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Walter Simpson: Energy Activist
By Irene Ligouri
Walter Simpson’s newly purchased home looked perfect—a real “cream puff,”as the real estate agents like to say. Beautifully finished basement. Tasteful paint and wallpaper. Absolutely move-in condition.
His Amherst neighbors surely thought Simpson to be a lunatic when he and a group of students showed up swinging sledge hammers, tearing out every inside perimeter wall of the 1,600-square-foot cream puff and filling a dumpster with the debris. Some time later, a tractor trailer rolled up to 4 Meadowstream Court loaded with insulating foam—so much foam, in fact, that the garage door refused to shut after it all had been unloaded.
“A passive solar home does not work unless it is extremely well-insulated,” explains Simpson, 50, whose goal of ripping apart his new home to make it as energy efficient as possible took him approximately six weeks one summer. He used two weeks off from his job as Energy Officer at the University at Buffalo. After eating up all his vacation time, Simpson continued to spend 8-10 hours a day on the project, working into the wee hours of the morning.
This headlong plunge to revamp his surroundings is typical for Simpson. Ever since he abruptly abandoned his college ambition of becoming a nuclear physicist, he has frenetically tried to transform himself and his world.
Working in UB’s miniature city of 20,000 students for 18 years, Simpson plays the role of a persistent gadfly who tweaks the community conscience with all the cleverness of a Madison Avenue spindoctor. Should the campus really be using and disposing of 1.5 million paper and styrofoam coffee cups each year? Shouldn’t its 8,000 computers be turned off when not in use? Why poison the campus’ sweeping green expanses with toxic chemicals to rid them of dandelions?
These are the kind of questions Walter Simpson constantly gives voice to, using any medium or forum he can grab—workshops, radio shows, letters to the editor, visual stunts. In doing so, he’s propelled UB to national prominence as an environmental leader among American university campuses. A few years back, he drew national attention for a project that will save UB $60 million in energy costs over 17 years.
“I think,” says former Erie County Legislator Joan K. Bozer, a longtime supporter of Simpson’s environmental quests at UB and elsewhere in the region, “that if Walter could somehow be made Czar of the Environment, we’d make real progress in cleaning up Western New York and making it a healthier place to live.”
The massive effort to redo Simpson’s home paid off, by the way. Today, the Simpson family’s maximum monthly gas bill is $80—$60 of that total for actual heating costs. Twenty-five percent of his home’s heating needs are met by the sun in a region where many people think it can’t be done. And thanks to the simple reconfiguration of windows in his home, it’s never necessary to turn on an electric light bulb in the house during normal daylight hours.
The thermostat in the Simpson household hovers at 63-64 degrees. Oddly enough, this is a comfortable temperature, because the walls never get cold as they do inside a typical home. During Buffalo’s most bitter months, the bank of windows on the house’s sunny south side provide an unusual feeling of connectedness to the natural sights outside—much like a Florida room without the energy waste.
The Simpsons use compact fluorescent light bulbs at home, which employ one-quarter the energy of a regular light bulb but provide the same light as a 60 watt lamp. They are more expensive, true, but they also last 10 times as long as a typical bulb. The Simpsons’ lawn mower is electric—quiet, efficient, and non-polluting. Their two compact cars get 40 mpg. Furnishings in the Simpson home have literally been pulled from a curbside or picked up at garage sales. Walter and his wife, Nan, adopted their two children—Jayson, 10, and Skye, 9—from Korea as babies because they desperately loved kids but didn’t want to contribute to the world population boom.
“Walter Simpson symbolizes what the environmental movement should be and must be if it is to succeed,” notes Paul MacClennan, the now-retired, longtime environmental writer for The Buffalo News. “He lives what he believes. His level of commitment is unique.”
UB’s Senior Vice President, Robert Wagner, can attest to that commitment. He recalls looking up from his desk one day during a holiday shutdown, when the number of people working on campus is severely restricted and thermostats are deliberately set at an uncomfortably chilly temperature to save money, and seeing Simpson poking around UB’s executive offices. “Everybody else was out enjoying the holiday season, and he personally came in to see that the campus energy policy was in effect,” Wagner said.
People on campus who identify with Walter Simpson see him as a crusader and champion. Others, Wagner said, believe he sometimes goes too far.
Many folks would reach for a pound of hamburger at the supermarket and think about how good it will taste when grilled. Simpson looks at that same pound of hamburger and thinks how energy-resource inefficient it is. It takes 15 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef, you see. “One hamburger has the energy equivalent of driving the family car 20 miles,” Simpson says. Just the facts, ma’am. That’s the way the energy czar is wired.
He stopped eating meat after a vegetarian friend gave him a little stray cat known as Bean. Time passed, and Simpson became hopelessly attached to the kitten. One day his vegetarian friend asked him: “Would you eat Bean?” “Of course not!” Simpson blurted out. “Well, why not?” the friend countered. Simpson could offer no rational argument to defend his distinction between animals he had been eating and Bean. After that, he never ate meat again.
Environmentalist. Animal rights supporter. Vegetarian. The labels stick to Walter Simpson, to be sure. But they can add up to a misleading caricature—a sort of humorless icon with a calculator smelling vaguely of the ‘60s and patchouli oil. Humorless, he is not. Simpson laughs loudly and often and has no trouble laughing at himself. The man also has a lot of poetry in his soul. Ask him about snow-hushed evenings he’s spent in Algonquin Park, dancing with his wife at midnight while wolves pad silently across a frozen lake.
Sometimes the labels and the list of causes seem so big, they tend to obscure the man. Sometimes even Walter Simpson wishes he could let them go for just a little while, so he could enjoy some of the things he’s spent most of his life protecting.
“There’s a sense as I get older that I am pre-empting my life,” Simpson says reflectively. “Why do I keep at it? I don’t know whether it’s a sense of empathy I have, but when things are wrong, when the earth is being damaged, I feel a personal pain front and center in my mind and heart. I can’t shake it. People of conscience have to ‘speak truth to power.’” It distresses Simpson deeply when he meets good people who care but don’t act. Caring is not enough.
How did a would-be nuclear physicist ever come to this?
Walter Simpson grew up in Maplewood, N.J., a town he describes as a fitting backdrop for Leave It to Beaver. Little Walter wanted nothing more fervently as a child than to be a scientist. Once he reached high school, Simpson earned the highest possible score on the SAT’s advanced placement exam in physics, and he ventured off to Lehigh University to become a nuclear physicist.
His freshman year, he ranked in the top 2 percent of his class, but his commitment to science started unraveling by his sophomore year. To him, it seemed his fellow engineering students cared mostly about house parties, getting drunk and squeaking by in class. There were bigger things going on in the world, and Simpson could not shake disturbing images of the Vietnam War he witnessed nightly on television. His parents were heartbroken when he switched his major to philosophy. In 1971 he graduated with honors from Boston University.
Simpson taught in UB’s and Daemen College’s philosophy department during the seventies while he pursued graduate studies in philosophy. By 1982, he had also earned a master’s degree in environmental studies from UB, concentrating on energy policy. Over the years, he has taught undergraduate courses in environmental ethics, world hunger, war and peace, social justice and nuclear arms.
In the late 1970s, Simpson became director of Western New York’s Peace Center, a church-affiliated, non-profit community group with a peace education focus. He once went nose to nose with Henry Kissinger for an hour in a Buffalo hotel room, hashing out ethical dilemmas of the Vietnam War. The Peace Center also bought one share of Honeywell stock, so Simpson and others could attend the corporation’s annual meeting and protest Honeywell’s role in making war weapons.
What could be more important, he thought, than ending the Vietnam War? And once the war ended, what could be more important than nuclear disarmament? Simpson lived and breathed these issues with the same exhausting tenacity that he later employed in tearing apart his house. It was during Simpson’s tenure at the Peace Center that he met Nan, the nurturing soulmate who shares his values but often acts as his emergency shutoff valve—forcing time-outs from what Simpson calls his “dance on the brink of burnout.”
Nan and Walter first worked together during a Peace Center campaign surrounding SALT, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Simpson’s workaholic level of commitment to SALT once led Nan to suggest that the acronym needed revising. “How about ‘Simpson’s Ambition Limitation Talks?’” she asked with a wry smile.
When children entered their lives, Simpson knew he would not be living quite as radically as he and Nan once did. Jayson and Skye needed living space, and that is what prompted the move to Meadowstream Ct.—a house which is still 500 square feet smaller than the average American home of 2,100 square feet.
Their children have been raised as vegetarians, but they go to McDonald’s like other kids to get french fries and milkshakes. At backyard birthday barbecues they simply tote along their vegetarian “not dogs.”
In addition to his job as UB’s Energy Officer, Simpson continues to teach. Students adore his energy and antics. He’s currently an instructor in UB’s Social Sciences Interdisciplinary Program and he supervises environmental internships on an ongoing basis.
Meghan Fay, a 21-year-old senior at UB, has worked alongside Simpson since her sophomore year, when he interviewed her on a radio show and she subsequently attempted a “Dumpster Dive.” The activity involved sorting out the contents of a campus dumpster to illustrate the amount of waste that could be salvaged for recycling and other purposes. Fay was hooked. Now she and a group of students involved in the UB Green office monitor six recycling centers on the twin campuses. The project will eventually be expanded to include 20 sites, then 50.
Simpson and his current crop of students recently launched a “Think Green” campaign, published “UB’s Little Green Book,” and set up a new website to promote environmental stewardship at http://wings.buffalo.ed/ubgreen.
Fay says she’s proud of her work on these initiatives. “Hopefully, it’s generating some buzz,” she says.
Meanwhile, Simpson keeps launching more projects—like pushing for environmentally responsible energy deregulation, or promoting green building design for the new Buffalo Convention Center, or protesting the clear-cutting of trees on UB’s north campus to build new student housing.
It seems like Walter Simpson just can’t stop putting his house in order — whether it’s his personal or his global living space. If you ask him, they’re one and the same.
Irene Liguori is a well-traveled Southern transplant who maintains that she wouldn't live anywhere else but Buffalo. She is a former reporter for The Buffalo News and the Courier-Express.
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