We Are Upstate NY With Nature Advocate Todd Spire

Having spent the last two decades in creative brand development and marketing, Todd has honed his skills as a director, copywriter, photographer and more. Yet tucked beneath the veneer of a once city-slicking entrepreneur with some impressive global brands in his wake, a polymath, Todd is also a fine artist, writer, community builder, musician, altruist, fly fishing guide, fishing instructor and impassioned Mother Nature advocate.

Yep, all that, and we are thrilled to announce Todd will be a regular contributor to INSIDE+OUT, writing about Nature, fishing and exploring the Hudson Valley. We invite you to get to know Todd Spire in our exclusive interview. Let’s get started!

INSIDE+OUT: Were you always as impassioned about Mother Nature and her stewardship or was there a precipitating event that happened later in your life?

Todd Spire: I grew up in suburban New Jersey, a few miles south of the New York State border, but I was lucky enough to see the end of a time when development had not yet taken over the landscape. Farms and apple orchards were abundant and I was close to parks like Harriman, which were formative in my obsession with the outdoors. A local zoo at Van Saun Park, as well as local wildlife centers, helped keep me fascinated with Nature. My true Shangri-La, however, was Vermont. I had family there and I’d spend a few weeks with my grandparents every summer. I knew early on that I’d eventually live in the mountains. Even in my teens, I began amassing items “for the cabin” of my adulthood. Scouting became my suburban proxy. Summer camps like Yaw Paw in Mahwah, NJ, became my local Vermont, where camping and fishing were the activities that best allowed me to emulate a vision of my future years. Almost every day after school, I’d do my paper route and bike to Saddle River to fish for trout.

Clearly, fly fishing is one of your great loves. What is it about that sport/ballet that you most appreciate?

It’s a long list, but there are two parts of the fly fishing experience that I am most grateful for. One is the sheer complexity. Like meditation, the amount of mental focus required to be a good angler is a wonderful tool to calm the racing of my type-A brain. For me, tossing a worm into a pond isn’t complicated enough to drown out the noise. I enjoy being extremely active throughout the process. You’re not waiting for the fish to hit; you’re fine-tuning your mind’s control of your body’s movements in an effort to make the fish take the fly. Awareness of every riffle, every passing insect, every bird and every movement helps round out the skill set. I joke that it’s only 700 things to do at once… no big deal. My other appreciation is what I call the petting zoo. While fishing isn’t devoid of its impacts on the fish we catch, fly fishing is one of the least detrimental ways one can actually touch an animal in the wild.

When did you first start fly fishing? Can you describe that experience?

I’ve been addicted to fishing for most of my life. College and a few years after kept me in cities where I drifted from it, but I left NYC less than a year after 9/11, moved to Beacon and re-ignited my love for fishing within a few weeks. I’ve been non-stop for over 20 years. When I moved to the Catskills (2008), I immediately took up fly fishing because it seemed sacrilegious to throw lures into the fabled waters of the Catskills.

What brought you to the Catskills and did you immediately live here full time or mostly visit as a Weekender?

Ironically, I’d visited Phoenicia around 2003 because one of my fishing friends found out that the Esopus had wild rainbow trout. We didn’t even fish, as it was off-season, but we came up from Beacon to check out the river. When I was looking to buy my first home, an old fishing cabin a stone’s throw from the Esopus, it was just the right price at just the right time. It is a little bit of a coincidence, but everything is as it should be. It was winter 2007 when I bought the house, but it was seasonal and shut down, so I had to wait until spring. I was already a freelance designer working remotely with occasional trips to NYC to visit clients. The cabin had high-speed internet, so I immediately moved up full-time.

You spent the last 20 years as an entrepreneur in creative brand development and marketing as a director, copywriter, as well as photographer. Was it a struggle to wear and balance all those hats, especially when your real passion was Nature? Did those things sometimes feel discordant?

I studied contemporary painting at art schools in the northeast, so the notion of being entrepreneurial was inherent in what I’d envisioned as my life’s path. Of course, “Life’s path” comes with bills, so I fell into commercial arts as a graphic designer. Luckily, I landed in NYC in the late 90s. It was the birth of “tech” and the forefront of the emergence of the internet as a marketing tool for businesses. The new focus on how businesses appeared meant that making brands and their websites look engaging was just as important as how their products or services actually performed. The creative team led everything, so it was a very rewarding time to be in NYC. Moving to the Hudson Valley and my rejuvenated relationship with the outdoors brought about some internal conflict, but I fell back to my childhood patterns: work hard, then run to the river.

You’re an advocate for cold-water fisheries and waterways throughout the region. Thanks to an organization you’ve been a part of, Trout Unlimited (while keeping up on our local water advocacy groups such as Riverkeeper, The Hudson River Watershed Alliance and Scenic Hudson), are things improving, or is there still much work to be done?

I do think that the increase in the public’s level of interest has brought positive change to local systems. There’s always work to be done but I think water issues are particularly tough. We are extremely water-rich in the northeast, so our never-ending supply of nearly perfect tap water creates a level of apathy. When something interferes with that supply, we react with a point-source determination and fine whoever is to blame. In fact, that’s our country’s general approach to dealing with environmental problems. Determine the level of damage any one project will or has created and legislate the fines. That’s not conservation. Conservation is a long-tail approach to ensuring future generations have access to a similar level of environmental resources. That takes a tremendous amount of education, which turns into actions at the individual level and corporate levels. Sound bite reporting makes it even more complex for laypeople to make intelligent decisions about particular issues.

Furthermore, the level of outright misinformation I see in reporting watershed conservation issues has become very frustrating for me to observe. Some of it comes from the skewed language of the parties involved, some from poor (or biased) reporting and some from the fact that the issues are simply too complex to encapsulate into objective reports. This is a problem for which I’m actively seeking solutions.

You also worked with the Coalition for the Homeless as a Shelter Monitor. Tell us about that, and did you see the demographics in the shelter change much since you started?

I became a shelter monitor for the Coalition for the Homeless in 2001 after the Twin Towers fell. I read The Mole People by Jennifer Toth, which is about people living in the abandoned 2nd Avenue NYC Subway tunnel and immediately volunteered. I had no idea what I was entering into. Still, it definitely set me on a path of both volunteerism and a deep interest in non-profit organizations, which became the core of my client base during my professional career. I care about nature and I care about people. I feel powerless about big-picture topics, so I tend to focus on quality-of-life issues. Access to and our relationship with Nature are loosely connected to homelessness in my mind. To me, the forest is a place I could live, but that’s not realistic. Helping to empower people in their efforts to escape the shelter system felt like I was catalyzing the nomadic instincts of individuals who needed profound levels of strength to change their situations. Rock bottom is inherently primal, like our need for time in Nature.

You established the first artist studio complex in Beacon, NY, which provided studio rentals and free gallery space for artists. What social impact did it end up having? And, what sets you on the path of service and altruism–what fuels that passion?

I’d self-identify as a community builder, but there’s something interesting I’ve observed over my years – a funny component of community behavior. When you move from participant to organizer, you immediately become “the man.” I first noticed this in Beacon. I arrived as an artist who fled post-911 NYC to a town with, at the time, fifteen or so artists. We all had a need for inexpensive studio space. I contacted a commercial building owner to see if I could rent a bit of their warehouse. They convinced me to run it as a complex and take the whole lease. I did it willingly in an effort to help the blossoming arts community. Yet, I was almost immediately stripped of my public identity as an artist. You become accountable for things you had nothing to do with. Putting yourself into a position of helping others means, in the eyes of the public, that you’re putting yourself into a position of power. Sticking your neck out gets it chopped off, but I was raised with a strong sense of personal identity and self-confidence, so I take the licks. Conservation is no different. There will always be someone with a dissenting opinion, but armchair activism accomplishes very little and I’d like to feel like I’m making change. I’m not trying to martyr myself as much as acknowledging that it takes courage to be altruistic. It’s strangely not valued by our society and I see why people shy away from service. Even the most well-intentioned actors can lose their compass. Extrapolate this into politics at your own peril.

While you have worn many hats in your life, it seems you have only recently begun to take your writing career seriously. Why the shift and what about this greater focus excites you?

Much like my ideals of living in the mountains, I’d always envisioned that my creative path would eventually take me to writing. It seems the hardest creative act one can do. It’s awfully private and the hurdle of getting feedback from others is high. As a painter, you can get a studio visit from someone you trust, a gallerist or a curator. The immediacy of the feedback can instantly influence you. Asking someone to read an unfinished work is almost cruel. I knew it would take half a lifetime before I’d feel ready to write seriously. I wrote a lot of poetry when I was younger but eventually rejected poetry as too simplistic. Now I write haikus for the challenge.

If you could impart one particular lesson to children en masse, what would it be?

What a great question – TY! Seek a deep connection with Mother Nature and observe how you react to your soul’s conflict with the division between your time in “the real world” and your time outside. That conflict is a metaphor for every challenge you will face in the decision-making parts of your life. It is at odds with itself and is quite simply, irreconcilable. We are inherently complex creatures. Navigating the complexity of irreconcilable ideas is the very nature of being human, not being convinced (or convincing others) that one or the other is the correct way to be or think.

Photos by Joanna Lentini

Stay tuned for Todd’s Stories on INSIDE+OUT UPSTATE NY
Follow Todd Spire > Website Esopus Creel | @toddspire

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Click HERE to see all of our exclusive interviews with the amazing folks who proudly call the Hudson Valley home.