A Story of Political Transformation, from my memoir Angels by the River

I believe this story of my political evolution from mainstream environmentalism to fervent advocate of deep, fundamental change in our political and economic systems might be helpful to others searching for a way forward.  I tell this story in my 2014 memoir, Angels by the River. Here is the relevant section from the memoir.

How did a nice, conservative, Southern white boy become a civilly disobedient, older, still white guy bent on transformative change to a new system of political economy?

The people I know with any ambition want to be successful at what they do—to feel they are accomplishing something meaningful. And so we accommodate in various ways to what is required to be effective in the particular circumstances in which we find ourselves. It’s important, then, to try to stay in jobs or other situations where that accommodation is not too much of a stretch. If it is, unless we’re unusually malleable, we’re going to be either unhappy or ineffective or both. 

I have been extremely fortunate in this regard. I’ve held both advocacy and management positions that allowed me to stay comfortably in my own progressive skin, with ample freedom to maneuver. That said, it is true that those positions have all been jobs within the American mainstream, and true also that I conducted myself to be effective in those contexts.

Thus it happened in 2004 that Time magazine would refer to me as “the ultimate insider.” I had never thought of myself that way, but it stuck and was picked up yet again in 2012 by Wen Stephenson in the title for an interview he did with me in the online Grist, titled “‘Ultimate Insider’ Goes Radical.”

Stephenson introduced the interview by noting my “soft South Carolina drawl,” and pointing out that I am “nobody’s picture of a radical,” before adding:

 “And yet this elder environmental statesman . . . has grown ever more convinced that our politics and our economy are so corrupted, and the environmental movement so inadequate, that we can no longer hope to address the climate crisis, or our deep social ills, by working strictly within the system. The only remaining option, he argues . . . is to change the system itself. And that, he knows full well, will require a real struggle for the direction and soul of the country.

“Which is why . . . he was arrested in front of the White House on Aug. 20 [2011]—along with Bill McKibben and eventually more than 1,200 others—in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience protesting the Keystone XL pipeline.” That modest act of nonviolent civil disobedience landed us in the central cellblock of the District of Columbia jail for three days.

I went to jail with Bill McKibben and scores of others because I found myself at the end of my proverbial rope. After more than 30 years of unsuccessfully advocating for government action to protect our planet’s climate, civil disobedience was my way of saying that America’s economic and political system has failed us all.

The journey from “insider” to “radical” that Stephenson describes began when I returned to Yale in 1999. My decade long tenure as dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies provided me the opportunity to step back from the fray and do what professors are supposed to do: take a hard, searching look at what is actually going on. Subsequently, the Vermont Law School provided the same opportunity. At both I not only had the time to reflect but also the freedom and encouragement to speak out. That was part of the job, not a hindrance to it.

Shortly after becoming dean, I began looking at information on conditions and trends in the environment and, later, in other areas to see where America actually stands after several decades of much progressive effort and even more resistance. And the harder and longer I looked, the more I felt that I was being mugged by reality. As I noted earlier, after years of claiming this and that environmental victory, we find ourselves today fast approaching environmental catastrophe. More broadly, if one looks at where the United States stands among the 20 leading advanced democracies on 30 key indicators of national well-being—poverty, inequality, education, social mobility, health, environment, and on and on—you find that “We’re Number One!” in exactly the way we don’t want to be—at or very near the bottom. So I started organizing my thoughts, offering lectures, and then writing. 

My first sustained effort to articulate my growing concerns was Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment, published by Yale University Press in 2004. It grew out of a series of lectures I had given in a course for Yale undergraduates. For over twenty years prior I had worked to promote international responses to a series of pressing global scale problems: climate change, biodiversity loss, ozone depletion, deforestation, desertification, and more. By the time I took a group of Yale students to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002, the international community had in fact adopted an impressive array of treaties and other agreements addressed to almost all these challenges.

My first task was to assess how these agreements were working. I was prepared for some bad news, but it was worse than I anticipated—and not much has changed in the decade since 2004. As I wrote in Red Sky at Morning, “the bottom line is that these treaties and their associated agreements and protocols do not drive the changes that are needed. Thus far, the climate convention is not protecting climate, the biodiversity convention is not protecting biodiversity, the desertification convention is not preventing desertification, and even the older and stronger Convention on the Law of the Sea is not protecting fisheries. Nor are they poised to do so in the immediate future. The same can be said for the extensive international discussions on world forests, which never have reached the point of a convention. . . . 

“It would be comforting to think that all of the international negotiations, summit meetings, conference agreements, conventions, and protocols at least have taken the international community to the point where it is prepared to act decisively—comforting but wrong. Global environmental problems have gone from bad to worse, governments are not yet prepared to deal with them, and, at present, many governments, including some of the most important, lack the leadership to get prepared.”

Those conclusions forced me to ask why. What had gone wrong? My answer was that, “the failure of green governance at the international level is a compound of many elements. The issues on the global environmental agenda are inherently difficult . . . powerful underlying forces drive deterioration and require complex and far-reaching responses, while the inherently weak political base for international action is typically overrun by economic opposition and protection of sovereignty. Meanwhile, the response that the international community has mounted has been flawed: the root causes of deterioration have not been addressed seriously, weak multilateral institutions have been created, consensus-based negotiating procedures have ensured mostly toothless treaties, and the economic and political context in which treaties must be prepared and implemented has been largely ignored. To some degree these results can be attributed to accidents, errors, and miscalculations, but the lion’s share of the blame must go to the wealthy, industrial countries and especially to the United States.” The United States gave strong leadership in the effort to protect the ozone layer but after that became a big part of the problem in international negotiations. In effect, I concluded, the international community brought weak medicine to a very sick patient. 

There are deeper drivers of deterioration than our treaty regimes are addressing—the root causes that I mentioned. Red Sky at Morning identified ten: population growth, mounting affluence, inappropriate technology, widespread poverty, market failure, policy and political failure, the scale and rate of economic growth, the nature of our economic system, our culture and its misguided values, and the forces loosed upon the world by the globalization of the economy. This, obviously, is quite a list. Undaunted, I went on to propose an agenda for real change in global environmental governance, including what is needed to address these ten underlying forces. So little has since been done to adopt my proposals that, a decade later, they are for the most part still fresh as a daisy.

The book was getting attention, but I was not satisfied with my first effort to get to the bottom of the environmental problem, and I wanted also to broaden the analysis beyond the global-scale challenges and to focus particularly on the United States. When the opportunity arose to offer the DeVane Lectures at Yale, I accepted the invitation and decided to use the lectures as the means to explore these issues more deeply. There’s nothing quite like the requirement of delivering a fresh, hour-long lecture every week for a semester in front of two hundred people to concentrate the mind, and in the winter and spring of 2007, that’s what I did. The Bridge at the Edge of the World, published the following year, was the product of those lectures.

The breakthrough for me was to see those root causes and underlying drivers of deterioration as aspects of a system, and The Bridge at the Edge of the World named it: population growth and poverty in the developing world were factors, I concluded, “but the much larger and more threatening impacts stem from the economic activity of those of us participating in the modern, increasingly prosperous world economy. This activity is consuming vast quantities of resources from the environment and returning to the environment vast quantities of waste products. The damages are already huge and are on a path to be ruinous in the future. So, a fundamental question facing societies today—perhaps the fundamental question—is how can the operating instructions for the modern world economy be changed so that economic activity both protects and restores the natural world. With increasingly few exceptions, modern capitalism is the operating system of the world economy.”

In The Bridge at the Edge of the World, I summarized my conclusions in six points:

• The vast expansion of economic activity that occurred in the twentieth century and continues today is the predominant (but not the only) cause of the environmental decline that has occurred to date. Yet, the world economy, now increasingly integrated and globalized, is poised for unprecedented growth. The engine of this growth is modern capitalism.

• A mutually reinforcing set of forces associated with today’s capitalism combine to yield economic activity inimical to environmental sustainability. This result is partly the consequence of an ongoing political default—a failed politics—that not only perpetuates widespread market failure—all the nonmarket environmental costs that no one is paying—but exacerbates this market failure with deep and environmentally perverse subsidies. The result is that our market economy is operating on wildly wrong market signals.

• The upshot is that societies now face environmental threats of unprecedented scope and severity, with the possibility of various catastrophes, breakdowns, and collapses looming as distinct possibilities, especially as environmental issues link with social inequities and tensions, resource scarcity, and other issues.

• Today's mainstream environmentalism, as I described in the previous chapter, has proven insufficient in dealing with current challenges and is not up to coping with the larger challenges ahead.

• The momentum of the current system is so great that only powerful forces will alter the trajectory. Potent measures are needed that address the root causes of today’s destructive growth and transform economic activity into something environmentally benign and restorative. 

• In short, most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic failures of the capitalism that we have today, and long-term solutions must seek transformative change in the key features of this contemporary capitalism.

As with Red Sky at Morning, the larger part of The Bridge at the Edge of the World is concerned not with identifying the problems but with pointing to the solutions. In the case of The Bridge, most of the actions I urge are focused on changing our current system of political economy.

My analysis was getting sharper, but I was still not happy. It is clear to anyone reading the newspapers that America is beset by multiple problems—not just environmental but also social, economic, and political. Our system of political economy is delivering bad results not only for the environment but across the whole spectrum of national life. There are more big things on our national to-do list than we have fingers and toes. A list of 21 is nearby, right at the end of this chapter in fact. I wanted to explore the linkages among these issues, to look more closely at our country and how we have come to find ourselves in such a sea of troubles, and to present a vision of a possible future that, while plausible, would be a place we’d be happy to have our children and grandchildren inhabit. When the Vermont Law School invited me to give a series of public lectures, my next book, America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy was launched.

America the Possible looks more searchingly than I had previously at what went wrong in America. It argues that America got off course for primarily two reasons. “First, in recent decades we failed to build consistently on the foundations laid by the New Deal, by Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and his Second Bill of Rights, and by the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Eleanor Roosevelt contributed so much. Instead, we unleashed a virulent, fast-growing strain of corporate-consumerist capitalism.

Here, I am referring not to an idealized capitalism but to the one we actually have. This system of political economy—the basic operating system of our society—rewards the pursuit of profit, growth, and power and does little to encourage a concern for people, place, and planet. ‘Ours is the Ruthless Economy,’ say Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus in their text Macroeconomics. Indeed it is. And in its ruthlessness at home and abroad, it creates a world of wounds. As it strengthens and grows, those wounds deepen and multiply.

“Such an economy begs for restraint and guidance in the public interest—control that must be provided mainly by government. Yet the captains of our economic life, and those who have benefited disproportionately from it, have largely taken over our political life. Corporations have long been identified as our principal economic actors; they are now also our principal political actors. The result is a combined economic and political system of great power and voraciousness pursuing its own economic interests without serious concern for the values of fairness or justice or sustainability that democratic government might have provided.

“The other big and relevant development in recent American history is that our political economy evolved and gathered force in parallel with the U.S. role in the Cold War. . . The Cold War and the rise of the American security state powerfully affected the political-economic system—strengthening the priority given to economic growth, giving rise to the military-industrial complex, and draining time, attention, and money away from domestic needs and many international challenges. This deflection of attention and resources continued with the rise of peacekeeping operations in the wake of the Cold War’s end and, more recently, with the response to international terrorism.

“As a result, America now confronts a daunting array of challenges in the well-being of our people, in the conduct of our international affairs, and in the management of our planet’s natural assets, at precisely the moment that it has become unimaginable that American politics as we know it will deliver the needed responses.”

America the Possible makes the case for driving system change so deeply that our country emerges with a new system of political economy, one programmed to routinely deliver good results for people, place and planet. The idea of a new political economy is too big to swallow whole. System change can best be approached through a series of interacting, mutually reinforcing transformations—transformations that attack and undermine the key motivational structures of the current system, transformations that replace these old structures with new arrangements needed for a sustaining economy and a successful democracy.

As I wrote in America the Possible, I believe the following transformations hold the key to moving to a new political economy. We can think of each as a transition from today to tomorrow.

• The market: from near laissez-faire to powerful market governance in the public interest; from dishonest prices to honest ones and from unfair wages to fair ones; from commodification to reclaiming the commons, the things that rightfully belong to all of us;

• The corporation: from shareholder primacy to stakeholder primacy, from one ownership and profit-driven model to new business models and to economic democracy and public scrutiny of major investment decisions;

• Economic growth: from growth fetish to post-growth society, from mere GDP growth to growth in social and environmental well-being and democratically determined priorities;

• Money and finance: from Wall Street to Main Street, from money created through bank debt to money created by government; from investments seeking high financial return to those seeking high social and environmental returns;

• Social conditions: from economic insecurity to security, from vast inequities to fundamental fairness;

• Indicators: from GDP (“grossly distorted picture”) to accurate measures of social and environmental health and quality of life;

• Consumerism: from consumerism and affluenza to sufficiency and mindful consumption, from more to enough;

• Communities: from runaway enterprise and throwaway communities to vital local economies, from social rootlessness to rootedness and solidarity;

• Dominant cultural values: from having to being, from getting to giving, from richer to better, from separate to connected, from apart from nature to part of nature, from near-term to long-term;

• Politics: from weak democracy to strong, from creeping corporatocracy and plutocracy to true popular sovereignty;

• Foreign policy and the military: from American exceptionalism to America as a normal nation, from hard power to soft, from military prowess to real security.

Here’s the good news: we are already seeing the proliferation of innovative actions along these lines, particularly at the local level in our communities: sustainable communities, transition towns, local living economies, sustainable and regenerative agriculture, new regional and organic food systems, community investment institutions as well as innovative business models—including social enterprises, for-benefit business, and co-ops of several types (worker owned, producer owned, consumer owned)—that prioritize community and environment over profit and growth. We are also seeing the spread of new community-oriented and earth-friendly lifestyles. These initiatives provide inspirational models of how things might work in a new political economy devoted to sustaining human and natural communities. They are bringing the future into the present.

… Here is how it might all come together. As conditions in our country continue to decline across a wide front, or at best fester as they are, ever-larger numbers of Americans lose faith in the current system and its ability to deliver on the values it proclaims. The system steadily loses support, leading to a crisis of legitimacy. Meanwhile, traditional crises, both in the economy and in the environment, grow more numerous and fearsome. In response, progressives of all stripes coalesce, find their voice and their strength, and pioneer the development of a powerful set of new ideas and policy proposals confirming that the path to a better world does indeed exist. Demonstrations and protests multiply, and a powerful movement for pro-democracy reform and transformative change is born. At the local level, people and groups plant the seeds of change through a host of innovative initiatives that provide inspirational models of how things might work in a new political economy devoted to sustaining human and natural communities. Sensing the direction in which the current is moving, our wiser and more responsible leaders, political and otherwise, rise to the occasion, support the growing movement for change, and frame a compelling story or narrative that makes sense of it all and provides a positive vision of a better America. It is a moment of democratic possibility.