Dustin made impact on the cycle

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from July 15, 2004. Jack loved nature. He enjoyed walking nature trails, especially at Loblolly Marsh Nature Preserve. It’s no wonder he connected with the interview subject he writes about here.

It was 14 years ago when I interviewed Tom Dustin.

But if it had been 50 years ago or last week, it wouldn’t have mattered.

His core principles would have been the same.

I interviewed Dustin — who died this weekend — in connection with a book project that never came to fruition.

(The publisher and I had different ideas about what the final product ought to look like; that sometimes happens.)

Tom and Jane greeted me at their rustic Allen County home, a spot not all that far from the center of Fort Wayne but which might as well have been in another world.

They were, as far as I knew, the most prominent environmentalists in Indiana.

Probably, they were on the short list of the most prominent environmental activists in the United States.

What I was trying to figure out, during an interview marked by numerous cups of black coffee on my part and an endless string of cigarettes on Tom’s part, was what made them tick.

What made them care so much about the natural world that they were willing to risk alienation from friends and neighbors, ridicule in the letters to the editor column, and being labeled — after so many controversies — a crank?

They told me that morning 14 years ago over too many cups of coffee.

They told me about stopping on a camping trip in 1954 at Dinosaur National Monument in the Northwest and coming home to learn that it was slated for destruction by the Bureau of Reclamation, which planned to build a dam on the Green River which would have flooded the whole thing.

They told me about how the dust had barely settled on the Dinosaur National Monument project — the environmentalists won — when they learned that the Indiana Dunes were threatened.

And they told me what their environmental activism had taught them about politics and the need for compromise.

Reading Tom’s obituary the other day — Jane died about nine months ago — I found myself digging through old files, trying to find what that 1990 interview produced.

This is what I found:

“A great blue heron interrupts.

“Tom Dustin stops in mid-sentence to watch it soar above Cedar Creek.

“’That really is my religion,’ he says after a moment, ‘because I can look off into those woods and see life taking place in all of its aspects. Now we’re looking at a season of renewal. Things are coming back. Reproduction, growth — later decline, death, and renewal again. And I relate to that. And I battle mightily to preserve examples and systems of nature like that where people would have similar opportunities.’

“He is warming to his topic. It’s a sermon he has given before.

“’I feel that a good bit of humanity, particularly in the developed countries, is increasingly being sealed off from that in the pursuit of a utilitarian framework … Is it useful? What can I make out of it? How much money can I make out of it? How does it contribute to the economy? I’m not saying those things are not important, but it’s not fundamental.

Fundamental, to me at least, is this human relationship with my surroundings. In nature there really is no fear. You can see the whole cycle of things happening. And I know I am part of that. Not apart from it.’”

He was part of that cycle then. He is part of it now.

And the planet is better off for having hosted him for 80 years.