Rapidan, Virginia is a quiet little town five miles from Orange -- sitting on both sides of the Rapidan River. It’s home to a couple of historic churches, an old school house, several vintage homes, and a derelict concrete mill on the riverbank. It now serves as headquarters for American Climate Partners -- a non-profit founded by Michael Collins.
“We formed a real estate company, and we purchased the dam and four acres of land on the Culpeper side of the river,” he explained.
Collins had a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Virginia Tech and a masters in environmental planning from UVA when he was hired as town planner for Orange. That’s where he met real estate developer David Perdue.
“Mike has had about 16 different lives – a scientist and a teacher and a businessperson and an activist and a Buddhist," he recalls, "but when he was the town planner, and he had a real vision that was much bigger than what you would expect from a town the size of Orange.”
He was also adventurous and loved to give people tours of the five-story mill. ACP manager Mary Dennis says he would lead guests onto the roof of the silos with no guard rails but amazing views.
“You know he was so much about nature, but yet this industrial building also fascinated him, and I like that about him – a lot.”
Another acquaintance, attorney Tom Salley, says Collins was a visionary – always coming up with ideas to improve the natural environment.
“He was a whirling dervish – a man of intense energy, but he was also a man of intense focus on each of his visions. He would assemble financial supporters and others that were interested in the same ideas and make concrete programs come out of his ideas.”
There is, for example, a program called Stream Sweepers. Collins’ friend Buzz Van Santvoord recalls how it came to be.
“Mike loved to fish, and he was fishing this stream in Madison County and was just appalled by what he found in the water: tires, a sofa, microwave oven, a bed pan, so he called me up immediately and said, ‘You need to see this!’
Collins raised money to hire students each summer – high school and college kids who would remove trash from streams and rivers while learning about the environment.
And his buddy Chris Mawdsley says Collins liked working with farmers.
“He helped a lot of them with rivers and handling erosion. Just a really positive, forward-thinking person.”
The program he called Soil Keepers promotes the use of natural, organic fertilizer that doesn’t put more nitrogen into the ground. There was too much of that already, and it was washing into the Chesapeake Bay, creating dead zones and killing fish.
To boost populations of shad, herring and other aquatic life, Collins proposed taking down a dam on the Rapidan River.
“We’ve cut off their spawning habitat," he explained. "This project will have a major positive effect to help them.”
And Chris Mawdsley says he was able to find the funding he needed.
“He recently got a large – like over $7 million grant two years ago to help develop his ideas.”
He made friends with public officials and business leaders like Page Sullenberger – head of the Downtown Orange Alliance – who had an office just down the hall from Mike.
“We popped in and out of each other’s offices, and we would discuss the ecological work that he was doing, and he would discuss the preservation and economic development work we were doing for the Downtown Alliance, and then we would solve the problems of the world.”
Part of his success, she says, was his ability to communicate with anyone who would listen.
“His depth of knowledge and his ability to translate these incredibly complex ideas and climate situations was really part of what made people willing to invest in him basically. “
He would explain, for example, that the world had a simple, mathematical problem – that we need to move two down and one up.
"We have too much carbon and water in the atmosphere, and so we need to get them back into the ground, and then we have too much nitrogen in the ground. We need to get that back up into the sky – so we say two down, one up. We develop actual solutions to make that happen."
Collins was so prolific that Sullenberger and Perdue say they sometimes had to hold him back.
"I used to give him the Mother Sullenberger talk every now and again. Michael was a real visionary and had the stamina and the energy to just keep after every new vision that he had, and sometimes I would say, “Now you know there are some other aspects of this that you might want to consider, and you might have to move a little slower than you really want to.’"
"Sometimes I had to be known as the Mike Whisperer to rein in these ideas that were coming to him, because if we could channel that energy and intelligence and that enthusiasm that he had in the right direction, he was always effective," Perdue adds.
He pressed ahead – even in the face of federal budget cuts.
"He was always optimistic, despite the barriers and the politics that were occasionally in the way," says Sullenberger. "He just truly believed that the world could be made a better place and that people could be willing to do it."
But this past summer, his efforts came to an end. Collins stopped to help a stranded motorist in Green County. A fit and healthy 64, he was struck and killed by another car.
Friends and relatives were shocked, saddened, but in one respect they were not surprised.
"If Mike Collins is going to be taken from us early in life, it’s going to be from some act of goodwill," Perdue concludes.
"Stopping to help another person was so Mike," Sullenberger says.
Just over a month later, his family hosted a memorial service at a local winery managed by his son Logan, who follows many of the soil-enriching methods Collins favored.
Nearly 200 people of all ages came from as far away as the Clinch River Valley to remember Mike and to celebrate his life. His daughter assured the crowd he would not want them to be sad, and his son got everyone outside – then climbed onto a piece of heavy equipment to snap a picture of Mike’s many admirers.
Guests shared memories and agreed on two things. Michael Collins could never be replaced but the organization he created, American Climate Partners, would go on – working to clean the streams and rivers of Virginia and to enrich the land that he loved. I’m Sandy Hausman.
