Lew Batts: Key Player In Michigan's Environmental Turnaround

 

When Dr. H. Lewis Batts, Jr. of Kalamazoo died on October 9, 2001, Michigan lost an environmental giant. Outside of the community in which he lived and spent most of his life, Batts was little-known in recent years, but any account of the state's rise to national environmental leadership in the 1960s and 1970s would be incomplete without a mention of his pivotal role.

Batts helped found the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and encouraged it to use Michigan in 1967 as a test case in the fight against the application of the pesticides DDT and dieldrin. Batts provided much of the funding and organizational support to the fast-growing Michigan citizens movement calling for an end to the use of DDT to control Dutch elm disease. Batts deserves much of the credit for the public pressure that resulted in a Michigan ban on most uses of DDT in April, 1969 - making the state the first in the country to take such action. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would not ban DDT for three more years.

The Fight Against DDT

The publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 not only aroused nationwide concern about the so-called "hard pesticides" like DDT, but also highlighted troubling data collected on bird deaths on the Michigan State University campus that had been linked to the chemical. Frustrated by their inability to turn government policy against the hard pesticides, a handful of people on New York's Long Island decided to do something more direct about stopping DDT applications there. Along with Batts, then a biology teacher at Kalamazoo College, they formed a new organization called the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Batts had taught another EDF founder, Victor J. Yannacone, Jr., who had gone on to become an attorney. The EDF founders had determined to use the courts as the avenue to force controls on DDT and other dangerous pesticides.

One of their first opportunities came in Michigan. In the fall of 1966, the Michigan Department of Agriculture (MDA) planned to apply 5,000 pounds of dieldrin in southwestern Michigan's Berrien County to kill off Japanese beetles. A close cousin of aldrin, another pesticide then also manufactured by Shell Chemical Company, dieldrin is a persistent and bioaccumulative chlorinated hydrocarbon more toxic than DDT. Batts pledged $10,000 to support court action against dieldrin and DDT in Michigan.

At a meeting hosted by Batts at the Kalamazoo Nature Center, EDF attorney Yannacone and Dr. Charles F. Wurster, a marine biologist at the State University of New York, laid out their case to a representative of Department of Conservation Director Ralph A. MacMullan. The meeting proved critical in winning MacMullan's support for the lawsuit. Soon the state agency chief was using his bully pulpit to storm against the ecological impact of pesticides, and testified in one of the EDF lawsuits - against his sister agency, the Michigan Department of Agriculture.

Ann and Dale Van Lente, Norman Spring, Batts and others founded the Michigan Pesticides Council to help coordinate the citizen fight against hard pesticides. The Council quickly encompassed a large cross-section of the state's citizen organizations and was an effective voice in pressuring the state to halt the application of DDT and dieldrin. Batts also supported the anti-pesticides movement by providing a base for Bob Burnap, an activist from New York and also one of the EDF founders. While at the Center, Burnap coordinated the printing of hundreds of copies of Wurster's pesticide-damning affidavit, which included numerous footnotes on studies showing serious damage from the use of hard pesticides. Widely distributed across the state to leaders of citizens groups in communities applying DDT for Dutch elm disease, the copies of Wurster's affidavit galvanized the League of Women Voters and local Audubon clubs to oppose the spraying programs and pressure city councils to stop DDT use. The MDA's discovery of high levels of dieldrin and the federal Food and Drug Administration's finding of high DDT levels in Lake Michigan salmon in early 1969 was the last straw. Provoking still greater public concern, it led to the state's first-in-the-nation DDT ban.

A Lifelong Concern

Batts was an environmentalist well before the term came into vogue. "He introduced the word 'ecology' and its principles to this community," said Monica Evans, who began working for Batts in 1953 and later joined him on the staff of the Kalamazoo Nature Center. "He was definitely in tune with the out-of-doors, and with nature. He knew the workings of basic ecological systems, and he was appalled that the natural world was beginning to disappear."

After graduating from Kalamazoo College in 1943, he served in the military and later did graduate study at the University of Michigan. He returned to Kalamazoo College in 1950, serving as a member of the biology faculty until his retirement in 1977. He received his Ph.D. in ecological ornithology from Michigan in 1953. Batts was active on a number of community boards, particularly those focusing on protecting the quality of the environment. In 1970, he joined with Burton Upjohn as a partner in the development of Parkview Hills, Kalamazoo's first planned unit development, dedicated to the idea of people living harmoniously with nature.

He was active with the Audubon society at all levels, serving as president for the Kalamazoo and Michigan groups and as a member of the Board of Directors for National Audubon Society. Other national board service included Natural Science for Youth Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, Zero Population Growth and the presidency of the Wilson Ornithological Society.

One of Batts' greatest legacies is the Kalamazoo Nature Center. One of its founders, its first president, and its first executive director, he was the initiator and visionary behind the establishment and development of the Center, a pioneer organization in the country and now one of the largest community nature centers. During his 28 years at the helm, he was involved in all aspects of the Center, including designing a comprehensive program of research, education and stewardship. "Many staff members who worked alongside him early in their careers have since made significant contributions in the fields of environmental education, environmental advocacy and natural history research," said Connie Ferguson, a longtime associate. "He believed that introducing people to the natural world and helping them learn about it would lead to their valuing it and protecting it."