Wow, that’s great. I love the North Woods, even though I live here in southern Maine on the shore. When I go to the North Woods, and I do often to hunt and to fish, it’s just that sort of bio regionalism exploding, and I really feel grounded. I also love the coast and Penobscot Bay and sailing, I love Casco Bay. So I guess one of my goals would be to preserve the quality of place that we have in Maine. That’s also one of the missions of NRCM, not surprising we share that. But I think that we’re so uniquely positioned that Maine remains an iconic place in people’s mine. You go to Acadia and meet this whole multicultural group of folks that come visit there from around the world, you realize that Maine is special.
And I would like to see us use that leverage and that bully pulpit of being a special place to be a leader in the environment, and how we protect our waters, how we value clean air, how we work with technology and efficiency to have a healthy environment. And with some of the wonderful leaders we have in Maine and we’ve had in the past, that we can be leaders in this conversation we talked about early in our conversation, about how we can pull the country back together. I think we’re in a wonderful position to do that. I don’t think people look at Maine as being partisan one way or the other. I think we’re well positioned to be leaders in that healing process in the country and protect our environment at the same time.
Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Dr. Tony Owens, who is a physician in the emergency department at Maine Medical Center and an advocate for the environment. Also on the board at the Natural Resources Council of Maine. Also a teacher of mine, and also one of our 50 Mainers for 2017. I know that you’re a very busy individual. I really appreciate the time that you have taken to come and speak with me today, but I also appreciate all the work that you’ve been doing.
Tony Owens: Thank you Lisa, pleasure’s been all mine.