Mary Brune speaks up for concerned
mothers everywhere.

Photos: Gregory Dicum

For Brune, the golden ducky represented much more than a call to remove PVC from Target’s shelves. It was her official coming out as an environmental activist.

Eighteen months earlier, Brune was home nursing her newborn daughter and watching the news when a story came on about perchlorate, describing how this toxic component of rocket fuel had been found in human breast milk. “I didn’t have any idea what perchlorate was,” Brune says, “but I was really scared. Then I was outraged.” By the time her husband got home from work, she had made up her mind: “We’ve got to do something about this,” she told him.

Brune and three of her friends — fellow new mothers and environmental advocates — got together to talk about it. “It started to snowball,” says Brune, who had volunteered with Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network. “We did some research and we found that there are pesticides and DDT and lead and mercury and phthalates and flame retardants and lots of other things being found in breast milk.” That food source, so perfect for growing babies, is also a living record of a woman’s chemical exposures. And many of the industrial chemicals that have been found in breast milk are suspected endocrine disruptors — chemicals that can alter children’s development.

Though activist groups monitor chemicals in the body, Brune says, “Nobody was focusing specifically from the nursing mom’s point of view.” So the four friends founded Making Our Milk Safe, or MOMS, which has grown to more than 300 members in 28 states. “There should be nothing more basic than a mother’s right to provide clean and healthy breast milk for her child,” says Brune. “Whether you’re a blue-state mom or a red-state mom, nobody wants their kids exposed to toxic chemicals. This is a human issue — something we all, as parents, are confronted with.”

Our Babies, Ourselves

By mid-October, when I met with Brune and a few volunteers before the Target action, she had become a leading voice on the issue of breast-milk contamination. This year, Brune testified about the issue in Washington, D.C., and in Sacramento, where the state legislature was considering California’s biomonitoring bill. The first version of the bill, which establishes a statewide program to monitor chemicals in the human body, had been vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005, partly on the grounds that testing might dissuade women from breastfeeding.

Brune and her fellow activists won’t let
Target duck the PVC issue.

Brune’s testimony was important, because MOMS is adamant about breastfeeding. “No matter what we know about toxic chemicals ending up in breast milk,” Brune says, “it’s still best to breastfeed. We are nursing moms, and we’re doing this because we think it’s such a wonderful, amazing, miraculous food for our children that we want to protect it.”

The bill was signed into law this September, and Brune went to the signing ceremony in Sacramento. But meanwhile, chemicals are still seeping into mammaries across the country — hence the giant ducky.

Because legislation can take a long time to have an effect, and can always be challenged, MOMS decided to take their message directly to the people who could make a big difference quickly: the retailers who supply the mothers and fathers of America with critical baby supplies like bottles, diapers, and toys, which often contain surprisingly harmful chemicals. “Moms spend a lot of money shopping, buying things for the home, buying things for their children,” says Brune. “That really represents a lot of leverage.”

To get their feet wet, MOMS teamed up with the Center for Health, Environment, & Justice, planning their Bay Area demonstration as part of a national day of action that served as the kick-off of CHEJ’s anti-PVC campaign. Protests took place at about 30 Target stores nationwide, calling on the chain to phase out PVC. While other retailers have taken the issue seriously — including IKEA, which removed PVC from nearly all of its products 10 years ago, and Wal-Mart, which is in the process of removing PVC from its private-label products — Target has not made any commitments.

Hitting Their Target

The ducky dilemma turned out to be caused by a too-small generator, so Brune took off in her Prius to get a bigger one. The next day, she stood in front of the local Target with her daughter on her hip, watching the rubber ducky inflate. It went up without a hitch, an immense, yellow specter next to the all-too-apt Target sign. Around it, parents and kids chanted, “Phase out PVC!” and handed out literature. For intransigent retailers, MOMS had officially become the mommy group from hell.

Emboldened, Brune led an impromptu march through the store. The sight of a squadron of strollers rolling across the parking lot with banners flying behind them seemed to bewilder the store’s security team, and MOMS was able to march through the sprawling store without any unfortunate — though surely telegenic — arrests of new mothers.

It’s beginning to look a lot like a movement.

More fundamentally, MOMS threw down the gauntlet that day, reframing the question of industrial contaminants in the human body. Rather than getting bogged down in toxicity studies and legislative process, MOMS is, in effect, asking companies like Target to explain why it’s acceptable for the chemicals in their products to wind up in the sacred bosom of motherhood. The next day, Target issued a statement saying it would “explore alternatives” to PVC.

Brune was in high spirits after the demonstration. While the other three MOMS founders have prior experience with environmental activism, this was the first time she had ever organized anything like this, and it found her redefining what motherhood means. “There is a perception that new moms are inward-looking,” she says, “but becoming a mother brings something out in you that you never knew existed. The desire to protect your child is just so powerful, you feel such a passion for it that you’ll do what you have to.”

MOMS operates on a shoestring budget and staff — the founders and volunteers “don’t even make one full-time person,” Brune says — and schedules its campaigns around nap and feeding times, rather than the daily news cycle. But Brune, who also works as a technical writer, says there are many ways for busy mothers to get involved, from demonstrating to making phone calls and writing letters.

“It’s kind of unbelievable,” she says. “Before I was a parent, I never would have thought that I was capable of getting half of the stuff done that I do, with so little sleep and so little time, with so little money and resources. But MOMS has to be done — we just have to figure out where we can squeeze in the time.”

The Great Bear Rainforest, stretching from Vancouver Island to the Alaska Panhandle on the wild, rugged coast of British Columbia, is that rarest of things: an unvarnished environmental victory. But as the groundbreaking agreement signed to protect it comes into force, new challenges are surfacing.

The numbers are stunning: at 15.5 million acres, this rainforest is the size of Switzerland. A third of it, about the size of New Jersey, is now entirely protected from logging (selective cutting is permitted on the rest). The Great Bear is home to only about 25,000 people — and also a fifth of all the wild salmon on the planet. It is a rugged coast of narrow fjords that reach so far in from the sea, the water becomes glassy, as though in a lake. That water reflects steep mountainsides and glacier-smoothed peaks, their flanks cloaked in untouched coastal rainforest marked here and there by lighter patches of alder where rockslides have churned the landscape. Humpback whales breach in the shadow of ancient cedars and rare spirit bears — a local variety of black bear with fine, white fur — scoop salmon from pristine rivers.

It’s just obvious that it shouldn’t be clear-cut or mined or paved. The Great Bear is one of those last remaining truly wild places that offer a dash of hope to the human imagination. “It’s a place 99 percent of people will never go,” says Todd Paglia, executive director of San Francisco-based ForestEthics, which was instrumental in protecting the area, “but they want to know it exists.”

The campaign to protect the Great Bear sprawled across a decade of activism, democracy, negotiation, and enlightened self-interest. By the time a deal was announced in February, an unlikely quorum of First Nations, timber companies, environmental groups, towns, tourism operators, and the provincial government had not just come to imagine a different future for the Great Bear — the group had committed to bringing it about.

The deal was so revolutionary that an entirely new type of land management was brought to British Columbia to encompass it. Already, the Great Bear is being hailed as a model around the world, from Chile to Tasmania.

But now things get interesting. Having protected the forest on paper, these strange bedfellows have to work together to achieve something none of them has ever tried before: creating a sustainable future for the region. While they iron out their partnership and plans, they must also fend off an oil-transport project that could change everything.

“Our first ten years of work were really a campaign — negotiations to try and save this place,” says Paglia. “The next ten years are to make sure that deal gets enforced. It’s changed the way we think about our work, because if the Great Bear isn’t there in 20 years, then we haven’t achieved anything.”

Great Expectations

The communities living in the Great Bear include First Nations like the Gitga’at people, who live in the village of Hartley Bay, pop. 180. The residents here have always depended on the natural bounty of the ecosystem. Indigenous people have long fished its waters and hunted its lands. More recently, a bustling commercial fishery sustained the community. But no more. The fleet of seine boats at Hartley Bay — which has no cars and no roads, only wooden boardwalks, and sits nestled between high, forested mountains — has dwindled to a handful as fish stocks have declined.

As elsewhere in British Columbia, the combination of economic pressures, a history of poor relations between First Nations and the government, and the social problems faced by a community that has endured two or three generations of colonizing, genocidal government policies left the area open to the blandishments of timber companies. They promised jobs, if little else.

Other parts of the province have been devastated by industry — from the air, it looks like the mountains have been scraped clean — but the Great Bear has so far been too remote for more than a few scattered clear-cuts by small operators. So the land hasn’t been devastated, but the communities have hit hard times. And with no other options, the apparent windfall of destructive logging could become too attractive to resist.

Which is why permanent forest protection has to include a sustainable local economy with a vested interest in an intact ecosystem, something Paglia says has become the new focus of his work in the Great Bear. “We are looking at botanical products that go into health and beauty aids, at sustainable seafood, and other options,” he says. “We’re looking at creating a social venture to partner with the First Nations and other entrepreneurs to ensure this region has real sustainable jobs, and isn’t tempted to go back on its agreements.”

The agreement does allow for limited, selective logging under an overarching ecosystem-based management plan. A few such operations have begun, and they are dramatically different from the clear-cuts of the past: a few trees are selected, leaving enough standing timber that the untrained eye might not even notice the cut at all, even when it is new.

Tourism is another tantalizing possibility, but one with well-known destructive tendencies of its own. A million people a year pass through the Great Bear on cruise ships, but none of them stop, and not a dime is spent here by the cruise industry. A million people visiting Hartley Bay would clearly be problematic, but there are other options. “These boats are like traveling feedlots,” says Paglia. “They’re filled with Americans at the trough. At the very least, they ought to be buying the seafood — cruise ships can buy local.” To that end, the Gitga’at have built an experimental oyster farm in a secluded fjord.

Another option is the kind of less-destructive tourism that folks drawn by the area’s natural features can bring. The coast here is already an angler’s paradise, luring people from all over the world for once-in-a-lifetime experiences at remote lodges. But could visitors love this place to death?

King Pacific Lodge.

Fit for a King

Not far from Hartley Bay sits King Pacific Lodge, a capacious wooden structure built on top of an old logging barge. It floats just offshore at the head of a calm bay called Barnard Harbor, surrounded by the usual — but never, ever unimpressive — mountains and forest. With fast, rugged boats, a quiet spa, a restaurant serving delicate interpretations of local wild foods, and a helicopter for inland fishing and hiking, it’s ecotourism for the affluent.

“We’re in a perfect situation here to look at ecotourism in a less theoretical way,” says Michael Uehara, King Pacific’s president. “Tourism here has the potential to displace more extractive practices. But it certainly has the potential to become a love-it-to-death plunder too.”

In 1999, the lodge became the first business in the Great Bear to explicitly recognize indigenous residents’ title to the land: King Pacific signed a protocol with the Gitga’at and began paying a conservation fee for each guest. Other operators were outraged, but today, after a bruising battle for indigenous land claims in British Columbia, hundreds of businesses in the province, including at least 100 in the Great Bear, have signed protocols with First Nations.

The lodge employs Gitga’at people as boat pilots and fishing and nature guides, and has become a pillar of the local community: Uehara was even accorded the rare honor of being inducted into the Gitga’at Killer Whale Clan. But King Pacific, where rooms start at over $1,000 a night, raises the vexing question of elitism. Uehara makes no bones about it: “Very few people can afford to come here,” he says, “but very few people spending a lot of money has great economic impact with less total environmental impact. At least that’s what we hope.”

Certainly the approach has worked in the immediate area: the forest around King Pacific was once slated to be logged, and had been cruised for timber as recently as 1999. Yet today bald eagles still perch on tall snags overlooking the mouth of the rushing river there, watching the salmon mass for their run up to their ancestral spawning grounds.

Paglia recognizes that King Pacific and its devotees have a place in the bigger economic picture, but says more affordable options are a necessary part of protecting the area. “My friends aren’t going to go to King Pacific,” he says. “They would go and do a hut-to-hut kayak trip or go to a lower-end lodge and love it — they’d bring back part of the Great Bear. They’d continue to make a contribution, even if it’s a smaller one financially.”

But operational questions like this pale in comparison to a new, looming threat: Big Oil.

If the Loggers Don’t Get You, the Drillers Will

The parties involved with the Great Bear agreement seem to be warming to their new roles, but it may already be time to fall back into fighting mode. Like an unfortunate hiker trapped between a grizzly and a fat, juicy salmon, this forest just happens to sit between the Alberta oil sands, where an oil boom is under way, and China, whose growing economy is sucking in fuel from all directions.

Insert oil tanker here?

This year, Enbridge, the Calgary-based company that operates the longest system of oil pipelines in the world, unveiled plans to build a pipeline terminus at Kitimat, on a fjord almost 100 miles from the open ocean. The project would mean oil tankers would cruise this narrow channel daily for the next 50 years, carrying a million barrels of crude a day right past Hartley Bay, past the King Pacific Lodge, past the Gitga’at seaweed harvesting grounds and oyster farm, past the rocks covered in sea lions, and through this ancient forest.

“To picture an oil tanker in that landscape is enough to make you cry,” says Paglia. After a decade of struggle, and just a few months of apparent victory, people are exhausted, and have to force themselves to confront this new challenge. “I tell people you better enjoy your life while you can,” says Helen Clifton, a Gitga’at elder and Uehara’s Killer Whale mother. “I don’t know that we 180 people can stop anything.”

But Merran Smith, the ForestEthics campaigner based in Smithers, B.C., who was instrumental in shepherding the players toward the Great Bear agreement, is more optimistic. “A lot of things happened that people said could never happen,” she points out. “A decade ago the whole coast was slated to be logged. It was stopped because of the power of the people. Corporations appear to have power, but we can stop them.”

But it’s going to be a tough fight. Corporations can learn too, and there is a $4 billion project at stake. Can the ties forged in the local community take that on? So far, they have weathered the opening shots: after an initial meeting with Enbridge, King Pacific Lodge received two unsolicited buyout offers. “It’s blatant,” says Uehara of the company’s divide-and-conquer strategy. “They’re everywhere, and they’re very good at it.” But he’s staying: “On almost every level, the lodge is incompatible with tankers passing in front of it. I have nowhere to go. Where do I go from here?”

The bears and the salmon don’t have anywhere to go either, which is why people like Paglia are in it for the long haul too: “Our victories are temporary and our defeats are permanent,” he says, quoting David Brower. “There is never an end to the campaign: if you don’t stay on top of it, it can slip away.”

Rather than describe Bioneers in detail here, allow me to point you to something I wrote about last year’s conference.

The basic gist is that it’s a forum that draws together leading thinkers and actors in a number of different disciplines that are profoundly related, and yet aren’t always thought of in that way. Hard-core anti-corporate, local-sovereignty litigation of the sort pursued by Thomas Linzey, for example, is connected via the work Tzeporah Berman is doing with ForestEthics to the freaky/practical mushroom-channeling the lovable Paul Stamets focuses on, to Sarah Crowell’s Destiny Arts Center, which has coaxed Bay Area youths to actually make environmentalism far, far cooler than you or I could ever hope to be. See? Lawyers are connected to dancers. It’s all, indeed, connected.

It’s the kind of gathering that I am constitutionally predisposed to criticize and mock — precisely the kind of moonbat Gaia worship “they” think we get up to here in California (if they only knew …). It’s elitist (expensive to attend and impossible to get to without loading up the atmosphere with carbon); it’s self-congratulatory (yet one more forum where people go on about change being in the air, a new world being born … in defiance of all evidence) — but, somehow, I find it inspirational and moving.

It’s very difficult to explain, even to people who are, perhaps like you, drawn to the accomplished presenters. Somehow, it manages to be mind-expanding, even to jaded nihilists-in-denial like yours truly.

For me, unexpectedly, the aha moment came when Linzey referenced an essay Derrick Jensen wrote in Orion a couple of issues back — a look at the futility of hope. It had been on my mind this month already, but Linzey brought my attention back to it, and I went out into the exhibition hall and, of course, found the Orion people (practically speaking, the fact that a huge slice of the movement is there in person is a big draw for me), and re-read the essay.

Rather than go on about it further, I recommend you read it yourself.

You know that little rubber duckie in your bathroom? I always thought the little fella was sorta cute, nestled there between the shampoo and the loofa.

Well, it turns out the little ducky’s not so rubber after all — it’s plastic, namely the dreaded PVC. And it further turns out the bathroom is full of the stuff.

Today, the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice is launching a campaign to get Target to remove PVC from their stores. The background is, Target (apt name, eh?) has been dragging their heels, while others — even Wal*Mart — are actually beginning to get the endocrine disrupting nastiness out of their stores.

I’m working on a story for Grist that is tangentially related to this campaign, so I’m off now to a demo which, I’m told, will feature a giant inflatable rubber duckie. More on that later …

In the meantime, check out the flash animation put together by Free Range Studios, the geniuses behind The Meatrix and other funny-but-scary tidbits I’m sure you’ve forwarded to all your friends.

For me, this one is extra scary: my bathroom looks uncomfortably like the one in the animation … except the soap has yet to rough up the shampoo.

Today, they launched FutureSeaLevel.org to bring the climate crisis home. It’s an ingeniously simple idea: Participants tape up public spaces with a line of blue tape that marks the new sea level after unchecked global warming.

In a coastal city like San Francsico, it’s a disturbing sight indeed — the blue line cuts the urban landscape mercilessly, and you can really feel yourself going under. The project launched at Pier 39 — tourist central here in SF — so it’s getting lots of exposure.

Now if only they’ll share the tape so we can try this everywhere else there’s a coastline too …

Xtremely green demo at a Whole Foods in San Mateo, Calif.

Photo: Courtesy ASEC

 
With the recent profusion of green takes on everything from diapers to caskets, Frank Scura’s proposition might sound like more of the same: “We’re about greening the planet, one skateboard at a time.” But Scura, founder of the Bay Area-based Action Sports Environmental Coalition, isn’t your average environmentalist. And action sports — that heavily marketed package of adrenaline-infused competition undertaken on oceans of plywood — is a little different too.

For one thing, it has a cool factor so appealing that mass-marketers can’t keep their TV cameras off it. At the start of August, about 140,000 people saw X Games 12 in person in Los Angeles, and nearly a million households watched on prime-time TV. In fact, 100 million Americans consume some form of ESPN every week. Scura is sure he can use that type of exposure to transform action sports into the vanguard of green consciousness.

Frank Scura.

Photo: Courtesy ASEC

You play the cards the universe dealt you, and in Southern California in the 1980s, the universe dealt Scura BMX racing, skateboarding, surfing, and punk rock. It was a uniquely SoCal youth culture infused with a sunny but nihilistic rejection of suburban cultural norms. “I just basically used to do a lot of drugs and drink a lot and only date strippers,” says Scura when asked how he got from there to here. “But things snapped in me when the Rodney King riots happened. I was just like, ‘I’m over it. This is a joke.’” Scura went to Oregon “to be Grizzly Adams and reflect on what it’s all about.” He came back a changed man: “I left wearing leather pants and velvet shirts — rock-star boy. And I came back wearing sarongs and Jesus sandals and a beard and smelling like patchouli.”

Scura found that, while he was away, his beloved action sports had changed too. In 1995 ESPN discovered skating and BMX, and conjured up the X Games as a way to plug directly into the hearts and minds of the most coveted consumers on the planet: those impressionable and quick-to-jump-on-the-bandwagon 18- to 25-year-old males. “When I first saw the X Games,” recalls Scura, “I was livid. It was the bastardization of everything I held true. It was the media making action sports wussified.”

As action sports grew into a mass-market phenomenon, rejection of cultural conformity somehow turned into a way to sell Mountain Dew and Slim Jims. But something else happened too: the kids Scura knew from the ’80s who had been making custom decks and shredding backyard pools had become the captains of a new industry. “All my friends had come up,” he recalls with amazement. “Guys that were just groms before were owning $100 million shoe companies.”

Scura hit the scene like a mad prophet back from the wilderness, talking to anyone he could corner about his new vision of sustainable action sports: “At first, I was just kind of a tripper to them — it was a little too far-fetched,” he says. But he kept at it, and as his friends got older and had kids of their own, he says they had to confront the fact that they had become the Man. “People started to get a glimpse of their waste stream and ask, ‘Well, where does all this crap go when I’m done with it?’”

Scura began talking with athletes too, and in 2001, he formalized his effort to green the industry by creating ASEC. With a staff of three, the coalition has managed to bring together not just top athletes — including demigods like Jamie Bestwick, Darcy Turenne, and skater Jen O’Brien — but also a bevy of hip clothing and gear manufacturers, eco-products companies, and media companies. Advisers include members of the board of X Games and executives from HP and Whole Foods.

“ASEC is a common ground and neutral space,” says Scura, “where the greatest minds in our industry — the greatest guerrilla marketers in the world, in my opinion — can come together and figure out how we’re going to make this a global model.”

Right Place, Prong Time

Today, Scura’s ethic is rubbing off on both athletes and fans. “You get so wrapped up in what you’re doing that you tend to forget about what’s going on in the world,” says Bestwick, the world’s top BMX vert rider and a silver medalist at this year’s X Games. “Being around Frank, you stop being so selfish and self-centered all the time.”

If the fact that Bestwick pulled off the first ever Tailwhip Flair in competition a few years ago doesn’t impress you (and it should), consider that there are countless kids all over the world who have posters of Bestwick on their bedroom walls. It’s this access — not just to media, but to the kids the media targets — that really gets Scura excited. “The reality is the action-sports world is small enough to have a dialogue with one another,” he says, “but we’re big enough to influence the entire world because we’re involved with NBC and ESPN and FOX and everybody else.”

Scura, who can talk about tripping with wolves in one breath and, with equal passion and conviction, corporate marketing strategies in the next, has charted a three-prong attack on business as usual. The first, and so far most visible, brings to action sports the kinds of green businesses and practices with which Grist readers are intimately familiar. Sponsors like Whole Foods, Stonyfield Farms, New Leaf Paper, and Guayakí are now visible at action-sports events alongside what Scura calls the “sugar water and toxic snacks” that have long owned the sector.

Many ASEC athletes happily forgo more lucrative sponsorships that conflict with their values: Scura says superstar skaters and ASEC members Bob Burnquist and Danny Way have passed up millions of dollars. And when Way (the Air and Bomb Drop world-record holder and gold medalist at this year’s X Games, and the only person ever to jump the Great Wall of China without a motor) is dropping in on a megaramp, or Burnquist (a fixture in the Tony Hawk video game series, and winner of three medals at this year’s X Games) is pulling off his legendary switch-stance loop work, chances are good they’re doing it on sustainably harvested, Forest Stewardship Council-certified plywood.

Olympic snowboarder and women’s skateboarding pioneer Cara-Beth Burnside, who is an icon to two or three generations of skaters and continues to dominate the vert pipe (she won her second consecutive gold at this year’s X Games with a run that included a Pop Tart Disaster and a Feeble to Fakie), says that Scura and ASEC are creating a critical mass that makes it easier for athletes to live by their convictions. “That’s what’s cool about Frank,” she says. “We can be involved with conscious sponsors, but stay fully in the mainstream.” And the industry, sensing a good thing, is embracing it too: this year’s X Games were carbon-neutral and powered by wind energy. Past X Games have used FSC-certified wood, and reused ramps whenever possible.

But this is just the first step. Scura’s master plan involves completely transforming the action-sports industry to make skate shops and surf shops into beacons of sustainable alternatives, the way natural-food stores are now. Scura is tight-lipped about the details — he plans to unveil it all at a trade show in September — but he hints that it will bring together existing green initiatives throughout the industry (including shoemaker Sole Technology’s comprehensive solar-power and recycling programs and Indian manufacturer Wearology’s organic and human-rights practices). Scura expects to announce that up to 20 of the top action-sports brands will be coming out with organic clothing lines, something he says will have immediate results: “By next year, we will have saved millions of pounds of greenhouse gases, pesticide runoff, water pollution from dyes, and air pollution.”

It’s the third prong of ASEC’s attack that reaches right to the core of the culture. Action sports come from a hands-on tradition in which kids get together to teach each other new tricks, trying them over and over until they’re bloody and exhausted — and nailing them. So Scura and ASEC’s marquee athletes are undertaking personal, face-to-face work at competitions and skate parks. “We understand kids need to be really cool, so we’re going to make this cool,” he says. “Want to be green? We’re behind you. You’ve got a posse.”

The Kids are Alright

While most action-sports stars are suspicious of celebrity, many do acknowledge the power they wield. “The country is run by television,” says Bestwick. “Using personalities and athletes is the only way that people will really, really stand up and listen.”

“I don’t preach to kids,” Bestwick goes on, “but I find that kids nowadays are generally interested in what you’ve got to say — they want to know about you and about your beliefs.”

Burnside concurs: “You can’t change the world overnight, but you can try to just send your messages. I don’t like to be really forceful — it kind of weirds people out. So I just try to set a good example.”

16-year-old eco-sk8r Lyn-z Adams Hawkins.

Photo: Lyn-z Adams Hawkins

One of those kids Burnside set an example for, Lyn-z Adams Hawkins, stunned the world in 2004 when, at age 14, she won the women’s vert at the X Games by landing a Kick Flip Indy Grab — the first female skater to pull it off. Hawkins is also involved in ASEC, and dreams of the day when everyone will be skating on FSC decks in organic clothes — although she hasn’t yet started to flex her celebrity. “I’m just a kid at the moment,” she points out.

But Scura — who says these extreme athletes’ mellow approach to advocacy is due to the yogic nature of their pursuit, in which “you have to be right there and you have to be aware of exactly where you are in that moment” — isn’t afraid to turn on the hard sell himself. “We basically get out there and bribe kids to learn,” he says of the public events ASEC puts on everywhere from Whole Foods parking lots to inner-city skate parks. “The reality is, I ask the kids a question about biodiesel, I give away some swag, and those kids are going to have that seed in their minds for the rest of their lives. What do you think Coca-Cola is doing when they’re passing out swag? They want you to learn about Coca-Cola.”

Scura says that solutions in the marketplace are critical to follow up any sort of education about green issues. “One of the most important messages in this is to vote with your dollars — it’s a vote that can’t be tampered with,” he says. “Triple-bottom-line companies that are going the extra mile should get your dollars, and the ones who aren’t should not get your dollars. Send them a message — that’s how they’re going to change. And if they don’t, they’re going to lose out.”

Ultimately, what Scura is doing plugs back into the roots of action sports, when rebellion meant more than buying a different brand of energy drink. “Kids want to be armed with knowledge that their parents don’t have,” he says, “and this is that vehicle for them. The beauty of it is it’s exactly what action sports needs, because the ultimate punk rock rebellious act to fuck the Man and fuck the system is to be environmentally and socially conscious. That’s exactly what they don’t want you to do.”

Resting in peace at Ramsey
Creek.

Photo: Memorial Ecosystems.

“I’d prefer to be put in the ground, under a tree,” says Joe Sehee, contemplating his inevitable demise. “But I don’t want to go in the ground with anything, I just want to be buried in a simple pine box or shroud, and that’s it.”

If Sehee has given his preferences a lot of thought lately, it’s not that he’s planning to shuffle off this mortal coil any more imminently than the rest of us — it’s just that, as executive director of the Green Burial Council, it’s his job.

The “anything” Sehee wants to avoid going into the ground with is the embalming fluid, concrete, steel, and hardwoods that typically get buried along with the dead. For the past four years, he has been seeking a way to bring environmental consciousness to the “death-care” industry. Now the Green Burial Council is unveiling the first U.S. certification for eco-burials, a move that Sehee hopes will harness the power of the $25 billion death-care industry — which oversees 1.8 million burials in the U.S. each year — in the service of conservation.

Joe Sehee.

“I’ve talked to a couple thousand consumers over the last four years, and I know what’s driving them [to look into green burials],” Sehee says. “Allowing people to feel as though their last act on earth contributes to a positive purpose connects them in an almost religious way to this concept. It makes people’s eyes sparkle.”

The new certification standards will indeed help consumers plan their earthly end. But they’ll also help the conservation community. Sehee, currently helping to establish a green cemetery near Santa Fe as part of an eco-development managed by the Commonweal Conservancy, hopes his efforts will eventually protect a million acres around the world.

Death-Care Be Not Proud

While there’s been a buzz about green burials for several years, the concept has yet to catch on widely. “There have been dozens and dozens of articles about it,” says Ron Hast, publisher of industry magazines Mortuary Management and Funeral Monitor, “but it is not a trend. It is a cottage industry that cemetarians do not find worth the investment to provide.”

Indeed, the two most prominent green cemeteries — Ramsey Creek Preserve in South Carolina and Fernwood in Northern California — have performed fewer than 200 green burials between them in the past five years.

But according to Sehee, there’s a major obstacle: the death-care industry itself. The prevailing marketplace makes it hard for consumers — who have enough trouble picking paper or plastic — to evaluate their end-of-life options, especially if they haven’t planned ahead. A bewildering array of options, regulations, and misinformation awaits, compounded by the emotional circumstances in which such decisions are usually made.

That’s where the new standards, developed in consultation with consumer advocates, land trusts, and landscape architects, come in. Sehee hopes to do for death-care what organic standards and Fair Trade certification have done for the supermarket. “We’re making it easy for consumers to distinguish between environmentally and consumer-friendly providers and those who are not operating that way,” he says. “That, to me, is the crux of this issue.”

The Council has issued two sets of guidelines, for Natural Burial Grounds and Conservation Burial Grounds. The first outlines requirements for eco-friendly cemeteries, governing everything from visitation to landscaping. It bans toxic embalming, vaults, and landscape-inappropriate monuments, and requires biological evaluation of the site, habitat restoration with native plants, and the establishment of an endowment fund to ensure the burial ground continues to adhere to the standard.

Love me like a rock.

Photo: Memorial Ecosystems.

But it’s the second type of certification that takes things in a new direction. The Conservation Burial standards help land trusts and other groups use a combination of Natural Burial certification and conservation easements to further their stewardship mission. The Green Burial Council — which includes a board member who’s a senior vice president at the Trust for Public Land — believes certification has the potential to not only bring in revenue, but also to help ensure that land remains protected. “Burial is another layer of protection,” Sehee says. “It consecrates the land and offers another barrier to development.”

Ted Harrison, founder and president of the Commonweal Conservancy, says conservation burial has been under discussion within the land-trust community for the past decade, but without standards, land trusts haven’t had the confidence to undertake it on their own. “The standards ensure a better grounding,” he says, “a level of integrity that gives us a higher level of confidence than if we were trying to figure it out on our own.”

Facing Facts

By providing legally enforceable and transparent guidelines, Sehee hopes to move conservation burial from concept to reality, and quickly: he estimates that a million acres will be protected over the next decade. He’s clearly still at the true-believer stage of his consumer movement, when such claims sound either ludicrous or audacious, depending how you look at it.

Either way, the concept will soon be put to the test: this fall, Sehee expects a handful of facilities in Southern California to become certified, and by this time next year he expects “dozens and dozens” across the country. Since the certification system will be funded by fees from certified facilities, Sehee’s next challenge is to make sure consumers ask for the services.

“We have these standards,” he says, “and we have a very credible entity that’s put them forth, but no one knows about them. My challenge right now is to make consumers realize that it’s in their best interest to look for the council seal of approval.”

It’s the sort of chicken-and-egg conundrum any marketing campaign has to face. But in this case, there’s an added wrinkle. “There’s a cultural barrier to green burial in mainstream culture,” says Kim Sorvig, a landscape architect at the University of New Mexico who serves as an advisor to the Green Burial Council. “We have a detachment or denial about people dying. You can go your entire life and never be confronted with the actual facts of death.”

Sorvig says planning for conservation burial can change the way people view their own deaths, and thus their lives. “People are depriving themselves of important psychological or spiritual connections by playing along with the idea of death embedded in the conventional culture,” says Sorvig. “This offers great potential for engaging people now and helping them connect with the cycle of birth and death as a part of human ecology — it’s a very meaningful use of the earth.”

And that, ultimately, is the legacy Sehee is after; a way to ensure that, even as he lies in his simple pine box, he’ll still be working to protect the planet: “I hope that I’m part of something bigger, protecting an endangered landscape — in a Green Burial Council-certified Conservation Burial ground.”

Here’s part of that discussion …

Q: So you’re working in prison?

A: I’m a clerk. I do inventory for the prison food warehouse. But I don’t even get paid by the hour. I get paid by what they call a “point scale.” I think right now I make like 50 bucks a month.

Q: What’s your daily schedule like?

A: It’s very structured. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are all put on at the same time everyday. I work on the yard, so I get out of my cell roughly five hours a day, not including meal times. I guess the best way to describe the yard structure is like a typical high school. There’s a track and some handball courts; some basketball courts.

The inner structure is an old-school penitentiary. It’s a tiered structure. The doors still open on cables — you flip a switch and your door opens. The cells are five feet by eight feet — for two people.

Q: That’s not a lot of room for two people.

A: No. Not at all. You get to be real close or really, really not like each other. There’s not a lot of in between.

Q: What do the other prisoners think of you?

A: You know what, I’m actually pretty well respected. I’m sure that I have my share of enemies on the yard, but I can’t come out here and walk around without a lot of people saying ‘hi’ to me or shaking my hand or coming up and talking to me. There’s definitely quite a few that respect what I’m in for, and if they don’t necessarily respect the reasons behind it, they respect the fact, unlike a lot of the people in here, I came in for my beliefs, for fighting for something I believed in.

Q: How has prison surprised you?

A: All the stereotypical things that you see in the movies — that stuff happens here. I’ve lived through and seen things that certainly no human being wants to see happen to another human being. And what surprised me most is simply my ability to adapt and deal with it. You know, I haven’t curled up into a fetal ball and refused to leave my cell. I just accept this environment as home.

Q: Sounds like you’ve carved out your niche there.

A: Yeah, I get along pretty well. I run every couple of days. I hit the weight pile. They’ve got a punching bag up; I do that every few nights. Play chess. Watch TV to pass the time. Read books. It sucks. I ain’t going to lie. Prison sucks. But I do it all right.

Q: How’s the food?

A: You don’t want to know about that — it’s horrible. You’ll have people in the streets if I tell you about the food!

Q: As bad as that?

A: I don’t think that anything that we get has less than a thousand ingredients. Everything that we eat as a main entree is pre-prepared, mass processed food. Almost everything we get is a year or more outdated — I know from doing inventory. Last year, we apparently had a contract with Burger King because we got a million pounds of their french fries from 2002.

Since then, Bullard, who is as much activist as academic, has been one of the leading voices of environmental-justice advocacy. He was one of the planners of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991, at which the organizing principles of modern environmental justice were formulated. Bullard later helped the Clinton administration write the watershed executive order that required all federal agencies to consider environmental justice in their programs.

Under the Bush administration, progress made during the 1990s is under attack, with even the U.S. EPA working to dismantle that provision. As he has for 25 years, Bullard stands at the forefront of efforts to maintain environmental-justice gains, and to make mainstream environmentalists aware of the issues at stake.

Currently on sabbatical from his position as director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, Bullard has just published his 12th book. The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution brings together more than 20 contributors for a survey of the movement’s past and future.

Grist caught up with Bullard as he took a break from working on a Ford Foundation-funded study of how government actions have endangered the health and welfare of African Americans over the past seven decades. Most recently, this work has turned Bullard’s attention to the area devastated by Hurricane Katrina, which he describes as the latest urban environmental sacrifice zone.

How did you first become involved in environmental justice?

I was a young sociology professor just two years out of graduate school. My wife asked me to collect data for a lawsuit she had filed. A company had decided to put a landfill in the middle of a predominantly black, middle-class, suburban neighborhood — a neighborhood where 85 percent of the people owned their homes. Of course, the state gave them a permit, but the people said “no.”

I saw that 100 percent of all the city-owned landfills in Houston were in black neighborhoods, though blacks made up only 25 percent of the population. Three out of four of the privately owned landfills were located in predominantly black neighborhoods, and six out of eight of the city-owned incinerators. In a city that does not have zoning, it meant that these were decisions made by individuals in government.

That’s how I got dragged into this.

And you got hooked.

I got hooked. I started connecting the dots in terms of housing, residential patterns, patterns of land use, where highways go, where transportation routes go, and how economic-development decisions are made. It was very clear that people who were making decisions — county commissioners or industrial boards or city councils — were not the same people who were “hosting” these facilities in their communities.

Without a doubt, it was a form of apartheid where whites were making decisions and black people and brown people and people of color, including Native Americans on reservations, had no seat at the table.

Just before Hurricane Katrina, you were getting ready to look at natural disasters as part of a study of how government actions endanger the health of African Americans in the South. How does Katrina fit the historical pattern?

Katrina was not isolated. It was not an aberration, and it was not incompetence on the part of FEMA and Michael Brown and the Bush administration. This has been going on for a long time under Republicans and Democrats, and the central theme that drives all of this is race and class.

You’ve done a lot of work with schools. Why is that of particular concern?

Poor children in urban areas are poisoned in their homes. And when they go to school, they get another dose. And when they go outside and play, they get another dose. It’s a slow-motion disaster: the most vulnerable population in our society is children, and the most vulnerable children are children of color. If we protect the most vulnerable in our society — these children — we protect everybody.

Can you give a sense of the scale of the problem surrounding these schools?

Moton Elementary School, in New Orleans, is built on top of a landfill, causing lots of problems with the water in the school. The playgrounds in Norco, La., in Cancer Alley, are across from a huge Shell refinery. You stay there 15 minutes and you can’t breathe. And in South Camden, N.J., there are schools and playgrounds on the waterfront where you have all this industry, all this nasty stuff. Almost two-thirds of the children in that neighborhood have asthma. In West Harlem, the North River Water Treatment Plant covers eight blocks near a school. On the south side of Chicago, it’s the same kind of thing.

From coast to coast, you see this happening. It’s not just the landfill, it’s not just the incinerator, it’s not just the garbage dump, it’s not just the crisscrossing freeway and highway, and the bus barns that dump all that stuff in these neighborhoods — it’s all that combined. Even if each particular facility is in compliance, there are no regulations that take into account this saturation. It may be legal, but it is immoral. Just like slavery was legal, but slavery has always been immoral.

Let’s look at a specific case in which you’re an expert witness: In Dickson County, Tenn., a county that is just over 4 percent black, a landfill was sited in the middle of a poor black community several decades ago. The dump was later a candidate for Superfund status, yet black families contend that authorities told them their water was OK to drink, even as they were telling white families not to drink it. In 2003, one family whose land borders the dump began a lawsuit against the county and the company that allegedly dumped the industrial waste. What does it take for a community to stand up against such comprehensive injustice?

In every struggle, somebody has to step forward, just like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr. In this case, it’s the Holt family: they have drawn a line in the dirt and said “no.”

Every time I go there, I’m amazed at their spirits. These are fighters, from strong stock: this is a community of black people who owned land dating back over 100 years. They are resilient. But at the same time, they’re sick. Harry Holt is the patriarch in the family right now, and he has cancer. His daughter, Sheila Holt-Orsted, has cancer. His son has an immune deficiency.

That’s how these lawsuits play out: it’s a waiting game. The people with the money can wait the longest, and the people who are sick generally can’t, because at some point, sick people die. And they know that. That is the cruelty and the horrific nature of environmental racism.

What keeps you going?

People who fight. People like the Holt family. People who do not let the garbage trucks and the landfills and the petrochemical plants roll over them. That has kept me in this movement for the last 25 years.

And in the last 10 years, we’ve been winning: lawsuits are being won, reparations are being paid, apologies are being made. These companies have been put on notice that they can’t do this anymore, anywhere.

It’s no longer overt policy to practice environmental racism in this country, yet it keeps happening. Where is the locus of the problem now?

Now it’s institutional racism. You don’t have a lot of individuals out there wearing sheets and hoods. Instead you see it as the policies get played out. On their face, policies may appear to be race-neutral. They say, “We’re going to look at unemployment, poverty rates, and educational level,” but the poorest areas oftentimes correspond to racialized places. Without even talking about race, you can almost predict where these locally unwanted land uses, or LULUs, will go.

In your 2003 book Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World, you took a look at what sustainability means from an environmental-justice perspective. Is there such a thing as sustainability without justice?

No, there’s not. This whole question of environment, economics, and equity is a three-legged stool. If the third leg of that stool is dealt with as an afterthought, that stool won’t stand. The equity components have to be given equal weight. But racial and economic and social equity can be very painful topics: people get uncomfortable when questions of poor people and race are raised.

In your latest book, you wrote, “Building a multiethnic, multiracial, multi-issue, anti-racist movement is not easy.” That seems like a huge understatement. Has anything like that ever been done?

No. What we’re up against is really trying to disentangle and unpack a lot of baggage, from slavery to colonialism to neo-colonialism to imperialism, and all those -isms that have really served as wedges.

For example, before we had the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, there was very little interaction and understanding and collaboration among African Americans and Latino Americans and Native Americans and Asian and Pacific Islander Americans on anything. We had the civil-rights movement, but the modern civil-rights movement was not necessarily your model multiethnic, multiracial movement.

There was friction and lots of confrontations and animosities in terms of who’s going to lead and the extent to which paternalism and racism and sexism could be eliminated. The environmental-justice movement took on the huge task of breaking down mistrust and stereotypes and the internalized racisms that we’re all victims of. You have some dynamics that are really very complex. But we’ve made a lot of progress: we’ve worked out the relationships for partnering and respecting leadership styles.

There are a couple of cases in your latest book of people involved in local struggles who went on to hold elected office. How representative is that of environmental justice as a leadership incubator?

In at least a quarter of cases, the leaders that emerge to work on local environmental-justice issues get involved in electoral politics. They get elected to school boards, city councils, and run for state representative. And 35 percent of them are women.

In other cases, they become the go-to people when it comes to, “What about jobs? What about this facility? Will it be a good thing or is this just a sell job?” Whether they be retired school teachers or retired mail carriers or little old grandmothers who have lots of time to devote to these issues, this is the training ground for leaders.

Marshall Ganz has pointed out that many of the mainstream, national environmental groups are D.C.-based lobbying organizations that don’t have the really engaged grassroots constituencies you’re describing. How do you see these two different kinds of groups working together?

The environmental-justice movement was never about creating little black Greenpeaces or little brown Environmental Defenses or little red Audubon Societies. These organizations have their expertise and when we can work together and maximize our strengths, that’s when we win.

There’s division of labor that can work to the advantage of this whole movement. When the mainstream national environmental groups pair up with environmental-justice groups that have the ability to mobilize large numbers of constituents — to get people marching and filling up those courtrooms and city council meetings — that’s when you can talk about an environmental movement.

A great example of how it should be done is happening right now in Louisiana. The Natural Resources Defense Council is partnering with the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network to work on testing and issues of environmental justice after Katrina. NRDC brings a lot of expertise, but is respecting those organizations based in New Orleans and Cancer Alley. They’re really showing how a national group and local groups can form a relationship that is principled.

So you’re hopeful?

On our side we have lots of committed troops on the ground and a growing movement of young people. Because of the way race operates in this society, there are some people — poor white people, for example — who have been given blinders; they’re blinded by racism and have voted against their own best interests. When we take the blinders off and allow every single American to rise and reach his or her potential without these artificial barriers, then we could really become a great country.

What environmental-justice issues might we be surprisingly close to breaking through on?

Globally we’ve got a long way to go, but the fact is we don’t have a lot of time — I think that reality will force collaboration. An awareness that what we do in the developed world doesn’t just impact us is now pretty much a given. But we have to move that to another level of action and policy: the framework that environmental justice has laid out can resonate across a lot of developing countries.

In the end, I think we’ll be able to get our message out because it’s based on principles and it’s based on truth and justice.

Click here to read more thoughts from Robert Bullard on Katrina and institutionalized racism.

Marshall Ganz.

Photo: Harvard University/Justin Ide.

As voluntary associations fade from our cultural landscape, political participation is threatened, especially on the left, says sociologist Marshall Ganz. And, he says, that trend is undermining the environmental movement, which has long depended on engaged members to carry its banner. That’s why Sierra Club leaders recently turned to Ganz to figure out how to get people fired up again.

In 1964, Ganz dropped out of Harvard to become a civil-rights organizer in Mississippi. The next year, he returned to California, where he had grown up the son of a rabbi and a teacher, to work for Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, eventually becoming the director of organizing. In 1991, after years of union, electoral, and community organizing work, he returned to Harvard to finish his undergraduate degree. And he’s been there ever since: a Ph.D. in sociology in 2000 led to Ganz’s current position as a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

His background led Ganz to the study of social movements, and the ways in which leadership and direction are nurtured. Now he focuses on finding ways to revitalize democratic organizations, develop their leadership, and engage their members — work that he says is critical to rebuilding a base of political power on the left. To that end, he has worked with the Howard Dean campaign and the national Democratic Party, as well as in local campaigns around the country. His just-completed, two-year project for the Sierra Club examined the group’s organizational effectiveness, pointing the way toward energizing its 750,000 members as the core of a revitalized environmental movement.

This fall, the largest-ever meeting of Sierra Club members convened in San Francisco as a way to begin the club’s revitalization. Grist caught up with Ganz after that gathering.

Much of your work has looked at social organizations that sound a little quaint in an age of online connectivity — the Loyal Order of Moose comes to mind. What did those organizations provide that’s lacking today?

Traditionally, membership associations, volunteer organizations, and advocacy organizations provided connective tissue between citizens and government, and public policy in general. There’s been a substantial breakdown in that over the last 30 or 40 years, and it’s left a vacuum.

What’s replaced the traditional organizations are these mailing-list operations — Greenpeace, Children’s Defense Fund, things like that. They’re like advocacy firms, where there’s a few professionals [who] do lobbying, but they don’t really have any kind of mobilizing capacity. They don’t provide vehicles for broad participation.

In these groups it’s very easy to disappear into an elitist mentality where, “Oh, everybody out there is dumb, so we gotta get with people like us and figure out the smart thing, blah blah blah.” Well, that’s deadly to a democratic movement that needs to be figuring out how to engage the broad community.

What’s missing is the link between them and groups that actually get people engaged. That process traditionally had a couple of important features: one was that it linked local with state with national; and secondly it brought people together and trained and developed leadership.

The word leadership figures heavily in your work. What do you mean when you use it?

Leadership is not just someone giving a good speech. Leaders are people actually capable of mobilizing other people and getting them engaged in public life and public action. Participation isn’t just a million individuals making individual choices: it’s a social activity in which some people take responsibility to mobilize others.

This may sound simplistic, but leadership means knowing how to have a good meeting: how to hear all sides, how to make a decision, how to include different points of view. It’s not a particularly mysterious skill set, but if people haven’t been trained in it, or they’ve only learned it as individuals and not as a group, then they don’t know how to do it.

In San Francisco, at the Sierra Summit, you said that “grassroots organizing is about building power.” What does that mean?

Well, the traditional formulation is that there’s two kinds of resources that can yield power: money and people. Democracy is a way to balance money with people. And for that to work, people have got to act together, because it’s through collective power that people can challenge the economic power of private wealth. So the goal is the power to alter policy, to alter circumstances, to change the world around you. It’s not just, you know, come to a nice meeting or something.

And the best way to reach that goal is through membership organizations?

Power is built in collective capacities — the capacity to act together. But that requires mastering the skills of collective action. And for years those skills were taught by large voluntary associations. But it’s sort of fallen into atrophy, and that’s actually where a lot of the Sierra Club groups and chapters are struggling. It’s not just that they’re trying to make better strategy, but they need to be able to mobilize their numbers.

That sounds like the kind of strength we’ve seen more of on the right than the left.

Well, [the right has] more successfully sustained the local/national linkage. We’ve seen that in election after election: they are able to put together local mobilization with national strategy in a way that has worked very well for them. National Right to Life, or the Christian Coalition as it used to be, or the NRA — those are national organizations that actually have local bases, and that actually mobilize them.

The right has this pre-existing base of church organizations. Isn’t that a big part of it?

That’s right, and they seem much more comfortable with a populist political style. They seem much more to “get it” about … being committed and cooperating with other committed people, and going out and evangelizing more. There is an evangelic spirit in their movement that is a great strength to them.

Church-based organizing has also been effective on the left: civil rights-era black churches produced some of the greatest leaders in American history. But they were having weekly meetings of their congregations. Is there anything with that kind of regularity in the environmental movement or in liberal society in general right now?

No, but what’s interesting is that people who came together weekly came together to worship, right? And worship was a collective activity. They weren’t coming together to do something that they could have done individually.

That’s why the Sierra Club’s recreational side is a tremendous strength. Because people come together to do that stuff, and they need to come together in order to do it. It gives the organization a reason to exist aside from getting together and figuring out what to do about public policy.

What do you see as promising sources for leadership on the left? Where do people get it?

I think if the Sierra Club buys into [the idea that it can be an incubator for leadership] it can have a huge impact on the environmental movement. Unions are [also] very important, the SEIU [Service Employees International Union] in particular, and a reenergized labor movement could really help with this. There’s a lot of activity in new immigrant communities — they’re much friendlier to this kind of approach and have had more success with it. Churches have a lot of experience in working in the way that I’m describing. That’s mainly benefited the right; it could benefit the left.

Conspicuously absent from that list are political parties.

Well, the logical thing would be political parties, and in any other industrial democracy it would be a political party. But we have such a screwy electoral system … political parties have become marketing instruments: it’s all about polling and about message and message delivery. There’s really no investment in, interest in, or even understanding of organization building. In the 2004 election, even ACT [America Coming Together] and the other groups were all canvassing operations, which is simply a way of marketing person-to-person as opposed to marketing over the phone. But actually creating collective capacity, organizing groups, developing leadership, and creating organizational capacity? That wasn’t happening — that’s what was missing.

Talk of organization often seems to have a corporate model as the underlying mind-set. It’s common to see MBAs coming into an advocacy situation trying to apply those skills. Is that part of the problem?

I think it’s a huge problem. For many years, the model of large organization in America was representative organization. Then, toward the end of the 19th century, corporate organization became an alternate model. One was about representation, the other was about control.

So now, as the interests and constituencies represented by large organizations like unions have been losing ground, and as this whole market thing has come to be so dominant since Reagan, and public institutions themselves have been increasingly viewed as illegitimate, everybody says, “Well, we gotta do everything like the private sector; we have to do everything like the market.”

It means that creative, intelligent individuals can legitimate a way of operating that doesn’t require them to engage with a constituency, to educate, to lead, to bring people together — to do the kinds of things that people used to have to do to earn leadership in a large organization. It lends itself to a very elitist approach to social change.

Yeah, I’ve noticed a lot of executive directors recently calling themselves CEOs.

Oh yeah. They call them CEOs, they have marketing plans. See, the language is a real giveaway: the language expresses an understanding of how organizations work that makes them basically a question of command and control. And so you wind up with this pull to make advocacy groups look more and more like firms: with boards of directors, managers, efficiency tests, and so forth — not as inclusive, mobilizing social movements or democratic organizations, which is a really different proposition.

What do you make of the demographic overlap between the corporate and environmental worlds? Environmentalists are often typecast as middle-class and white, just like the people who run corporations.

To me that’s one of the great potentials of the environmental movement. It is a middle-class constituency that is committed to a set of values that are not market-driven. It’s a set of values that requires strong public action in order to protect common interests and the common good. The movement plays a very important role in which middle-class, educated people are challenged to turn their values into political action and community action.

A lot of Grist readers — and writers — are the classic sort of environmentalists who recycle and have compact fluorescents and that sort of thing. They’re very on top of the consumer end of environmentalism. So do they need to plug into this organizational end?

Is living your life in an individually responsible way enough to bring about the kind of change that you would hope for? I think the answer is no. It takes collective action. It takes mastering the tools of power, because there are very powerful institutions committed to making your preferred way of life impossible.