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Sustainable Pulse Profile: Lu Schilling

Environmental activist Lu Schilling came to Sister Bay from Glendale, the Milwaukee suburb of her childhood, by way of California where she spent 30 years of marriage and childrearing. The ill health of her parents precipitated the move, and after their passing, she stayed to make a life for herself.

She recently biked to a coffee shop for a conversation about her life as an environmental activist, a lifestyle she regards not as a finished product but rather as a work in progress.

Schilling’s roots as an activist can be traced to her childhood. She recalls that her mother was a conservative person, one who would chide, “Don’t waste!” And she remembers being offended by the smell of exhaust when she was eight or nine, and her first venture into protests as she and a horse-loving friend threw snowballs at cars and yelled, “Get a horse!”

Now Schilling’s activism is more sophisticated and informed. She serves on the Social Responsibility Committee at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship where she occasionally shows documentaries dealing with social, economic, or environmental justice. She also writes an Eco Solution column for the UU Newsletter.

She even facilitated an eight-week course, The Natural Step for Sustainable Communities, sponsored by Sustain Door and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. “But I am still learning,” she says.

As she does, she tries to lead an environmentally responsible life. “You can’t call yourself an environmentalist unless you are a vegan,” she says. The benefits of making plant-based food choices, she has learned, include not only reducing the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming but curing or controlling a number of illnesses.

She is concerned that the wrong food is often fed to animals, such as the wasteful use of corn to fatten beef animals, and is opposed to huge corporate farms that raise animals in an inhumane assembly line manner.

Schilling tries to live according to the 100-mile food challenge, purchasing locally whenever possible from organic gardeners. She points out that http://www.SustainDoor.org provides a helpful list of organic farms in the county.

While she is a practicing vegan, Schilling makes exceptions for her cat and dog, purchasing organically raised meat and eggs for them.

She attempts to make environmentally responsible choices in all aspects of her life, using organic bath and personal products, for example, since these items often go into the water system. Sewage treatment facilities, she notes, cannot effectively remove all harmful chemicals during the purification process.

Schilling also feels it is important to serve as an environmental watchdog. She tries to attend public meetings as a civic duty.

As Lu Schilling looks about the community she has a wish list for changes. She would like lawns to be chemical free. She likes organic farms but would like for more of them to offer facilities for customers to process their vegetable purchases for preservation on site. She would like to see more orchards transition to organic pest control, and the development of a network of bicycle paths that would encourage more people to use bikes for transportation. She’d like the installation of more rain barrels and the planting of more “Victory Gardens.” She’d like to live in a community in which members support each other collectively, borrowing tools or equipment rather than purchasing these items individually.

But an environmentalist can also be playful. As a practicing vegan Schilling misses ice cream. She has developed a recipe for a frozen confection using oats rather than cream, and is exploring the commercial potential of this product.

Lu Schilling believes “environmental responsibility is an ethical, moral, and spiritual issue.” Perhaps we have had it too good in this country, she said. “I always come back to nature,” she continued. “We are part of the environment.”

At the end of the conversation she mounted her bicycle and pedaled down the road, an environmental activist living a life that is still a work in progress.