Duluth Couple Has Been Champions of the Outdoors for Nearly 50 Years
By Sam Cook, Duluth News-Tribune, Minn.
Dec. 16–December sunlight slants through the picturewindow of Jan and John Green’s home in the woods near Duluth. Birds flit from spruce and fir trees to the Greens’ eight well-stocked feeders.
At a table just inside the window, the Greens tally each bird on a form provided by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Chickadees. Two kinds of nuthatches. Downy woodpeckers.
It is not at all uncommon for the couple to be keeping track of such natural events. For almost 50 years, Jan and John Green have blended their own research with that of others to educate thepublic and shapeenvironmental policy.
John has done soprofessionally during a41-year career as ageology instructor at theUniversity of Minnesota Duluth, and privately through volunteer work with the Superior Hiking Trail Association and other groups.
Jan is a noted birder and environmental activist who has served on the boards of theMinnesota PollutionControl Agency, the National AudubonSociety, the Minnesota Center for EnvironmentalAdvocacy and as amember of the Minnesota Forest Resources Council. She was instrumental in setting aside land that is now Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve in Duluth.
John is 75 and Jan 73 — “kind of Precambrian,” John quips — and they’re still fully engaged in sharing their talents. Both continue to serve on boards of conservation and environmental groups.
Jan was a key contributor to “The North Shore Birding Trail,” published by Audubon Minnesota this year. John’s “Natural History and Geology along the Superior Hiking Trail through Duluth, Minnesota” also was published this year. John is blazing a new portion of the Superior Hiking Trail between Duluth and Two Harbors.
Both are known as tireless researchers and defenders of science. They are also known to colleagues and adversaries alike as reasonable people who understand that policy change often comes incrementally.
“They represent the pillars of the environmental movement in this area,” says Kurt Soderberg, executive director of the Western Lake Superior Sanitary District. “They are challenging to governments and industries and other groups, but they are also the kind of people who are willing to work through the process without it becoming adversarial.”
“They are both very concerned about getting things correct,” says Duluth’s Andrew Slade, executive director of Sugarloaf: The North Shore Stewardship Association. “I’ve worked with them in print and been in meetings with them. They’re both very concerned that the truth is respected.”
Along the way, the Greens also raised two daughters and deliberately have lived a modest lifestyle. Their carbon footprint was a tiptoe long before the term became fashionable. A woodstove heats the room where they tally birds, and their home on the North Shore emphasizes passive solar technologies. They drive small cars, one of them a gas-electric hybrid. They have never owned a clothes dryer.
“I think it’s immoral to burn coal to dry your clothes that will dry anyway,” Jan says.
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Copyright (c) 2007, Duluth News-Tribune, Minn.
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