Susan Campbell
Susan Campbell is an award-winning environmental journalist, author, and communications specialist. She covered the Fox River and Green Bay cleanup controversy from 1995 through 2000 as environmental reporter for the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Her extensive Fox River reporting won national and state honors, including a national “Best of Gannett” award for specialty reporting in 1997; an enterprise reporting award from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association in 1997; beat, staff enterprise, and specialty reporting awards from Gannett in 1997, 1998, and 2000; and a spot news award from the Milwaukee Press Club in 1999. The Fox River stories were also honored by the local Green Bay community, earning the “Conservation of Natural Resources Award” from the Green Bay Mayor’s Beautification Committee and the “Clean Bay Backer Award” from the Remedial Action Plan Committee.
Campbell is also co-author of Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise, (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002) with the late Earth Day founder U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson. Her articles have appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Psychology Today and Journal of Soil and Water Conservation. She’s shared her passion for local newspapers as an adjunct journalism instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, and for the environment as a public speaker in classrooms and at Earth Day events.
After her newspaper career, Campbell championed Great Lakes protections, notably passage of the landmark Great Lakes Compact, as communications manager for the Chicago-based Alliance for the Great Lakes. In 2017 she branched out to focus on sustainable real estate, promoting energy efficiency in homes and working to raise the profile of sustainable homes nationally as a founding member of the National Association of REALTORS’ Sustainability Advisory Group.
“A lot of people think that in order to be attractive, you need to appear cool, together or confident. But REAL confidence comes from accepting yourself as you are, and sharing the real you. When you share you do so simply in the interest of being transparent and not trying to get a certain favorable response. Letting go of trying to control other peoples' responses to you is one of the greatest confidence-builders I know of. And from my own experience, I have come to the conclusion that I am most lovable when I am most transparent.”
“So you raise up a few generations of young girls, telling them that they should step to the back of the bus, ingrain that in their psyche, preach it to them from the pulpit, hold up as ideal examples women doing precisely that, and in a few years, you can step back; you need say no more. Your work is done, because you have carefully created a herd of women who know and even begrudgingly accept that their place is secondary, just outside the limelight, clapping for and cheering on the important people who were never taught to put others first.”
“When your heart speaks, take good notes.”