WORLDFIRE - Chapter 19, Part II

It's Not "The Environment"

Canadian scientist and conservationist David Suzuki believes the "environmental” movement has failed because we didn’t change minds when we changed the laws: “The failure was, in winning these battles, we didn't change the way we see the world... We didn't get across the idea that the reason we wanted to stop logging here, or this dam, or this offshore drilling is we're a part of the biosphere and we've got to begin to behave in a way that protects the most fundamental things in our lives—air, water, soil and other species. That's the lesson of environmentalism and we failed to inculcate that in society." Our failure has been a failure to connect.

Another who sees green groups failing is conservationist Gus Speth, who TIME magazine once labeled “the ultimate insider.” As described by climate writer Wen Stephenson: “His resume is as mainstream and establishment as it gets: environmental advisor to Presidents Carter and Clinton, founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and World Resources Institute, administrator of the U.N. Development Program, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, now a professor at Vermont Law School.” But don’t let the establishment veneer fool you. I know better having shared a cellblock with the guy after being arrested, along with 1,252 others, for protesting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline outside the Obama White House. In 2018, Speth searingly wrote: “For over forty years we have known that avoiding disastrous climate change requires breaking fossil fuel’s hold on our economy and way of life. Decades of debate, negotiations, and actions have fallen short in triggering, never mind managing, an energy transition... This failure of government over these decades is, in my view, the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the Republic.” In his memoir, Angels by the River, Speth also fingers the “environmental” movement: “A specter is haunting American environmentalism – the specter of failure.” Speth is right that our economic and political systems have failed us. He is also right that nothing he, or I, or anyone else has done has managed to slow climate breakdown. For all its valiant work over the past half century, the “environmental” movement is not winning. It is losing. Oh, we have won our share of battles, but we are losing the climate war. And it is delusional to think that will change if we just work a little harder. We have to rethink our approach.

This begins with paying attention to nature by being here now. Step outside, take a deep breath, quiet your mind, and take a good look around. The answers to how we make peace with the planet are unfolding in front of our eyes every day. Life is happening all around us all the time. Gaia’s lessons, and those of Indigenous cultures that never stopped paying attention to the dance of life around us, are our lifeline to survival. But to see, we have to snap out of our techno-trance. We have to get our faces out of our phones. The more we are able to unplug from our electronic devices, the better we can plug back in to nature and revitalize our hearts, minds, and souls with her elegance, beauty, and grace. Allow yourself to be awestruck by this amazing planet. Your life will be forever enriched.

By remembering that we are part of nature and not apart from nature, we can move from an ego-centric point of view to an eco-centric point of view. This is how we develop what the 19^th century nature mystic, Richard Jeffries, called “earth knowledge.” Tapping into nature’s evolutionary genius is how we become nature smart. Others have another name for it: biomimicry. As described by the Biomimicry Institute, biomimicry is “an approach to innovation that seeks sustainable solutions to human challenges by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies. The goal is to create products, processes, and policies — new ways of living — that are well-adapted to life on earth over the long haul.” The Institute’s co-founder and most well-known promoter of the concept, biologist Janine Benyus, has an even shorter definition: “innovation inspired by nature.” In a 2017 commentary, Benyus wrote: “Dreaming our next city into being begins with a simple question: What would nature do here?” It’s a question we need to ask every time a city gets destroyed by a climate-fueled hurricane. If we don’t want to keep getting the same disastrous results, we need to redesign our cities in ways that are nature smart. Gaia has accumulated a deep well of wisdom over her 4.5-billion-year lifespan. It’s time that we learned more of what she has to teach us.

If you have ever spent a night under a cozy down quilt or in a down sleeping bag, luxuriating in the compressibility and high warmth-to-weight ratio of goose feathers to ward off the cold, you have experienced biomimicry. Here is the core concept as described by the Institute: “[N]ature has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. After billions of years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.” In other words, the keys to evolutionary resilience are all around us. We just need to look. That’s biomimicry in a nutshell.

Here is how biomimicry can be employed to improve the efficiency of wind turbines: scientists at two universities and the U.S. Naval Academy discovered that the ridges on the front edge of humpback whale flippers reduce drag by as much as 32% and increase lift by nearly 8%. Owls are also teaching us how to make wind turbines not just more efficient, but quieter: a U.S. National Science Foundation and U.S. Office of Naval Research study discovered that owls have a totally unique wing structure that allows them to hunt undetected. By applying a special coating or adding a serrated edge to turbine blades that mimics owl wings, wind turbines can be run quieter at higher wind speeds, thereby generating more electricity. To model Mother Nature’s genius is to model elegance and efficiency. There is no practical limit to what biomimicry can do, but we have to make nature-inspired innovation central to our thinking. From any objective point of view, we have not been acting very nature smart as a species. The good news is we are smart enough to change.

No sooner had I finished taping my YouTube video, “Redefining ‘the environment,’” than I found myself surrounded by a small group of C&O hikers peppering me with questions about my rig. As if to prove my point about never knowing who you might run into around the next bend, one of their voices sounded awfully familiar. But it wasn’t until I looked up at his face, twice (he was wearing a winter hat), that it dawned on me who it was. I said, “Bruce?”

It was Bruce Babbitt, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior. Babbitt seemed just as surprised to see me, at first unrecognizable in my bike helmet and sunglasses. He asked me what I was doing, so I gave him the 30-second elevator pitch. If you’re wondering how we knew each other, Babbitt and I had locked horns quite severely years prior doing battle over the Everglades when I was fighting to protect the “River of Grass” from Florida’s polluting sugar industry and he was carrying the sugar industry’s dirty water as Interior Secretary in the Clinton/Gore administration. We had built an army of Floridians to battle the industry, but they had a bigger arsenal. When Secretary Babbitt (along with Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Lawton Chiles, and others) cut a sweetheart deal with Big Sugar, Everglades protectors went ballistic. One of two big public dustups Babbitt and I had, this one, which also involved Florida’s Governor Lawton Chiles, made national news. If they hadn’t been so arrogant as to sign Big Sugar’s bill in a public national park, and instead had done it at the capitol in Tallahassee where they could control the narrative, they might have pulled off the con. But they underestimated the resolve of six determined Everglades defenders. After drawing Florida’s governor into an impromptu debate, an AP photo picked up by newspapers across the country pictured me heatedly confronting Lawton Chiles face-to-face across a police line in Everglades National Park for selling out the Everglades. Standing behind Chiles was Bruce Babbitt, who I also called out to his face. USA Today ran the AP photo with the headline, “River of discontent swirls around ‘River of Grass.’” The confrontation also made the front page of The Washington Post: “The Everglades Forever? Critics Say Cleanup Act Is Sweet Deal for Sugar.” In the end, they may have gotten their bill, but we made them pay a dear price for signing it. During our second big dustup, Babbitt’s assistant threatened to have me arrested for the having the audacity to ask his boss thrice in front of reporters why he was sticking the taxpayers of Florida, and not the polluting sugar industry, with the bulk of a $750 million Everglades cleanup tab. So we have some history.

Time, though, has a way of healing old battle wounds, and I try hard not to take things personally. For my part at least, I was happy to see Babbitt. What I did not think to tell him then, but wished I had, was how he indirectly helped inspire the journey I was on through an impassioned speech he gave on the climate crisis 13 years earlier in Boulder. Stirring and compelling, it remains the single most powerful climate talk I have ever heard in person. I attended the speech with my friend, Paul Alexander, which unfolded at Macky Auditorium at the University of Colorado, three years after Babbitt and I had last clashed. How ironic that my former arch nemesis would help inspire my future path in life. That 1997 speech helped awaken me to the true severity of the global climate crisis. This trailside encounter with Babbitt was an important reminder to keep an open mind about people, for you never know what role they might end up playing in your life. Adding irony to the irony is the recent discovery that peat oxidation from Big Sugar’s drainage of peat soils to grow sugarcane in the Everglades Agricultural Area has mutated the region into a carbon emissions hotspot. Growing evidence suggests that Big Sugar may even be one of the nation’s top 100 greenhouse gas polluters. As it turns out, extracting the sugar industry from the Everglades Agricultural Area would not only help the Everglades; it would help the climate.

As Babbitt and his friends continued up the towpath, I continued on my way down. A few short miles from the end of the trail, I passed by more history at Lock 6, where on July 4, 1828 President John Quincy Adams turned over the first shovelful of dirt to commence construction of the C&O Canal system. I soon found myself in Georgetown, with less than a mile to go, but there were more thoughts begging for release. So I pulled over on the suddenly narrow trail to record another YouTube video, this one on overcoming the forces of greed, calling out the depravity of the climate cranks sowing seeds of doubt in the minds of the American public about a reality the rest of the world has long since accepted. It called for countering that corruption with the might of doing what is right. It summoned the need for a heroic generational mission, reminding us that America is about doing great things. It also shared a profound insight I picked up from several people I had met on my journey as to why they thought we were not seeing real climate leadership in the U.S.: the “disease” of greed. Until I met them, I had never heard greed be described as a disease, but hearing my fellow Americans call it that really resonated with me.

I have nothing against making money. I am all for achieving financial security. In my own life, I have experienced both feast and famine and vastly prefer the former to the latter. In fact, I hope to make enough money someday to be able to pay forward the generosity shown to me during my life by giving a lot of it away to people and causes in need. I view desiring abundance for oneself and others as a good thing, but craving more than you would ever know what to do with is another thing entirely. I believe greed is a disease, a dis-ease of the soul, if you will, a debility that is felt by most of us from time to time. Where it becomes a problem is when it starts consuming you. Because those of immense wealth are so celebrated in America’s hyper-capitalist system, materialism and the manic pursuit of endless wealth have become almost national religions. But worshiping at the altar of mammon warps our values and blinds those in its grip to what really matters, which is each other.

I once heard a podcast with John Densmore, the drummer of my favorite band, The Doors, that spoke eloquently to this conundrum. As fate would have it, years prior I had had the pleasure of being arrested with Densmore, Bonnie Raitt, and a host of other well-known Earth protectors protesting Boise Cascade’s logging of ancient forests (the best moment: being thanked by arresting officers for what we we did). I was struck by how honestly Densmore spoke about greed. After describing “the greed gene coursing through my veins” and acknowledging that “[w]e’ve all got it,” he shared how he was inspired by John Lennon to tithe ten percent of his annual income to charities and why he has practiced tithing since the 1980s: “[M]oney is like fertilizer; when hoarded, it stinks. When spread around, things grow.” There are lots of philanthropists like Densmore who are making things grow, but too many others can’t seem to get enough while government cuts to social safety nets make it increasingly difficult for the majority to scrape together enough to even get by.

If greed is a disease, I think the cure for that dis-ease is love, which can be found by listening to your heart. I don’t think anyone is beyond redemption when it comes to that. People can change. If, like me, you believe there are forces greater than us at play in this grand drama called life, why not leave room for surprises? I am open to working with unlikely allies. I think deep down, everyone is ultimately seeking more connection. We just don’t know who is going to step up to the plate to help save civilization while there is still time. But let’s also not kid ourselves. Entrenched institutions are not going to change willingly. Wall Street and the big banks are not going to suddenly get a corporate conscience. Other behemoths like the fossil fuel industry will fight change to the death. We’re dealing with people who value money over the survival of the human race. I harbor no illusions about their power. Humanity is up against the most ruthless political forces the world has ever seen.

Let’s face it: our current economic system is benefiting fewer and fewer people, not more. Because the status quo is all that most of us know, that system today feels permanent. But it’s not. This is important. Crony capitalism is just one of countless ways of thinking about how to produce, distribute, and consume goods and services. For civilization to survive, economic development has to be brought into line with ecological limits. There is a fatal flaw in the capitalistic assumption that progress requires never-ending growth and consumption. The glaring glitch is this: infinite growth is not physically possible on a finite planet. Just as we regulate food consumption for optimum personal health, so must we regulate material consumption for optimum societal health. A healthy economy is one in service to human and ecological vitality, not obese growth. Beyond the matter of leaving a habitable planet for our children, there is much to be said for trading in the endless acquisition of temporary material goods for more simplicity in our lives. The answer is not more of everything. The answer is having enough to live a rich and meaningful life. Need, not greed, should be our creed. I have found in my own life that we can live better with less. Building an economy that prioritizes people and planet over profit and greed is central to safeguarding our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Without healthy food to eat, clean air to breathe, fresh water to drink, and a habitable planet to live on, there can be no liberty or happiness, let alone life.

Extractive capitalism is not only undermining our freedoms, it is leading to a dystopian future for the human family. But the collapse of civilization need not be our fate. There are other paths we can take that lead to health and happiness. One such pathway is being created by a group of thought leaders called Leading for Wellbeing. Their strategy document, the Meadows Memorandum, calls for “an economy in service to life.” This part of the memo mirrors the generous spirit of America I had encountered so often on my journey: “The old narrative was based on assumptions that scientists now reject. Psychologists, evolutionary biologists and anthropologists and others find that most people are not greedy, rugged individualists. We seek to meet our needs, but more, people seek goodness, connection, and caring. We desire to be rewarded for meaningful contributions with a decent living, but are not primarily motivated by acquiring wealth.” Another group, called the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, is doing similar work to create “an economy designed to serve people and the planet, not the other way around. Rather than treating economic growth as an end in and of itself and pursuing it at all costs, a Wellbeing Economy puts our human and planetary needs at the centre of its activities.” Others are advocating for an economic model called “Doughnut Economics,” a model designed “to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet.” The only businesses we should be celebrating in the 21^st Century are ones that do well by doing good. Call it conscious capitalism. Call it social capitalism. Call it enlightened capitalism. Call it a steady state economy. Call it a circular economy. Call it whatever you want, but we have to call it into being.

Scotland has established a Cabinet Secretary for a Wellbeing Economy. The Parliament of Finland has a Committee for the Future that serves as a government think tank for identifying “major future problems and opportunities.” The nation of Wales has gone so far as to create a Future Generations Commissioner to promote the wellbeing of the people of Wales and serve as a “guardian of future generations.” Every nation, including ours, should have such a Commissioner.

Despite it being accepted as near gospel in the United States, other nations reject Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the ultimate index of happiness. The Wellbeing Economy Alliance produces a global Happy Planet Index that challenges the primacy of GDP by asking the crucial question: “Is it possible to live good lives without costing the Earth?” Wellbeing times life expectancy divided by ecological footprint equals a nation’s score. Costa Rica was ranked #1 from 2006-2019. I witnessed such wellbeing with my own eyes during a 2007 backpacking adventure there. I have never encountered so many happy people just enjoying life. There is a reason why the unofficial motto of Costa Rica is pura vida (“pure life”). I don’t know too many Americans who want faster lives, but I know a great many who would like to slow down and enjoy more of the actual experience. Instead, our fixation on materialism and productivity–and the endless assault of technology on our senses and time–leaves too many Americans feeling estranged, demoralized, and depleted.

The United Nations has also been tracking happiness. Using a different index, the UN’s 2019 World Happiness Report measured the world’s happiest nations according to the following six variables: 1) GDP per capita; 2) life expectancy; 3) social support of friends and family; 4) freedom to make your own life choices; 5) charitable giving; and 6) perceptions of government and corporate corruption. According to the UN, the world’s happiest nations, ranked in order, were: 1) Finland; 2) Denmark; 3) Norway; 4) Iceland; and 5) the Netherlands, all social democracies. The United States was ranked 19^th. We can do better than this.

In the Himalayas, the democratic Kingdom of Bhutan has gone the farthest to elevate the happiness of its people over Gross National Product (GNP) by embracing Gross National Happiness (GNH) as its national philosophy. The Centre for Bhutan Studies describes their GNH Index as “an overview of performance across 9 domains of GNH (psychological wellbeing, time use, community vitality, cultural diversity, ecological resilience, living standard, health, education, good governance).” Their Constitution “directs the State ‘to promote those conditions that will enable the pursuit of Gross National Happiness.’” This is evolved thinking writ large. It has also helped make Bhutan one of the world’s few carbon negative nations (by protecting so many of its forests, Bhutan absorbs significantly more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits). With so many Americans saddled with debt and plagued by chronic economic insecurity, what better time than now for the U.S. to embrace a Gross National Happiness Index? Maybe we call it Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH) since that is closer to the well-known Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Regardless of what we call it, high performance in the aforementioned domains would go a long way toward promoting sustainable wellbeing for individuals and society.

While I was pedaling from Boulder, CO to Washington, DC, acclaimed economist Manfred Max-Neef was having a profound conversation with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, where he laid out a greenprint for a new economics in seven brilliant sentences:

“The principles, you know, of an economics, how it should be, are based in five postulates and one fundamental value principle. One, the economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy. Two, development is about people and not about objects. Three, growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth. Four, no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services. Five, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible. And the fundamental value to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life.”

The economic genius then explained why we should be focused on development, not growth: “Every living system in nature grows up to a certain point and stops growing. You are not growing anymore... But we continue developing ourselves. Otherwise we wouldn’t be dialoguing here now. So development has no limits. Growth has limits. And that is a very big thing, you know, that economists and politicians don’t understand. They are obsessed with the fetish of economic growth.” Now I am no student of economics, but the upshot of Max-Neef’s principles seems pretty clear to me: endless growth will be the end of us.

Rescuing civilization is going to require a national conversation along the lines of what research institutes like the Simplicity Institute have started “about the need to transition away from growth-based, consumer societies toward more resilient, egalitarian, and rewarding societies based on material sufficiency and renewable energy.” They are right to say: “Rethinking growth, capitalism, and consumerism in an age of environmental limits and economic instability cannot be avoided. The only question is whether it will be by design or disaster.” I say we do it by design.

Just because things are the way they are now doesn’t mean that is how things have to be. In the words of Albert Einstein, “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” It’s time to change our thinking. When what you’re doing isn’t working–and hyper-capitalism isn’t lifting the boats of the vast majority of Americans–it’s time to try something new. Prioritizing happiness and wellbeing over endless growth will improve everyone’s lives. It will also ground us and strengthen us for the tumultuous times to come. Just as the “environmental” movement is in the process of metamorphosing from a caterpillar into a butterfly, so do I in my more hopeful moments see the unfinished dream of America transforming inside the chrysalis, preparing to reveal herself anew.

So how do we make the leap to a green new world in a way that reignites our common sense of purpose? We have the rocket fuel to propel us forward: a fierce green fire of civic activism that burns stronger by the day. We have the flight plan to put us on a transpartisan trajectory: a green energy moon shot. What’s missing is a containment vehicle for our collective adventure, a rocket ship, if you will, powerful enough to capture–and hold–America’s imagination for the duration of the flight.

Wait, I have an idea.

NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.