Couple thoughts about Jim MacInnes of Crystal Mountain

Photo, from left: Aaron Wissner, Richard Heinberg, Jim MacInnes


I just spent Friday night and all day Saturday at a conference called Michigan’s Future: Energy, Economy and Environment. I’ll write a few posts in coming days about some of the specific presentations, but I wanted to kick things off with a few thoughts about one of the organizers, Jim MacInnes, CEO of Crystal Mountain, the ski resort just southwest of Traverse City where the conference was held.

Most people know Jim MacInnes as the man who, along with his wife, Chris, operates one of Michigan’s premier ski resorts. And anybody who has tracked the arc of Crystal Mountain’s growth in the past 20 years can’t help but be impressed by the quality of the operation and the intellect that is apparently behind it.

For most business people, running an operation like that would be plenty enough to keep busy. But MacInnes has another side to his life that he also feeds. Earlier in his career, MacInnes was an electrical power engineer, helping run nuclear power plants on the West Coast. He left that career when he married Chris and moved to Northern Michigan, but he retains a passionate and intellectual fascination with energy and its role in the world, in our culture, on us as individuals. He told me last night (with a bright light in his eye) that the most fascinating book on his bookshelf is Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil. (As part of full disclosure here, I wrote about hazardous waste and low-level radioactive waste issues for nearly ten years in my previous job, so I have a fine appreciation for people into nerd topics like this.)

One kind of flaw of many environmental conferences is that they tend to attract only one half of the dialog: engineers in suits on the one hand, the granola set on the other. But when MacInnes and his partner in the conference, Aaron Wissner, sat down to plan the Michigan’s Future, they wanted a conference that would bring well informed voices from all layers of the debate. So here, on a gray November Saturday, opening day of deer season, actually, the CEO of energy giant DTE (also former chair of the nuclear power industry’s trade association) was presenting just prior to Richard Heinberg, an internationally renowned researcher and author on the topic of peak oil and what the end of the oil era means to humanity. (Heinberg, by the way, also says that the fuel for nuclear power plants, uranium, will also peak by about 2050, so we can’t expect nuke plants to bail us out). And in a concurrent session, farmers were talking about how returning to a system of locally grown foods is central to our future.

The only thing I might have done to improve the idea sharing was to make a rule that anybody wearing a suit was not allowed to listen to a speaker wearing a suit and anybody wearing Birkenstocks was not allowed to listen to anybody wearing Birkenstocks. Point: people still tended to go to sessions of like-minded people, despite MacInnes’s and Wissner’s best efforts. (Dang that human nature.) Still, there were many great combined sessions.

So, didn’t mean to go on an on about this. Just wanted to share some insight about one of Northern Michigan’s more interesting leaders. Something to think about next time you settle into the Clipper chairlift at Crystal Mountain and consider that the MacInneses purchased enough power from a windmill Out West to offset the power it takes to run the high-speed quad lift. -- Jeff Smith, Editor