Malcolm and Pamela Baldwin
I caught Malcolm Baldwin pruning his grape vines. Earlier in the day, he had to bury his ram Aeneas. Malcolm and his wife Pamela founded the Weatherlea Farm near Lovettsville in 1992 and they grow grapes for vintners and shear sheep for the wool.
Malcolm is active in the Loudoun Wine Growers Association and the Loudoun Valley Sheep Producers Association.
But this year he wants to grow enough votes so that he can represent the Catoctin District on the Board of Supervisors. He seeks to succeed Sally Kurtz who is retiring from the Board. His opponent is the Republican candidate, Geary Higgins from nearby Waterford.
Malcolm has always been interested in public affairs but he said he first got really concerned about Loudoun County when Scott York won election as the Chairman of the Board of Supervisors in 2004 and the Board then “took York’s County-wide mandate and made a shambles of it.” The Board gave the Chairman’s authority to the Vice-Chair instead. “This was totally contrary to what the voters expected,” Malcolm said, “it was a real disservice to the community.”
In response, Malcolm started appearing and testifying before the Board of Supervisors with some regularity. He joined the Board of the Piedmont Environmental Council (“PEC”), because the Board of Supervisors had “rejected a host of smart growth management strategies.” The Community was “endangered,” Malcolm said, by the Board’s “one-dimensional development approach, too many houses in the transition zone, requiring public services that the County couldn’t pay for, and the Board’s attitude was that the public be damned.”
“The problem then and now is we’ve forgotten how to talk with one another,” Malcolm said. “There is a polarization at the national and county level, although,” Malcolm said, “I believe it’s less here.”
Malcolm had a chance to work for community harmony when, with others in the community, he led the charge to stop the dirty coal power transmission line that PATH proposed to run through West Virginia, Loudoun County and Maryland so that PATH could sell this energy in the Northeast, and not even in this region.
This was going to be “destructive over the properties it passed, have a degrading effect on appearance and value,” said Malcolm, but, more than that, “we didn’t need the power line. PATH needed the line to make a profit, but the people didn’t.”
Malcolm is proud how “the community worked together, from diverse jurisdictions and various groups including the PEC, the Sierra Club, and Friends of the Earth; there was also the County government, and not just Loudoun; also landowners even those not directly affected got involved, they all pitched in,” said Malcolm. “I still run into some who don’t know that we stopped this power line,” Malcolm said. “We got an outcome we can all be proud of.”
Malcolm was tireless in that campaign, holding meetings in churches, the library, and at his Wetherlea Farm to teach, confer and discuss how to meet this offensive intrusion by PATH.
It’s ironic that Malcolm’s Dad was a public utility executive in upstate New York.
“My Dad believed, however,” said Malcolm, “that a public utility was intended to serve the public, not the other way around.”
“I remember,” Malcolm said, “when someone couldn’t pay their power bill and the power was cut off. They’d call my Dad at home. He’d ask them to come down to the office with a small deposit and turn their power back on.”
“It’s funny,” Malcolm said, “when my Dad retired from the public utility company, he joined the Town Planning Board. He did it as another form of public service. He didn’t get paid. Now here I am, retired, standing for office, doing the same thing.”
“When I was young,” Malcolm said, “I read a biography of John Adams and it had a profound influence on me; ever since I’ve been interested in politics, inspired by Adams’ selflessness, and by his noble pursuit.”
“What I learned from the PATH encounter,” Malcolm said, “was that you get the facts right, put emotions to the side, hold off your pre-conceptions, work together with differing views in good faith, and conduct an analysis of your alternatives and the best possible outcomes.”
“In PATH,” Malcolm said, “if the facts had been against us, as to whether or not a power line was needed, then those facts would have dictated a different outcome; but we got it right.”
Asked about his farming, Malcolm said he had always liked the country.
As a kid, he lived in western New York, in Rochester, in a house built by his great grand-father; it was “a modest farm house.”
After Haverford College, he went to law school. Malcolm planned to be a country lawyer in Vermont. “I liked the small town atmosphere,” Malcolm said. “I thought I’d enjoy that.”
He went to Chicago Law School, an especially prestigious school of law, well regarded for its influence on the economic analysis of the law.
“You got a good education there; it had the advantage of being a small class,” Malcolm said. “There weren’t any classes on the environment then, but I did attend a class in urban planning.”
Malcolm didn’t become a country lawyer in Vermont, he got detoured to Washington, DC instead, where he interned at the Pentagon in the General Counsel’s Office.
He walked into Brentano’s book store in the Pentagon one day, and saw a book titled, “Outdoor America.” Malcolm thought, “I want to do that.” He bought the book but never read it. He lived it instead, focused on the environment for many years afterwards.
He first got hired at the Conservation Foundation, and thus began a 38 year career in environmental law that took him from the Environmental Law Institute that he helped found to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), a division of the Executive Office of the President.
The agency was created in 1969 during President Nixon’s Administration, as a part of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and its purpose was to coordinate federal environmental efforts with agencies and other White House offices and to develop environmental and energy policies and initiatives. It was a simple principle, i.e., virtually every action by the government can have some effect on the environment.
Malcolm was CEQ’s Acting Chairman during the Reagan Administration.
NEPA and CEQ arose out of necessity. Malcolm said, “Very few lawyers knew how to deal with Love Canal and the CEQ and companion legislation was a creative answer to a most difficult set of questions.”
During the recent flap over the health of our streams in Loudoun County, Malcolm reverted to form, seeking how to harmonize the poor condition of our streams with a solution that was fair and just to the community. In a recent debate with Geary Higgins, Malcolm said he wasn’t in favor of the original proposal but thought that the final version of the ordinance that the Board of Supervisors considered did resolve his concerns about cost and inconvenience to the landowners while helping to ameliorate water quality issues.
Malcolm repeatedly emphasized that finding the facts and putting ideology aside were the first steps in making public policy. For example, he questioned the sense of a corridor of state significance through Loudoun West of Dulles airport if Maryland opposed any crossing into Maryland. As for schools, Malcolm said we can’t have $100 million schools if we’re going to have even more students in the next generation. From what he’s learned from his own farm, Malcolm feels he knows what other food and wine farmers need, and it’s keeping the land open and productive to generate revenue.
Malcolm said he hopes to be elected so he can say four years later, at the end of his first term, that “we had a strongly cooperative board where we reached decisions based on good analysis and understanding and avoided the ideological polarization that has plagued this country and we worked cooperatively with the school board with the same spirit.”
Asked if that was possible, he said, “I think that is possible and the results will be some good wise decisions.”
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