Winter 2008
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Mary Beth Doyle
1961-2004

To Stop Fighting Is Just Not an Option

By Dave Dempsey
February/March Issue, 2006

Some memories fade, like over-washed clothes, with time. Others are as vivid as the moment that inspired them.

That’s the way I remember a nighttime summer scene maybe five years ago. Walking out of one of Mary Beth Doyle’s favorite Ann Arbor hangouts, the Del Rio, she and I looked up to see fingers of lightning creeping silently across a high sky. No thunder, just lightning.

“Dang,” she said, or words to that effect, in the delighted unaffected tone of a child. “That’s neat.”

Coming from someone else, the words might have seemed trite or phony. But if you knew Mary Beth, you knew she was unafraid to take the risk of being misunderstood. She spoke directly, genuinely, without affectation. As a friend or as an advocate, she was one of the most direct, unspoiled, undaunted people I’ve ever known.

In that moment under the Ann Arbor sky, Mary Beth defined herself in a way that her environmental adversaries may never have known her, but that her friends certainly did. In a word: wonder. She was always responsive to a moment of wonder, whether in the natural world, or the so-called human world we think of ourselves as occupying. She spanned both worlds, telling me of the peace she found while kayaking on the Huron River, and the delight she found in tweaking and challenging the arrogant assumptions of the complacent in positions of power.

I’m pretty sure it was that wonder that kept her going, and kept her inspiring others to continue their struggles to bring a measure of environmental sanity to Michigan and the world. When those of us who knew her – and others who knew her work – are tempted after our loss of her to surrender to despair, it’s well that we keep in mind what she represented.

Two comments, one from a citizen fighter who worked closely with her, another from a gentle pediatrician with whom she teamed on one of her most important developing projects, help me keep my compass.

Says Michelle Hurd Riddick: “When we first met I felt as though we had known each other for a very long time. What I admired besides her conviction was how comfortable she was in her own skin. She was so confident in her call for public health protection and for those without a voice. She did it with such humility and grace. In many ways I think Mary Beth exemplified how we can win and showed us how we should fight. Armed with her example, we all know in our hearts to stop fighting is just not an option.”

“Mary Beth exemplified how we can win and
showed us how we should fight.”
-- Michelle Hurd Riddick

Says Dr. William Weil: “She was a dynamic, innovative, enthusiastic, supportive and wonderfully warm person who gave of her own time and effort without limitation. She was an individual with remarkable national contacts who worked tirelessly on whatever was on her plate. She was a delightful person to work with, as she never tried to dominate but was always full of imaginative ideas and ways to make things happen. I haven’t enjoyed such a relationship for a long, long time.”

These two very different people saw a remarkably similar woman. And so did I. The Mary Beth I knew was atolerant and unflagging friend, an egalitarian to the marrow, an inextinguishable spark of laughter and affection – and damned effective in her advocacy.

Mary Beth used the twin powers of persuasion and gentle intimidation to help the successful campaign to shut down the Henry Ford Hospital Medical Center toxic incinerator. She brought humor to the decade-long effort to thwart out-of-state trash by proposing the use of an Elvis Presley look-alike for the “Return to Sender” visit to the State Capitol. She helped shame the Engler Administration into reinstating a fish-consumption advisory for women of childbearing age by having kids inscribe paper plates with fish pictures and send them to the chief executive.

Mary Beth’s work will continue to bear fruit, from the local to the state to the federal to the global level. Locally, her work to protect open space and green space in Ann Arbor will benefit generations to come. On the state level, her work to institute the precautionary principle in state policy governing children’s environmental health will lead to the withdrawal or banning of toxic flame retardants and harmful pesticides like lindane. Nationally, we can expect to see in our lifetimes a new approach – like one now taking holdin Europe – that will require the safety of chemicals to be shown before they can jeopardize the health of our bodies and minds. And globally, we will see dignity restored to victims of environmental injustice from Bhopal, India, to our backyards.

In this world there are two kinds of insignificance. There is the insignificance you feel while sitting in a big-city traffic jam, jerked to a stop on a remorseless platform of concrete or asphalt, stuck in one automobile among tens of thousands. That kind of insignificance crushes hope and smothers the pure joy of breathing, seeing, smelling, dreaming.

Then there is the insignificance you feel in the presence of nature’s mysteries – the kind you feel while standing under a vast nighttime sky watching a silent lightning display with a friend. In the wake of Mary Beth’s passing, as I try to make sense of her life and our loss, I choose to feel that kind of comforting insignificance. She had a small but cherished place in this enormous universe, and she has a huge place in our hearts.

We may not know why she is gone, but we know why she was here: to help make the world better. In that she succeeded, the way a flash of lightning made our night in Ann Arbor unforgettable. We may not see her again, but we will always have the memory and the example of how she lived and advocated – in recognition of life’s wonder, and the urgent need to protect it.

Dave Dempsey is former policy director of the Michigan Environmental Council, a role in which he worked closely with Mary Beth. He also served in the 1980s as environmental advisor to Governor James J. Blanchard and is currently a Great Lakes policy advisor for Clean Water Action in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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