Transcription of Sustainability Ed #189
You’re listening to Love Maine Radio with Dr. Lisa Belisle, recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in family and preventative medicine, acupuncture, and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See the Love Maine Radio Facebook page or www.lovemaineradio.com for details.
Now here are a few highlights from this week’s program.
Jay: The idea is that you want to create the people who are going to go out and create the change. Business is the most ubiquitous activity on the planet. If you really want to create change, you need to be engaging with businesses.
Sarah: Thinking about not just what’s going to satisfy folks right now or next year or the year after, but what’s going to work 10, 20, 50 years out as well.
Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Marci Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage, Harding Lee Smith of The Rooms, and Bangor Savings Bank.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, Show Number 189, Sustainability Ed, airing for the first time on Sunday, April 26, 2015. We’ve all heard the word sustainability and become familiar with the concept, but what does it mean to put sustainability into practice and how do we educate tomorrow’s leaders? Today, we address these questions with College of the Atlantic Professor Jay Friedlander and University of Maine School of Law Professor Sara Schindler. Thank you for joining us.
One of the wonderful things about Maine and being in Maine is the opportunity to continually reconnect with people that we’ve met earlier in our lives, and one such individual is Jay Friedlander. He’s a friend of mine and he’s also the founder of the Sustainable Business Program and the inaugural Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Socially Responsible Business at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. As chair of the program, Jay has developed a sustainable business curriculum focusing on how building social, economic, and environmental capital sparks innovation and creates competitive advantage.
It’s really great to see you again.
Jay: It’s great to see you as well. Thanks for having me.
Lisa: Thank you for being here. I know you had to drive down from College of the Atlantic, and that’s 3 hours?
Jay: Yeah, about 3 hours, depending on the weather.
Lisa: It’s a beautiful place that you’ve chosen to live up in Bar Harbor, but it’s a little different than where you last lived, which was right here in Portland.
Jay: Yeah. It’s a lovely place. There’s tradeoffs. We have a quiet time in the winter, really busy summers. Acadia National Park and the College of the Atlantic is right on the ocean, so it’s a beautiful place. It’s also a great place to raise our son, Max, who is 9. He walks to school every day. It feels like a little combination of the ’50s and the ’70s mashed together.
Lisa: Wait a minute. In what way would it be the ’70s, then?
Jay: It’s sort of the ’50s because you have the small town and Max walks to school, says “Good morning” to the crossing guard. Everyone in the town looks out for each other’s kids. Then it’s sort of the ’70s because you’ve got College of the Atlantic up there. You have Jackson Lab, you’ve got MDI Bio Lab, so it’s a very educated, very progressive community.
Lisa: I like it, and obviously you know something about the ’70s because that’s about the time you and I both grew up.
Jay: Right. Yeah, absolutely.
Lisa: Did you ever see yourself living essentially on a large Maine island when you hit our age?
Jay: Perhaps. Ironically enough, Ursula, my spouse, and I were up in Bar Harbor for a weekend and we were really enjoying ourselves. We were coming off of a camping trip up in Canada and we had just gone canoeing for a week. We came back and we were driving through Bar Harbor and she turned to me and said, “You know, some day wouldn’t it be great to live here?” About 3 or 4 years later, lo and behold, there we were. It’s been a great move. We definitely miss Portland, miss our friends here, but it’s a pretty magical place.
Lisa: Tell me a little bit about your background. You’re not originally from Maine.
Jay: I’m not originally from Maine. I grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Went to Colgate University in upstate New York and then did a lot of things, everything from counseling and tutoring Native American students to being a ski bum to eventually ending up in the Peace Corps in West Africa. Then I came back. It was in West Africa, actually, I figured out that I wanted to do business because I saw business as the greatest lever of change. When I was in West Africa, I was in Mauritania, which had abolished slavery in 1980. You saw on the one hand the worst of business, that people were being enslaved for the enrichment of others. Then on the other hand you saw these small women’s cooperatives usually. They had gotten together and women were able to make money, able to provide healthcare, good nutrition for their families and you saw business as this tool that could really lift people up.
When I got back to the United States, I decided that was what I wanted to do, was figure out how you could do business in a way that really lifted people up. At the time, that was called socially responsible business. I came back, got an MBA, then did a little bit of consulting in New York City for Fortune 100 companies and then was one of the early folks on O’Naturals, which is a natural and organic food restaurant here based out of Maine.
Lisa: O’Naturals is a … I miss it. I still miss it to this day.
Jay: I do, too.
Lisa: It closed down maybe 3, 4 years ago, something like that.
Jay: Yeah.
Lisa: I remember going to the Falmouth location, going to the Old Port location. Just the soups and the … I don’t know, there was so much about it that was so great.
Jay: Yeah, it was wonderful. When we started it back in 2001, it was way, way ahead of its time. You see the potential now that it had when you look at companies like Chipotle or even what Panera Bread is doing. Part of the reason it was started was to just show that you could have a place that had quick service and high-quality food, because everything was local, organic or wild or all natural. It’s sad that it’s gone, but it’s also good to see that a lot of the ethos of it is living on in other things.
Lisa: Yes. I was just in the Old Port b.good, which is a organic and a natural restaurant. My daughters and my son and I, we enjoy that. It’s not exactly like O’Naturals, but it has the same sort of idea, and every time we are in there, it’s packed.
Jay: Yeah. Like I said, I think it’s an idea whose time has come. With a restaurant, and there are so many restaurants in town, and you see the constant churn and turnover. If you ignore it for any small period of time, you rapidly descend into entropy and you don’t really get a second chance, especially in a food town like Portland.
Lisa: I always like to think about the business aspect of all of this and this idea that we live in this culture where you’re supposed to be “successful” at everything. O’Naturals did close, but it’s not really a failure. It did exactly what it needed to do for the amount of time that it was in existence.
Jay: Yeah, and it was around for 10 years. If you look back at the history of businesses, there was a huge cycle of what they call creative destruction, so new things are always being created and old things are being destroyed as you go on. The birth, growth, and then failure of a business is part of the cycle. Obviously, we’re sad to see it go, there’s lots of lessons learned, but what I think is really wonderful is to see the value set living on in other concepts in other places.
Lisa: We just did an interview with people from Wolfe’s Neck Farm, which is doing this big thing with dairy cows, and Stonyfield is actually sponsoring this program. I think that’s an example of exactly what you’re talking about, that you have to create the interest early on and then eventually things catch up and there’s enough economic groundswell that you can actually make a go of it.
Jay: Yeah. You see that happening all over the place, on all kinds of different industries, everything from the automobile industry to the food industry. You see this kind of movement and groundswell towards a kind of new economy that’s valuing people in the communities they’re in as well as the environment and also making really viable, profitable businesses as well. It’s no guarantee of “success” or it’s no guarantee that the business will make it, because you still have to deal with all the other pieces that go into operating a business.
Lisa: It’s fun for me to think of College of the Atlantic as having this Sustainable Business Program, because a lot of people think of College of the Atlantic for its ecological bent and for its sustainability tenets, which are really important. We also know that part of sustainability is being able to make a living for oneself.
Jay: Sure.
Lisa: What you’re doing is really helping people to utilize multiple aspects of their lives to create something sustainable.
Jay: Yeah. If you look back at the founding principles of the college and what we still practice today, the idea is that you want to create the people who are going to go out and create the change. The college was founded to give people both the knowledge and the skills to go out and effect change in the world. What you see is business is the most ubiquitous activity on the planet, so if you really want to create change, you need to be engaging with businesses.
The other thing that they’ve found at the college is a huge percentage of students go out and become entrepreneurs because they’re at the school to have a self-directed curriculum, it’s completely interdisciplinary. They’re looking to have a different perspective, so they’re looking to make their own mark in the world, and as a result, many of them become entrepreneurs. I would say the school is extraordinarily entrepreneurial. They left off all of the traditional trappings of higher ed when they were founded. With all those things, it makes sense that there’s business in the curriculum.
Lisa: You and I worked on a project together because we were supporting the organization Safe Passage in a book that I had participated in editing and writing for Our Daily Tread. I had asked you to get your marketing students involved and help us market, and this was pretty early on in the social media timeframe. It’s interesting to me that the students came back with these great plans. I’ve got to say this was at least 7 years ago, something like that. You were doing things that were utilizing the latest technologies and also used business and marketing ideas.
Jay: Yeah. So much of what we do there and a lot of what we do in the Sustainable Business Program, but also throughout the college, is this idea of merging thought and action. With the Daily Tread project, students can talk about the theory of marketing and social media, but when you experience it, something a little different happens. People get more … When they have something real to latch onto, they get more excited, they want to study more deeply, and then they want to apply those things and see, wait, where does this idea and the practice of it match up and what are the …?
It’s not enough to talk about it, but you learn so much more by getting out there and doing it. Students become more engaged, and the learning is a lot deeper. We do that all over the curriculum and, actually, building off of that class, we now have students who are starting up businesses as part of their education rather than most schools where people who are interested in entrepreneurship and starting something up are doing it as a side to their classes or, rather, in spite of their education.
Lisa: You’re doing some interesting work with the outer islands.
Jay: Yeah. We just finished a project where we took a group of College of the Atlantic students … I co-taught this class with another COA professor, Anna Demeo, who teaches physics and sustainable energy. We took them and grouped up with the Island Institute and took folks from the outer islands and combined them with College of the Atlantic students and took them over to the carbon negative island of Samsø, Denmark, to see how they converted that island to become carbon negative, and now it’s moving towards fossil free. Then the students came back and worked on projects out on the outer islands. It was a pretty incredible experience.
Lisa: That’s such a great connecting of dots. You have Maine students, you have people who live on Maine islands, and then you’re going over to Denmark and you’re looking at a model that already exists that maybe we could learn from.
Jay: Yeah. It’s not about taking what they did on Denmark and just copying it, but understanding how do they garner all these resources, what did they do and what are the resources we have in our communities? The problem out on the Maine islands was particularly poignant because they have some of the most expensive electricity and heating costs in the country, so they’re really motivated to make change. For the students, they could work with these islanders and also on Mount Desert Island on projects they could get their arms around and make real suggestions and be real participants in over the course of the term, and they stayed connected with them after the term was over. That project just ended in the fall, but there’s lots of pieces that are continuing to ripple out from it.
Lisa: Talk to me about the Abundance Cycle and what that looks like.
Jay: The Abundance Cycle is a model and a framework that I developed essentially when I was at O’Naturals and I was also teaching MBA students down at Babson College, where I still teach down there as well. What I was trying to do is merge together all this stuff I was seeing every day around sustainability and what people were talking about and then merging those with business models and frameworks that MBA students were using, essentially to unite the languages and the thinking so that an MBA student could see this and say, “Oh, wow, I get it. This is a framework that I’m familiar with and a way that I could find new opportunities. I could innovate; I could save costs and as well have all these positive other effects like solving social problems. We’re building natural capital.”
It was really bringing together these two things in a common language, because so often it’s the language barrier that creates the problem. You have someone talking about sustainability speaking one language around carbon or around environmental problems, and then you have a business person over here speaking another language around profits. As a result, even though they may be saying the same things, they don’t hear each other. It was about bridging those gaps and putting them together.
It’s been really interesting now as the model has been developed to see the reception that it’s got. I’ve been giving talks on a pretty wide range of places from Japan, going over to the UK and Switzerland this winter to give some talks there. It’s interesting to see as it’s gaining some traction.
Lisa: I like the idea because I believe that one of the, I guess, marketing issues that the ecological movement has had is that there’s a perception of scarcity. There’s a perception that we need to buckle down and not do things and not consume things. What you’re talking about is just redirecting resources and being mindful, really.
Jay: Yeah. That notion of scarcity, that to be sustainable has to be a tradeoff is exactly the wrong idea. What you’re looking for and I think what you want to do and what most folks who are entrepreneurs want to do is it’s not about that idea of scarcity; it’s about new opportunities and finding new ways to do things and doing them in ways where you can have your cake and eat it too, so you have win-win-win all the way around. You have something that’s profitable, new enterprise that’s using less resources, that’s restoring the environment.
You see this happening all over the world in huge Fortune 500 companies to small, teeny startups to projects in the U.S. to overseas. The reason we talk about abundance versus sustainability is exactly what you’re talking about. It’s this idea of just sustaining where you are and like, “Oh, I have to take a shorter shower; therefore, I’m saving resources” versus “Wow, I’m going to have to come up with entirely new ways of doing things” that’s so exciting.
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Jay, when you and I first met, you … You’re my age, so I still consider myself relatively young. You were pretty young and you ended up with a cardiac event, a heart event that was pretty significant for you. Talk to me about that.
Jay: Yeah. No one still to this day really knows why it happened, but I had developed an atrial flutter. My resting heartbeat was 120 to 140 at different times, just would randomly pop up. It was something that I didn’t really know about and discovered one day when I was running on the East End. I was having trouble finishing the run and then went home. I lived on a third-floor walkup and walking up the stairs was a bit of a burden.
Then I just went to Brighton Medical Center to get checked out. I still remember when they said to me, after they checked me in and they were taking my heart rate, they were like, “Okay, we’re going to get you a wheelchair.” I was like, “A wheelchair? What are you talking about?” It was like, “Oh, we don’t think your heart should be under any more strain than it’s under.” I went in and they checked me into the hospital, brought me over in an ambulance, and then did what they call … They cardioverted me, which is basically they take paddles and shock your heart back into rhythm.
Lisa: That’s a big deal, and at the time, you had a young child and a wife and a pretty high-intensity career. Did that change your focus in the way that you approached your life?
Jay: The heart thing seemed really random. Then what ended up happening with the whole thing is I ended up getting some surgery; that really didn’t work. Then I went on some medication, and that seemed to get things stabilized. The heart thing, I have to say, was less of … The biggest adjustment I had with that was I don’t drink because apparently alcohol was a trigger, which was really odd and I guess just happens in some people. I think the bigger piece for me that caused change was having a small child and really assessing is … The life I was leading was crazy. I was running the franchising for O’Naturals. I was traveling all over the country, working really long hours. A lot of this became about is this a lifestyle that you can have if you really want to have a family and spend time with your family and be there and not be exhausted and all those things? That was a bigger impetus for change.
Lisa: The reason I ask is I believe this must have happened when you were somewhere in your 30s.
Jay: Yeah, probably late 30s or just about 40. Yeah.
Lisa: Which is a time when a lot of people have been doing what they think is expected of them, following a path, working hard. Then something happens, physically often, that reminds them that life is actually finite, that there are bigger factors at play and then whether it’s Max or whether it’s the heart thing. You have to really build your own sustainable life. You have to actually create in your life the thing that you’re talking about when it comes to business.
Jay: Yeah. That’s absolutely true. I think for us, for myself and Max and Ursula, that decision to move over to academia and go up to College of the Atlantic and pull back from the crazy life we were leading in Portland, where we were both working very long hours, traveling a lot … I was traveling a lot for work. It was definitely a very conscious decision. Took a huge pay cut, but deciding that, “Wow, let’s try a different style of life.” So far, it’s worked out great. We do a lot during the year when the school is in session, and in the summers we spend a lot of time traveling and going backpacking and canoeing and doing other things like that. That decision has been really good. Yeah, I think definitely an event like a heart thing or having a child in our case, it makes you step back and evaluate, “Wait a minute, what am I doing? Is this the life that I want?”
Lisa: There is a lot of resilience that comes along with being 20. There’s a big difference between when you’re 20 and when you’re 30 and when you’re 40, and life does evolve along. I don’t know that we do a great job with looking at lives and understanding what we can actually accomplish over the course of them, given our ages, which I think is interesting. We actually look at businesses and we say, “Okay, here’s a lifespan of the business,” but it’s almost as if we don’t do that as well with human beings.
Jay: Yeah, and the accounting. A blessing and a curse of the business, and I would say the life is accounting. Oftentimes, with business the accounting seems fairly straightforward. It grew, it multiplied, they were banging on the door. It enabled people to have a life and you can look at the numbers financially. With sustainability and abundance and a life, it oftentimes gets a lot more complicated and nuanced. This is for me where it becomes personal. Are you leading the life you want to lead? That life will change as your life changes and as you have new events. The life I led at 20- is not going to be the same, as you were saying, as the life I’m leading at 40 and the things I’d hope to accomplish are different.
Then as you get in different areas and careers, those things change, too. In academia, now I’m starting to look at, well, do I want to publish and what does that look like? Or write a book? Those are things I hadn’t really thought about before and weren’t on my radar. Then having a kid was like, “Well, I’m spending time working on this presentation and my son, Max, is looking at me and saying, ‘Hey, I want to play. I want to build a house for the leprechauns on St. Patrick’s Day. I want to go outside and wrestle in the snow.'” There’s always this calculus of going back and forth, of what is it you want to lead and what life are you trying to build.
Lisa: Sometimes the life that you’re trying to build isn’t even really apparent to you because there is no model. I believe, though, what you’ve been doing as … You’re the inaugural Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Socially Responsible Business, so inaugural means you’re the very first one. You’re building a model that didn’t previously exist, and that’s an enormous leap of faith.
Jay: Yeah. Although I’d say if you looked at my past … Whereas I look at it and try to see themes in it and then look back, I have a large entrepreneurial trend myself, so taking something that was not there, was a tabula rasa, and then making something out of it is something I seem to enjoy doing and I seem to fall into it a lot. As I look back, it was that way in the Peace Corps. It was that way after I left school, after I left college. It was that way even in the consulting. It was a brand new practice area. It seems to be something I enjoy doing. Certainly, it was that way with O’Naturals, which was changing every day.
For me, that’s something that is fun. I keep ending up there, whether consciously or not. I also think the life is what you … Things are what you create and what you make of them, so going in something that’s a blank slate like the Sharpe-McNally Chair, to me is fun and exciting. I can create what I want to see.
Lisa: What exciting things do you have going on at College of the Atlantic right now?
Jay: I’d say after our trip out to Samsø, we’re taking a little bit of a breath because that was definitely a huge experience. I’d say the 2 big things that are happening right now is, (1) we have a sustainable enterprise incubator called The Hatchery, which students start businesses as part of their education. That’s about to start up in the spring, so it’s a really fun time because you have students who are testing out ideas. We have one person who is working on sustainability issues on MDI. We have another person who is working to create a hydrogen car conversion kit so a car could run on hydrogen fuel. Another person is starting a program in the arts, another person working on a food systems business. This is always a really fun time for me because I get to work with students who are thinking about starting something up and want to do entrepreneurship but with a net.
I’d say the other thing that’s been really fun is the Abundance Cycle, and I’ve got a book chapter I’m working on for that. I’m giving talks on that in the U.K. and in Switzerland in the coming weeks. That’s also been happening. Then it will be spring, which is always a good time on Mount Desert Island.
Lisa: I always enjoy conversations in which people feel passionate about the lives that they’re living, and in no small part because when we have these conversations on air, other people can hear them and say, “There’s that guy. I’m listening to this guy. He’s talking about living this life that resonates with him, that feels authentic to him.” I think that’s really important because sometimes we get locked into this idea of who we should be, who others want us to be. This has been a great conversation.
Jay: Thank you. Yeah, I think that piece is so important about living the life you want to lead. I know there’s been more than a few times, and especially during the first year of College of the Atlantic, my wife and I would look at each other and like, “Oh, my god, this is incredible that we get to do this and it’s there.” The thing we realize is you can always change. There’s always this fear of what if I do this, but you always have that option, so you should take it.
Lisa: Jay, how can people find out about the work that you’re doing at the College of the Atlantic or other work that you’re doing on the Abundance Cycle?
Jay: They could go to the College of the Atlantic website. There’s a whole page on the Sustainable Business Program. For the Abundance Cycle, they could go to abundancecycle.com and there’s a few things there. There’s a TED talk there as well, article from TriplePundit.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Jay Friedlander, who is the founder of the Sustainable Business Program and the inaugural Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Social Responsible Business at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor and also a friend of mine. It’s really great to have you in for this conversation. It’s great that you were able to come back to Portland.
Jay: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. This has been wonderful.
Lisa: As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: When was the last time you took a break from what you were doing, from the work that was piled up on your desk and just looked up? I know that during the course of my days, I often forget to take a moment or 2 to just breathe, look up at the sky and dream. Terrible that I have to remind myself to breathe, but when I do, I feel energized because in those moments, I’m able to let go of the daily grind and think more about what I want to accomplish, how I want my business to grow. Sometimes those are the aha moments. If we all took a few moments out each day to stop what we were doing and dream a little about our business futures, not only would we feel a great sense of calm, but we may come to realize that these dreams can, in fact, come true.
I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need, boothmaine.com.
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Lisa: Today on Love Maine Radio, we have with us Sarah Schindler. Sarah is a professor at Maine Law who is quickly earning a national reputation for her scholarship, which focuses on the intersection of sustainable development and land use. At Maine Law, Sarah teaches property, land use, local government, real estate transactions, and animal law. She is also a musician skilled at playing multiple instruments and an avid urban cyclist.
Thanks so much for coming in.
Sarah: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: Sarah, your name has come up a lot lately here at Maine Magazine and Old Port Magazine and just in general. There is something about you, I guess, that people are starting to talk about. I know you recently did a TEDx talk.
Sarah: I did.
Lisa: Why is it that people are so interested all of a sudden on things like sustainable development and land use?
Sarah: That’s a good question. I think there’s a few issues. I think in Portland right now we’re seeing something that perhaps we haven’t really seen in many of our lifetimes living here, which is a renewed interest in development on the peninsula. I think that’s getting a lot of people talking about what we want our city to look like. There’s an idea that we need more housing. A lot of my friends who are renters especially, but also folks who are trying to buy homes are finding that it’s too expensive. They have to go off the peninsula; they can’t even find an apartment within their price range. There’s this recognition that rent’s getting high, there aren’t enough places available, and so we need development, especially middle-income housing.
At the same time, I think we’re feeling a pushback from some people who are saying, “Whoa, we don’t want our city to change too much.” I think in the abstract, a lot of people think that density is a good thing. If we build up instead of out, we can avoid sprawl, we can concentrate creative people in an urban environment, and that’s what we want. We hear all about how density is good and from an environmental perspective it’s good to have more people concentrated where the services are and decrease the reliance on cars and all this, but when it comes down to having a 10-story building next to your single-family home, people start feeling differently.
I think there’s a conflict there right now in Portland between what we think or say we want and what we actually want in our neighborhoods. I think people are starting to explore those feelings and explore what it will mean for the city of Portland, especially the peninsula, as more and more development is proposed and created, as our city becomes more interesting to tourists, to wealthy people, to creative people, to young people, folks who want to be here that are going to need places to live and places to work if they come. I think that’s definitely going on right now in the city of Portland.
I guess the other thing I would say is a lot of my research and work also focuses on urban sustainability in the context of food and food systems. As we know, food in Portland is a huge topic. We have more and more restaurants opening each year, great restaurants that are getting rave reviews from national publications. There’s also a lot of folks who are moving into the farming sphere, so there’s a lot of discussion around what we want our food laws and food regulations to be, how restrictive, how can we be local and still be looking out for our health and safety and things like that.
Lisa: What you’re talking about really is the very definition of sustainability, which is able to do something over the longer term that’s going to be beneficial to all involved. It’s not the flash-in-the-pan recycle our tin can today; it’s how do we plan forward so that we can make things good for everybody.
Sarah: Yeah. It’s definitely true. Right, thinking about not just what’s going to satisfy folks right now or next year or the year after, but what’s going to work 10, 20, 50 years out as well.
Lisa: You take a very personal approach to sustainability. You’re a vegan. You’re an urban cyclist. You’re really trying to practice what you teach. Why make those choices? How did you come to that place where you said, “Okay, I’m going to do this personally, I’m going to do this professionally. This is important to me?”
Sarah: I guess in my mind there’s never been a separation between the personal and the professional, and maybe that’s why I got into this field from a professional standpoint, because for me … I became a vegetarian when I was 5 and sort of slowly progressed toward veganism when I was around 20 or 21. For me, that was always a very personal choice. It’s my view of the world and my view of animals and my feelings about humanity and humaneness and ethics and morals and all of these things. I guess that was a decision in my personal life, but for me, my professional life needed to reflect those viewpoints.
I was a lawyer in San Francisco for about 5 years before moving here, and in that job I worked for a big corporate defense firm in the environmental and land use group. I remember when I started in that practice group, I said to myself, “Okay, I’m going to have to say no sometimes. If a project or a client comes up that I don’t feel good about, I’m going to tell my bosses I can’t work on it.” That did happen a few times. My firm represented the meat industry basically in a lawsuit, and I said, “I can’t work on that case.” The firm also represented some clients who were doing greenfield development, suburban single-family home development, and I also said I wouldn’t work on those cases.
I was able to do that because I worked really hard on other cases and projects, especially urban infill development projects. Of course, there you get some moral or ethical questions surrounding gentrification. That’s the big issue as opposed to environmentalism from the land perspective, you’re dealing with it from a human-centered perspective. Those were issues I had to confront, but for me, I felt more comfortable confronting those issues and working out with my clients a balance of how do we provide for the existing community as well as create this new development that we want to bring into existing communities.
Lisa: My observation of the law is that it is a lot less cut and dried than people believe it to be. I think of myself going into medicine, at one point thought, “I’m going to go into medicine because then I’ll know things. I’ll be able to tell people this is right and this is wrong, do this, don’t do this.” Being close to people in my life who are lawyers, who are attorneys, it seems very similar. There’s case law, there’s stuff that tells us this is what’s right and what’s wrong, but there’s a lot of interpretation. What has that been like for you? You seem so strongly principled to have to, I don’t know, sit through that.
Sarah: Yeah. It’s interesting. I think I first got a sense of that … I clerked for a judge on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Austin, Texas, after law school. It was interesting because the judge was a conservative judge, a Reagan appointee, and I was very progressive. I remember being curious that he hired me in the first place. It was like, “Oh, why does this guy want my opinions on things?” One of the things I learned was that a lot of cases, no matter what your political perspective, you’re going to come out the same way when you actually look at the case law or the statutes or the history of how the statute was created. Even though we might not know the answer just by looking at it abstractly, when you really dig down and do the research, there is often an answer that makes sense no matter what side of the aisle you’re on.
Where that gets mixed up, I think, in some cases is when you get up to the issues that are coming before the Supreme Court and as we see, oftentimes we can tell right off the bat who’s going to vote which way based on their political leanings. I think that’s why we have a sense that the law isn’t clear and a lot of it really does depend on the judge’s perspective. Again, that’s often true. It depends on the issue; it depends on the case; it depends on how much room for interpretation there is. It is funny, because I think a lot of people assume because you’re a lawyer, they say, “Oh, I have this issue, this real estate issue. Here it is. What’s the answer?” The answer is, “I don’t know.” First, you have to do the research.
A lot of what we’re seeing nowadays is still very unknown because it’s areas of law that are evolving. For example, in the real estate realm, the development realm, the sharing economy. We’re seeing the rise in Airbnb, we’re seeing the rise in Uber, in pop-up restaurants, all of these things that are not something that we traditionally regulated. I think the government, both local government and state and federal government, are having a hard time figuring out what are those things. Do we continue to regulate them just like we regulated industrial or commercial uses in the past or do we have to recognize that this is a new, evolving, somewhat more communitarian form of commerce? If so, does that mean it needs a different regulatory structure? I think the answer is yes, but there’s still a lot of unknowns around that because it’s new.
Lisa: San Francisco, Portland, I think in many ways they’re very different, in many ways they’re very similar, though. In the time I’ve spent in San Francisco, it almost seems as if Portland could evolve in that direction. What have you found?
Sarah: Yeah. I think there are definitely a lot of similarities, and that’s one of the reasons that when I was on the job market, when I came here for my interview, I really liked Portland. I felt very connected to it, even though I had never been here before, because I felt that it had a very similar ethic and similar ideals to San Francisco. The biggest difference is obviously the scale. It’s much easier to live here than it was in San Francisco. At the same time, the flip side of that is you don’t have quite as much happening. There’s not quite as much culture, there’s not quite as much energy, there’s not quite as much activism. It still exists, it’s just on a smaller scale. That was one of the biggest differences for me is that in San Francisco sometimes you’re overwhelmed by choices and possibilities. Whereas here, there’s, “Oh, this is the interesting thing that’s happening tonight that I want to take part in.”
Yeah, I definitely think the ideals of the people are the same. One of the nice things is, even though San Francisco you’re so close to mountains and water there, it’s so hard to get out. For me, I was working all the time and then getting in my car and driving across the bridge and sitting in traffic, it just often wasn’t worth it. I’d rather just walk down the street and go to a concert. Whereas here it’s so easy to get out of town and I think there’s a strong desire. You see people actually doing that here, not just talking about it but doing it. That’s been inspiring to me. I’ve really reconnected with my roots, which were being into nature and being into hiking and rock climbing and all of these things in a way that when I was living in San Francisco I let go because it was much more about city living.
Lisa: Describe to me what it was about being a law professor that appealed to you. It sounds like this might have been something you thought about pretty early on. A lot of people, they think I want to be an attorney or I want to be a professor. They don’t necessarily think about that specific job choice in the middle.
Sarah: Yeah. I’m trying to think when it began. I was a TA, a teaching assistant, during law school and I really liked that. I felt like I had some skill at explaining difficult concepts to my classmates or to the underclassmen. I think maybe that’s when I started to think about it in a real way, as in this could be something I’m really interested in. I also really loved law school. I thought it was so interesting, the way of thinking, reading cases, thinking about the policy behind them. That was all very appealing to me.
I had definitely thought about going and getting my PhD instead of going to law school, which could have also led to teaching, but it was much more unformed. I was young; I didn’t really know what that would entail. When I was in law school, I had that experience that made me think, “Oh, teaching would be interesting,” but at that point, I had already made the decision. I turned down some of the fancier schools to come back to Georgia, which is where I grew up, and they paid for me to go to law school. It was a great deal for me, but I started thinking, “Oh, maybe I’ve limited myself,” because looking into it, most of my professors had gone to Harvard and Yale and Stanford, which is common in the field. It was in the back of my mind, but something I didn’t necessarily think was realistic.
At the same time, I knew I wanted to make a difference in the world. I had these lofty ideals that I think many law students come with, which is, “I want to change the world, and the way to do that is figuring out the system and then working from within the system to change it.” That was what I thought I would do. I remember when I was in practice still thinking that teaching, that being a law professor would be really fun. I remember I once mentioned this to … They assigned us a mentor at the law firm, this female attorney who was one of my bosses effectively, and I told her … She asked me, “What’s your 5-year plan?” I said, “I’d really like to write a big article and maybe become a law professor.” She was like, “Oh, well, then I’m not going to give you anymore work if you’re just planning to leave in 5 years.” It was a very odd experience when I learned about, oh, mentoring isn’t always what you might think it is.
Anyway, when I was practicing as a lawyer, I started doing some adjunct teaching at UC Berkeley and UC Hastings, which were the 2 closest law schools. I started teaching the animal law class there as a substitute basically for the fellow who taught it. Whenever he had a trial to attend, I would sub for him. I got really great feedback from the students. They said, “You’re great. You should be our teacher all the … We like you just as much as the real guy.” That gave me, I think, a lot of confidence.
I had been in touch with some of my law professors from law school and I expressed these interests to them that I was thinking about it. They told me, “Oh, you should apply for this fellowship we have. We have a fellowship where we will hire someone for a year. If we think they have a chance of doing a good job as a law professor, we’ll groom you and you’ll get to teach a class and write a paper.” I applied for that fellowship back at the University of Georgia and got it. That was a great experience, so I went back there for a year and was immersed in the world of academia and got my bearings and then went on the teaching market and, yeah, wound up here.
Lisa: I love that story in part because when I chose family medicine and I was a resident, I quickly realized that I really enjoyed other aspects of family medicine, not just clinical work, which I think is probably the equivalent of legal practice. I remember vividly having a conversation with one of my fellow residents that night that I had just… “I’m not sure I want to do full-time clinical work. I think I want to teach and I think I want to write.” The response was very similar. The response was very, “Oh, my gosh, this isn’t …” It’s almost like you’re being a traitor in some ways because this is the path that they’ve chosen and your path is different.
I’m thinking it must have been so gratifying to dig into what you really wanted to do, to what you really felt passionate about, and have people say, “Hey, you’re doing a great job. This is exactly what you should be doing.” To be able to follow it through, I guess, to the conclusion that you should be a law professor.
Sarah: Yeah. No, definitely. Again, it’s one of those things where when you think something is unlikely and then it happens, it’s even more exciting. For me, it was really gratifying and then to have had success as a law professor has also been very gratifying, showing that you don’t have to have gone to Yale to do it. It’s still more likely. It’s an easier path, certainly, if you do go to one of the elite schools because it’s more of a feeder system, but other paths are possible and I think that’s nice to remember.
Lisa: It’s so, I think, helpful that you have the ability to communicate at different levels. You can speak to other lawyers, you can speak to law students, you can speak to the general public in a TEDx talk. I think that that’s more and more important, and we’ve spoken to other guests, say, in the medical, the biomedical research field, and they have to be able to do that. We all have to be able to speak a language that other people from other areas can understand now.
Sarah: Yeah, I agree. I think that I’m seeing this more and more with younger law professors. I think there was the sense with some of the older generation that they were very much about their research and focused and writing for other law professors. There’s still a lot of that. In my published work, the audience is definitely … I guess I would say I try to make the audience more broad than some do. I try to write not just for legal academics but also for courts and also for community activists.
I want to write in a way that does speak to all people, because my goal is with my research that I want it to have a real world impact. I think there is the sense that some legal scholarship is so esoteric. You’re writing about historical elements of some statute that no one’s looked at for 50 years, and it doesn’t necessarily speak to the public in the same way. I think there’s value in that kind of scholarship as well, but what I try to do is different. I think you’re right; I think there’s more of a push. As I said, I’m seeing that more with a lot of my junior colleagues, which is, “Let’s write stuff that’s actually applicable to people, that’s going to make a change in our communities.”
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Lisa: I know having 2 brothers that are attorneys that we’re still in this time where finding a job as an attorney isn’t necessarily a guarantee, that you really have to go to law school because you love the law, study as hard as you can, make the connections that you can, and then hope that you’re going to find a good job that you really like. What’s that like to be a law professor during this kind of era in history?
Sarah: Yeah. I would say that that’s changing. I feel like post-recession more jobs are coming back. We’re seeing firms hire more. We’re seeing more people need legal work. As I was talking about with development in Portland, suddenly now there’s all this development. We certainly need legal work to accompany that, so I do think it’s changing. Also, in Maine we’re lucky in some senses. I don’t know if we’d say lucky, but there’s this large area of Maine, northern Maine and Down East where a lot of the bar, the attorneys are older and they’re going to be retiring in a few years, so there’s a strong need for legal work up in that part of the state, but again, not everyone necessarily wants to be there.
I take your general point as valid. It’s not as easy as perhaps it once was or at least the idea once was that you just go to law school and then you get a job making $100,000 a year. I think what I’ve tried to do, what we try to encourage our students to do is think more entrepreneurially. The only path is not, for example, the path I took. You don’t have to go to law school and then work at a big law firm. There are a lot of other things you can do with a law degree. As you said, first of all, the education itself is really fascinating. It teaches you to think in this entirely new way, and you gain a lot from that experience. Maine Law specifically is a great deal. It’s one of the most low-cost law schools in the country, and it has great professors.
I think that the experience of law school itself is valuable, but then when they get out, when the students get out, there is actually a lot that you can do with that law degree. Having a law degree will help you more than had you not had it. I always tell my students, especially in the land use and real estate fields, there’s so many things other than just being a lawyer that are needed. Development groups need attorneys often or project managers, where having legal background is very helpful. Cities need attorneys to work on projects, to help with permitting. In states where there’s a big environmental review process behind development work, you need folks to do the environmental review and do the analysis.
At the same time, we’re having a lot of our students go out and hang their own shingle and start their own firms. I am always impressed with the students who do that because I personally am very non-entrepreneurial. I need a little box and someone telling me what to do. That’s sort of how I’ve always been. Seeing all of these students with just these ideas and going out there and putting them into practice is really inspiring to me. Yeah, it makes me excited for them. I think that’s part of it is just really encouraging that non-traditional thinking. At the law school, we’re talking about partnering with the business school and some other programs to really help students develop those entrepreneurial pathways.
Lisa: You’re obviously in the earlier stages of your career. You’re young, which is a compliment.
Sarah: Thank you.
Lisa: You seem very passionate about what you’re doing. Do you have some sense for what path you’d like your life to take? Are you kind of firmly ensconced in what it is that you feel like you’re meant to be doing or do you have thoughts of the future?
Sarah: I think one of the nice things about being a law professor and especially a tenured law professor is it gives you the freedom to explore new areas. For me, this space that I write and research in has been my passion for a long time, so I don’t necessarily see myself straying very far from it, but I do like the possibility or like the idea that I have the possibility to expand if I want to. I definitely think maybe I’ll write a book. Maybe I’ll do more speaking endeavors or events to try to share ideas and thoughts with folks around issues of sustainability or local foods.
I would definitely say I don’t anticipate leaving the field of academia or being a law professor because it really is … It’s the best job I’ve ever had. I love it. I remember before, when I was a lawyer, I would sometimes cry under my desk at work and think, “Why am I doing this to myself?” That’s so sad to me now to think back on those times. I just didn’t believe that people really loved their jobs. I thought it was just something sometimes people said, that no one could really love their jobs. Maybe they don’t hate it, but they might not love it. Once I got into this field, I realized, wow, I love this and I’m excited to go to work every day. I don’t know that I would find that somewhere else, so I feel very lucky.
Lisa: Obviously, as a tenured law professor, I am not in any way saying, “You’re so young.” I’m just saying the passion, the enthusiasm, you’re somebody who is … You’re very firmly in your career.
Sarah: Yes.
Lisa: You still have so much momentum.
Sarah: Yeah.
Lisa: I guess that was where my question was coming from.
Sarah: Yeah. I hope I keep that up. This is my sixth year teaching, seventh if I consider my fellowship as well, and I definitely still have a lot of passion for the subjects, but sometimes you come in and you’re, oh, teaching this case again and there are certain cases that I teach in multiple classes. I’ve taught this case 15 times and will I still have this energy and enthusiasm for it when I’m at the end of my career or even in the middle of my career? I hope the answer is yes. I think that sometimes you do need to do things to shake it up and teach a different case one year Yeah, no, I have always been a very energetic person, so I hope that that does continue throughout my career.
Lisa: I suspect that it will. Sarah, how do people find out about the work that you’re doing or about University of Maine Law School?
Sarah: We have a website. Google Maine Law and it’s the University of Maine School of Law. There are links there to most of the papers that I’ve written, which, as I said, I try to write for not only an academic audience but for a general audience as well. Yeah, that’s where they can find information about what I’m working on and what other folks at the law school are working on as well.
Lisa: They can also Google TEDxDirigo and watch the talk that you gave. I believe that was TEDxDirigo?
Sarah: Yes, exactly.
Lisa: I really appreciate your coming in and having this conversation with me. One of the things that we talk about often on Love Main Radio is how to create really sustainability within the community so that people who want to stay here and have jobs and love the jobs they have and live in Maine forever and ever and ever and raise their kids here, they can. To hear that you have a job that you love, being a law professor and working on sustainable issues is very gratifying to me.
Sarah: Thanks. It’s gratifying to me, too. I feel very lucky.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Sarah Schindler, who is a professor at Maine Law, who has been earning a national reputation for her scholarship. Good luck with your future. It seems like you’ve done a lot of hard work so far, and I suspect there’s a lot more great stuff to come.
Sarah: Thank you so much.
Lisa: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, Show Number 189, Sustainability Ed. Our guests have included Jay Friedlander and Sarah Schindler. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and see my running travel, food, and wellness photos as Bountiful 1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you’ve heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week.
This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Sustainability Ed show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Marci Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage, Harding Lee Smith of The Rooms, and Bangor Savings Bank. Love Maine Radio is recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Our executive producers are Susan Grisanti, Kevin Thomas, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our content producer is Kelly Clinton. Our online producer is Andrew Cantillo. Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See www.lovemaineradio.com or the Love Maine Radio Facebook page for details.