Alexandra Dawson made her words sting.
She listened to a question, then she snapped her answer back. There often seemed to be a hint of irritation in her tone, not necessarily directed at any one person or situation but at the state of things in general—the state of environmental affairs.
Her answers, however, were far from being generalizations. She provided detailed background and unequivocal evaluation of any issue that came up.
The last time I interviewed her, the issue was biomass—the plans, supported and, in Dawson’s view, promoted by the Patrick Administration, for a number of wood-burning power plants in Western Mass. Dawson told me that the governor and his environmental and energy secretary Ian Bowles had made a mess of the public process, that their overt boosterism had “poisoned the entire discussion about biomass.”
Dawson said the administration had rushed to the position that biomass should qualify as a “green” renewable without the science to back it up. Many environmental groups had taken a wait-and-see approach on biomass rather than openly challenging the allegedly pro-environment governor, Dawson said.
For all her criticisms and bleak forecasts for the environment if things didn’t change soon and profoundly, Dawson saw in the biomass controversy not only bad but good:
“In all my time, I’ve never seen anything like the uprising against biomass,” she said flatly. Instead of the opposition being driven from inside the environmentalist community, Dawson said, the pushback on the proposed projects came from the general public: “It was a genuine grassroots movement. They popped up out of nowhere, people who for one reason or another—air pollution and asthma, the impact on forests, the questions of carbon neutrality and sustainability—just didn’t think the case for biomass added up.”
An environmental consulting firm hired by the state to assess biomass subsequently came to the same conclusion.
I kept the notes of my February, 2010 interview with Dawson on my desk long after the story I was working on went to press (“Biomass Awaits Manomet,” May 20, 2010), and I looked back at them several times, always with the idea of writing a profile of this amazing woman. I didn’t feel any particular urgency about the project, even though I knew Dawson was 80: her column for the Daily Hampshire Gazette continued to sparkle with ageless energy and wisdom; her involvement in issues near and far continued unabated. The thought that she wouldn’t be around to answer a call from the Valley Advocate never occurred to me.
Alexandra Dawson died Dec. 30, 2011. A Harvard-educated lawyer and teacher, Dawson was an expert in environmental and land use law who spent her life fighting forces she deemed harmful to the natural world. A longtime chair of the Conservation Commission in Hadley, she was also a leader in the Massachusetts Association of Conservation Commissions, serving as director of legal affairs and in other capacities.
In 2006 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency presented Dawson with its Environmental Merit Award for Lifetime Achievement. Through decades, for Advocate reporters, she was a credible source of information and insight on a host of environmental issues. For me, Dawson was first and foremost a writer, whose column I read religiously. In print and in person she wasn’t just fiery and fearless, but fair.
When we talked two years ago, Dawson decried one of Gov. Deval Patrick’s initiatives above all the others: his unprecedented decision to combine energy and the environment in the same cabinet bureau, the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. For Dawson, it was a setback for the cause, part of a deeply problematic mixed message coming even from so-called progressives.
“The mandate to protect the environment doesn’t belong in the same portfolio as the mandate to supply plenty of cheap power,” Dawson snapped. Then her tone seemed to soften as she said she understood Patrick’s political needs: “He has pressure to get big things done for renewable energy. But he’s going about it in the wrong way.”
In publishing Dawson’s obituary online last week, the Gazette did its readers a good turn by linking to her last column for the paper. One can’t read it without thinking how much the environmental movement has lost with her passing. While she saw clearly the deep conflicts that animate public discourse about the environment, she urged her fellow human beings to rise above them.
“The important thing,” she wrote, “is to see our individual arguments and actions in the broader context, and to understand that we are all engaged in a great experiment for which we have little experience and even less preparation.”
