EVOLVE OR DIE: Environmentalism in the 21st Century

 Posted by at 6:52 pm  Culture, National Politics, Sonoma County
Feb 282013
 

TimesUpHippies2The environmental movement of the latter half of the 20th century is dying. And as a product and member of that movement, I say, not a minute too soon.

Don’t get me wrong. We have a lot for which to thank the green movement that arose in force during the Sixties. Without towering achievements like the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and countless other federal, state and local reinings-in of pollution, waste, and annihilation of habitat supporting biodiversity, our world would be vastly worse off.

Unfortunately, like so much that arose out of the Sixties, the era of environmental activism that is now passing away was based more on romantic notions than on practical and scientific realities. And now that time has moved on and younger generations do not, by and large, share those same romantic notions, we are threatened with a future in which protection and stewardship of the environment will dwindle as public support is lost.

Though there were certainly scientific reasons for the concerns being expressed by such Boomer-era environmental drivers as Rachel Carson and the David Brower-era Sierra Club, their articulated arguments were not couched in those terms. They were emotional appeals. Those coffee-table books featuring magnificent, endangered landscapes and adorable or noble charismatic species struck a chord in a Cold War public increasingly aware of the dark side of advancing technological progress, and painted a Muir-style romantic image of “Nature” as Out There: in the wild lands, far from humans, precious and endangered. As a result, millions of acres were protected as federal and state lands and parks. Nature-lovers flocked to hike, backpack, raft and otherwise enjoy these wild places.

There were those who loved and romanticized Nature prior to the 1960s, of course. But they were few, and viewed as cranks. Their signature, remarkable accomplishment was the invention of the national park, for which we must be ever grateful. But they were not a mass movement until a poetic idea of the Earth as a beloved, unified entity–what some claimed is even a single, intelligent organism–seized the imaginations of young people in reaction against their parents’ technologically enthusiastic, militaristic consumer society in the late 1960s, surging into the public imagination with the first full-Earth pictures relayed back by Apollo 8.

While there is certainly plenty of truth to describing wild lands as magnificent and rich with the fabric of life, it also had the effect of defining “the environment” as Somewhere Out There…rather than here, around us, all the time. By falling in line with the Sixties’ counterculture’s anti-societal ethos and evoking a romantic idea of Simpler Olden Times When Humans Lived More In Harmony With The Earth (particularly, lionizing with grossly oversimplified stereotypes the lifeways of native peoples) the environmental movement that rose to effective power at the end of the 1960s was the age-old-story of Man Against Nature, but rooting for the other team. It was the romantic mentality of the “back-to-the-landers”, rendered as a social movement.

Exacerbating this problem for us today is that one of the primary cultural legacies of the Sixties has been a wholesale cultural turning away from reason and science, suspiciously viewing these as the modalities and tools of authoritarian institutions, corporate greed, and engineered destruction. As a result, we have seen both on the left and right a tremendous surge in superstition, confirmation bias, junk, fringe- and pseudoscience accepted as fact, and paranoid conspiracy theories…be they about President Obama’s birth certificate, or the mortal dangers of water fluoridation.

Now, this is not to say that the modern environmental movement does not include many who are scientifically educated and literate, and who use the best available information in crafting proposed actions and policies. But this group tends to operate within institutions like established wildlife habitat restoration and land conservation organizations, academic institutions and policy think tanks. These informed and careful experts are often out of step, however, and even sometimes attacked by less educated grassroots activists, because they do not provide support for these activists’ more extreme theories.

The True Believers of the Sixties are fading away. Muir/Thoreau/Abbey-style Nature romantics who frame every proposal they don’t like as an environmental disaster belong to a generation now averaging over 60 years old, and their values have not penetrated to the youth of today. If theirs is the modality of operation and the mentality we continue to call “environmentalism”, environmentalism will die as a significant political and social movement.

Today’s generation does not view technology with suspicion. It spends most of its life engaging with it and interacting through it. Whether or not we want to face it, today’s youth feels little motivation to put on a backpack and hit the trail. Attendance at state and national parks has plummeted, and when you look at the number of people going to the back country, it is even lower. Those who do are overwhelmingly older, rather than younger.

The transition isn’t just in relation to technology. It’s demographic: a whole lot more of today’s young people come from backgrounds other than the white middle class suburbia from which most Boomer-generation environmentalists emerged. That’s just a fact.

Rather than beating the dead horse of values the young mostly do not share, if we want advocacy for the environment to persist it will have to become relevant to them. Environmentalism must evolve, or it will die.

Central to that evolution must be heightened emphasis on ecosystem services such as integrity of food webs and biodiversity, carbon sequestration, watershed function and other operations of the natural world which have a direct nexus with human needs, as opposed to wilderness preservation in remote areas. We all need to eat. We all need to breathe. We can still advocate for preserving wilderness from the standpoint of watershed functions, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, etc., but if our talk continues to be rooted in Muir/Brower “glory of Nature” rhetoric and the expectation we can lure popular support with the prospect of wilderness recreation opportunities that fewer and fewer of us are seeking, we’re going nowhere.

And, fellow greenies, we also have to stop indulging or participating in so-called “environmentalism” that is really just self-interested obstructionism. We need to call out the difference when opponents of change (and it is always opponents, not proponents, isn’t it?)  use environmental protection laws as a cudgel. We need to distance ourselves from fringe- and pseudoscience. We need to accept that all actions have impacts, and that this alone is not an argument never to do anything. The question is what will be impacted, and the significance of that impact. If the debate at hand is about which store goes into an already-existing mall, it’s up to us to point out that there may be reasons to oppose the project, but they are not environmental reasons.

Environmental reasons are rooted in air, water and soil quality; biodiversity; minimizing waste; efficient use of resources such as energy and water, and moving toward lower-impact ways of sustaining ourselves. That’s all.  Fighting a multi-family in-fill housing project in your neighborhood when what you really care about is parking convenience and the prospect that (gasp!) some brown people might try to live near you isn’t environmentalism. Opposing a more natural flow regime in managing a dam and claiming your concern is for fish and wildlife–when what you’re really concerned about is tourism-related business downstream–isn’t environmentalism.

In my home town a few years ago, a specific plan–mind you, just a plan, not a project–was proposed which would have set standards for developing mixed-use, higher density, transit and pedestrian-friendly projects in an area adjacent to the downtown, on lands currently occupied by decaying light industrial buildings.

The town went berserk. And self-styled “environmentalists” killed the plan.

Now, by no stretch of the imagination was theirs an effort in defense of or to augment the natural world. The existing policies applying to the area allowed more filling of nearby wetlands than did the proposed ones. Residents of the housing units would have been within walking distance of three grocery stores, a drug store, a farmers market, a post office, a movie theater, shops and restaurants and the town’s hub for regional transit. They would have been able to live a nearly car-free lifestyle. Everything about the plan was the kind of thing environmentalists around here say they support.

But only, apparently, if it is built somewhere else.

We have to stop this, folks. It’s shameful. Because what we’re showing the next generation is an “environmentalism” that lies about its real motivations while claiming to speak for the Earth in romantic, unreasonable, technophobic and often hysterically irrational terms.

There are projects well worth opposing. There are areas that should be protected rather than being allowed to intensify in land use. Zoning, land use, water and transportation planning and enforcement are good things. But they are abused every  bit as much when they are twisted to prevent change out of knee-jerk, reactionary opposition to anything new as they are when policy makers rubber-stamp exceptions to them to allow destructive activities to go forward.

We environmentalists were among the first to recognize the very serious problems homo sapiens was creating by fouling its nest. We bear a responsibility to be problem-solvers rather than reactionaries, to accept that some of our comforts are probably going to have to be let go for the greater good. Environmentalism can no longer be a luxury of the privileged, nor a movement primarily focused on defending that luxury. We have to make caring about the biosphere a practical, common-good ethos that includes a place for those who are never going to go backpacking, couldn’t care less whether there continue to be polar bears, and are not afraid of cell phone towers.

We are in the Earth and of the Earth. Our task is to figure out how to keep the biosphere livable for humanity–all of humanity–and for as rich a diversity of organisms as is practically possible.

Note the “practically”.

We must be thoughtful, well-informed, realistic, and embrace positive change. And we must distance ourselves from those who do not meet that standard but claim our mantle.

We must evolve, before we die.

 At publication, the Dragon was TELLING IT LIKE IT IS

The Republican Civil War is Here

 Posted by at 4:43 pm  National Politics
Nov 112012
 

Months ago, when I first launched Green Dragon, I wrote a post about the implications for the future of the Republican Party of the effectiveness of the Obama campaign’s critiques of Bain Capital and its vulture capitalism. I said a civil war within the Republican Party was coming…one that would make the Tea Party split look like a garden picnic.

Well, it’s here.

Each of the GOP’s three major blocs is reeling, trying to make sense of a campaign result it did not anticipate and which flies in the face of its core beliefs. With the reelection of the President, trouncing of anti-abortion candidates and unprecedented approvals both of marriage equality and election of openly gay legislators, Republicans now know that 2008 wasn’t a fluke. It appears finally to be dawning on conservatives that their imagined version of the United States simply is not real.

Take the Christian right, for example, who seem at last to be figuring out that they do not represent the values of most Americans. Their internal narrative has always been that if they can just get out their message, most Americans will agree with them. But this time they turned out more than ever, and issues like women’s rights to contraception and abortion and gay rights were front-and-center in the national campaign narrative. And they got their clocks cleaned.

I think many of them are now realizing that America isn’t what they always thought it was. Some have begun thinking that they don’t want to be Americans any more (though they wouldn’t say it that way)…instead, they want to carve themselves away from the places that aren’t “real” America, and create that imaginary Christian Murikkka they’ve always hoped for.

All three of the major GOP constituencies are in a world of hurt and confusion. The Plutocrats got nothing out of all that Citizens United spending; the Teahaddists saw broad support for a party that put itself squarely behind higher taxes on the rich as well as progressive social issues…and now they’re having to listen to party leadership opining that they must make common cause with a buncha dirty Meskins in order to have a prayer of succeeding.

This is a storm long brewing, and it is definitely here. None of these constituencies has anywhere to turn in a quest for a return to national political viability that doesn’t put a dagger through its most cherished nonnegotiables: backing away from attacks on women’s health rights and civil equality for the Christian conservatives; accepting higher taxation and regulation of industry and markets for the corporatist Plutocrats; abandoning racism and extremist positions on taxation and the role of government for the Tea-Party types.

I don’t see any of them but the Plutocrats being smart or realistic enough to be able to make those moves. Sure enough, today Bill Kristol says that raising taxes on millionaires won’t destroy the country. Not that Kristol is either smart or realistic—in fact, he’s so reliably wrong that when he says this, it give me pause—but he’s a sure indicator of what the Rulers of the Universe are willing to go for.

For 40 years, Republicans have succeeded by feeding voters a steady diet of dog-whistle racism, empty gestures to social conservatives, and anti-government rhetoric, all the while taking a wrecking ball to our national institutions, previously inviolable values, and the very Constitution itself. It was a strategy of division, and now it has come home to roost: increasingly in the minority, Republicans are divided not only from the majority of the country, but from one another.

I wouldn’t say it is what they deserve, because frankly, those who devised and pursued this strategy deserve far worse. But I will say this: it’s about damned time most of the country can see how bloody awful these people really are.

At publication, the Dragon was EATING POPCORN

Sonoma County Conservation Action: A History Pt. 2

 Posted by at 4:34 pm  Sonoma County
Sep 262012
 

This is the second installment of a multi-part history of Sonoma County Conservation Action, a political organization I helped to form and lead. The first part is here.

Pitch and Launch

When I returned to San Francisco at the end of 1990, I called Bill Kortum and proposed that we launch what would turn out to be the first county-scale, locally-focused canvass organizing operation in the country. I was 29.

Bill was still interested in the idea. He convened a meeting of local activists at his home—as I recall, it was Bill, Dick Day, Len Swenson, Juliana Doms, and Bob Higham—and I presented my idea to them. While by no means convinced, they were intrigued. They, after all, hadn’t seen what a canvass could do, as Bill and I had. Still, they respected Bill tremendously. Maybe he and the kid were onto something.

Bill began raising seed money while I prepared to move back to Sonoma County. An initial board of directors was convened comprised of Bill, Dick, Juliana, Allen James of Windsor, and Joan Vilms of Santa Rosa. They approved the name I proposed for the organization: Sonoma County Conservation Action.

By April of 1991, I was again living in Santa Rosa, had found office space, had a logo designed, secured workers’ comp and liability insurance, and was busily creating the forms, operating procedures, employee manual, canvassing and training materials, and accounting and information management systems necessary to administer the new organization. Bill and Lucy Kortum donated a computer: a Macintosh 512k that had been upgraded to a Mac Plus; it was already a museum piece by that time. Les and Audrey Ayres donated the first canvass car: a  red 1974 Volvo station wagon. If there had been any doubt that this was a grassroots, bootstrap effort, the car and computer put that to rest.

Then it was just a matter of building a canvass crew. Which, for those who haven’t done it, is a near-Herculean task. Canvassing is stressful, poorly paid, and requires a person who is intelligent, articulate, personable, and able to let a great deal of rejection roll off her or his back. During my tenure, we had 32 canvass applicants for every one who successfully completed the three stages of application and training to become a Conservation Action staff member. That’s a lot of time and energy invested in interviewing and training people who end up falling short, but it’s how you build an effective organizing team.

On September 9, 1991, trainee Lew Brown by my side, I stepped up to a house on the corner of Starburst Ct. and Starr Road in Windsor, knocked, and recruited the first member of Conservation Action.

Walking down the driveway filling out my stats sheet, I remember thinking, that woman just wrote a $25 check to an organization that only exists on paper, with the promise of a newsletter, a report card on local officials, and election endorsements, none of which yet exist. All because she supports a vision of democracy, public participation, and loyalty to what makes this place so special.

…This can work.

Soon, Lew (who had prior canvassing experience) would successfully complete training to become my first field manager. The days were packed: Mornings, I interviewed applicants and scheduled training days; evenings, I took out new trainees to canvass. I kept up with accounting and data entry after our return to the office. We were on our way.

SCCA’s very first campaign opposed the proposed incorporation of Windsor, a suburban-density region of the county between Santa Rosa and Healdsburg. The development/Chamber of Commerce crowd were all for it, and with good reason: the transition terms the county was offering to the prospective new city were so meager—and the area’s tax base was so small—that if incorporated, the new city would have been the land use equivalent of a crack baby, dependent on constantly approving more development in order to generate permitting fees to pay its bills.

We campaigned hard with our little crew, built a Windsor membership of hundreds of households, and heard strong support for our slow growth message. But many voters felt that the county had betrayed and ignored them, and believed they would have a better chance with local control. We lost.

Ironically, it turned out that though we couldn’t have known it, we were on the wrong side. The newly incorporated Town of Windsor sued the county over its transition terms, and they won, giving the new Town much more favorable conditions for getting up on its feet. By 1996, when SCCA-backed candidates took a majority on the Town Council, Windsor was on its way to becoming what is arguably the most forward-thinking, environmentally-oriented municipality in Sonoma County from a land use standpoint, with a revitalized “smart growth” downtown, a tightly drawn Urban Growth Boundary, and growth management and design ordinances to make growth orderly, more compact, reasonably paced, and attractive.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Despite falling short, we could see that our program had frightened and confused the political establishment in Windsor. The press rhetoric of the pro-incorporation campaign about Conservation Action’s canvassing grew increasingly hysterical as what they thought was a slam dunk became a competitive election. We even caught one candidate for the Town Council stealing anti-incorporation lawn signs and stashing them in the pro-incorporation office. We called the cops; she drove away before they could get there.

Those who were accustomed to calling the shots in local politics clearly did not understand the new phenomenon. They believed that if they smeared us in the press and ignored us politically, our public support would dwindle, and we would disappear.

Mobilizing the Grassroots Voice

Following the November 1991 special election in Windsor, Conservation Action launched its first letter-writing campaign, mobilizing hundreds of letters from Petaluma residents to the state Public Utilities Commission in opposition to their city’s plan to privatize its sewer system and wastewater treatment and eliminate public regulation of utility rates. Though Petaluma’s City Council, City Manager and prospective builders and managers of the proposed system had pulled out every political stop, the PUC agreed with the citizens expressing opposition, and denied Petaluma’s application to privatize.

Times were different then: Petaluma didn’t have a single City Council member who voted well on environmental issues, so what we knew about the buzz among political insiders came second-hand. But we understood it was growing. Who are these people, and what can we do about them?

But then, as it turned out, we seemed to go away. Things went back to business as usual for awhile.

Next: A Shocking Result

Sonoma County Conservation Action: A History Pt. 1

 Posted by at 5:30 pm  Sonoma County
Sep 252012
 

The story of the birth and evolution of Sonoma County Conservation Action has been described briefly in a couple of books about the environmental movements of the San Francisco Bay Area: The Country in the City by Richard Walker, and Saving the Marin-Sonoma Coast by Martin Griffin, M.D.

Unfortunately, both of these works went to print without fact-checking their texts with those who were actually present at the events they describe, and as a result, they got substantial parts of the story wrong.

With the celebration of the 21st anniversary of the launch of the Conservation Action canvass, I’m thinking about those days again. As the initial proponent and overseer of the organization’s development for its first ten years, I may be the only person who remembers the organization’s early history in detail.

It’s a pretty good tale, if I do say so myself, and worth preserving. So here it is. We’re talking about a span of twenty-one years, all told, so this will come out in chunks. Enjoy.

________________________________________

A Sense of Place

After graduating from high school, I moved from Davis, a college town in California’s Central Valley, to Santa Rosa, located some 50 miles north of San Francisco. I was on my own when it came to paying for my higher education, and Santa Rosa Junior College was said to be the third-best such institution in the country: affordable, reputable, and with a high transfer rate to university. Off I went. It was 1979; I was 17.

Settling on Sonoma County for my first two years of college brought unexpected rewards. As those who come from across the world to visit will attest, the place is amazing…particularly if you have spent your childhood staring across table-flat sugar beet fields to the unattainable hills of the horizon.

Suddenly, I lived among epic landscapes of soft coastal mountains, gold in the summer and green in the winter, with oak, bay, madrone and manzanita in the ravines between them. Redwood forests that felt so ancient I expected dinosaurs to come crashing into their silence. A wild coastline of high bluffs and secluded coves that looks for all the world like Scotland. A (usually) mild, lazy river meandering to the sea, lined with green riparian forests. Temperate climate, neither too cold nor too warm. Great air and water quality (sadly, less so now than they were then). Some of the best wine, beer and food on Earth, period, full stop. And a population largely made up of tolerant, liberal-minded refugees from other places that have been ruined by urban sprawl.

When I arrived, the county’s electoral demographics had only recently shifted from a majority of rural and small-town conservatives. That transition was not in any way reflected in the county’s politics, which were dominated by developers, realtors and builders cashing in on the county’s sudden attractiveness to home buyers, and agricultural land owners selling lands on the urban fringe for conversion to sprawl subdivisions. While a substantial group of back-to-the-land counterculturalists had settled in the western part of the county in the early 1970s, it had failed to gain much traction over the county’s land use, transportation, and water policies. So while voices expressing environmental concern were heard, they were generally dismissed as fringe, minority positions, and ignored by policy makers, who continued to dance with them what brung ‘em.

In 1979, Sonoma County was represented in Congress by a 9-term conservative Republican, and substantial majorities of both its Board of Supervisors and the city councils of its municipalities were owned lock, stock and barrel by the interests busily grinding Heaven on Earth into money. Polls showed that impacts of rapid growth were at the top of voter concerns, but their only sources of information about local candidates for office were the candidates’ own campaign literature and the local daily, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat…a substantial portion of the revenues of which derived from real estate advertising and other direct support from the interests running the show.

I became aware of all this, but didn’t engage with it much. I had always been interested in politics, but I was in college, waiting tables to survive and putting whatever extra time I had into speech and debate competition. I didn’t have time for activism.

I did have one bizarre engagement with the county’s politics during this time. My roommate and I were dragged by his father—a realtor with the infamous Soderling Brothers, who were subsequently convicted of a series of felonies—to an Election Night party celebrating voter approval of the Warm Springs Dam. This was before the wheels came off the bus in the federal savings and loan scandal, of course, in which Sonoma County developers, political figures and financial institutions were to play a prominent role (read this book, if you haven’t. It’s both fascinating and damning).

I’m quite sure I’m the only person ever to become a part of Sonoma County’s environmental movement who happened to find himself at that party. I remember then-Sheriff Roger McDermott bending my ear about something while, trying to pretend to pay attention, I looked around at the room full of drunken, exulting cow-town Good Ol’ Boys, thinking, these cannot possibly be the people directing the course of this county’s future.

 

Skills

I graduated from SRJC (::cough valedictory speaker cough::) and then commuted by bus to San Francisco State to complete my Bachelors Degree.  When I opted for graduate school in 1986, I finally pulled up stakes and moved to the City.

I needed a job while attending graduate school, so I looked in the nonprofit, public benefit sector. A friend pointed me at a building on Market Street filled with the offices of public-interest organizations; I started at the top floor and worked my way down, asking at each office if any of them had any jobs. On the fifth floor, I found the California League of Conservation Voters.

They had jobs. Canvassing jobs.

Over the next three years, I became first a trainee, and then a canvasser, a trainer, and a field manager for the League. Unlike many canvassing operations—yes, I’m looking at you, Greenpeace and PIRGs—the League’s field staff were viewed as organizers, not just fundraisers, and the organization invested the time, content and rigor in their training program to give staff what they needed to be effective. The League viewed recruiting membership and contributions as a means to the end of keeping the staff in the field, where we mobilized thousands of hand-written letters from voters to elected officials in targeted campaigns, distributed endorsements and campaigned for candidates and ballot measures the League supported, recruited volunteers, and disseminated an annual legislative report card on the California Assembly and State Senate. League canvassers understood that we were the face of the organization and would be back at the same doors again year after year; we needed to maintain a cordial, respectful and professional demeanor when interacting with the public. Pushy, foot-in-the-door types were not welcome.

I knocked on tens of thousands of doors for the League and worked on at least a couple of dozen campaigns, raising more than $100,000 in contributions averaging less than $30 per. I learned how to craft effective messages: how to talk with people about the League’s issues from many different standpoints, whether birds-and-bunnies environmentalism, fiscal conservatism, grassroots democracy, government accountability or resource efficiency. I traveled on cross-training trips to work on campaigns and help build canvass offices for other organizations in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, and the League’s own office in Southern California.

While at the League, I met Bill Kortum, a former Sonoma County Supervisor who had been one of the founding members of the CLCV board. He and I hit it off because of our shared affinity for Sonoma County, and during breaks in board meetings, we had a couple of conversations about how Sonoma County could really use a local-scale grassroots organizing program before what was great about the county went the way that what was great about the San Fernando Valley had gone.

 

The Idea

in 1989, my life happened to reach a juncture where there was a chance to make a big change: a relationship had ended, I was being forced to move from my apartment, and it was going to cost every dime of my savings to move into another place. So I jumped sideways instead: I put my possessions into storage in my brother’s garage, bought a one-way ticket to Amsterdam, shouldered a backpack and took off. I traveled throughout Europe and into North Africa for more than a year, settling in Barcelona during the school year to teach English.

As I began to consider returning to the U.S. in spring of 1990,  I thought about those conversations with Bill. I knew Sonoma County was where I wanted to live, and wanted it to retain the qualities I so loved about it. Those qualities had already been threatened just in the time since I’d first moved there, and something needed to be done, or there was certainly the possibility that Sonoma County would go the way of many other formerly wonderful places: The “Valley of Heart’s Desire”, for example, which we now call Silicon Valley, or that well-known land of bucolic orchards, Orange County.

It occurred to me that there couldn’t be many people out there who had both a passion for Sonoma County and the skill set I had developed while working with the League. If a program like the one Bill and I had discussed was going to happen, I was probably going to have to build it.

Next: Early Days

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