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barry commoner
What Barry Commoner's Four Principles of Ecology Has to Do With China's Coronavirus
"The present system of production is self-destructive; the present course of human civilization is suicidal."
Jan 26, 2020
My world as a very impressionable kid growing up on Long Island was influenced in the late 1950's and early '60's by make-believe television heroes and heroines, like Davy Crockett, tough western cowboys like Paladin and Wyatt Earp, and gentler ones, like the characters in the Wizard of OZ who finally found their courage. A picture of Alfred E Newman, from MAD Magazine, was pinned to the wall next to my bed, and a big pile of comic books were neatly stacked in a nearby bookshelf. Ah, the joys of a sheltered childhood....
These days I often find myself thinking about the people in my adult life that I count as exemplary individuals, like Pete Seeger, Martin Luther King, Joan Baez, Jane Fonda, Francis Moore Lappe, Ralph Nader, Greta Thunberg, and, the late Dr. Barry Commoner, who made the front page of Time magazine in 1970 during the first Earth Day as "the Paul Revere of Ecology."
Barry Commoner published his first best-selling book, "The Closing Circle," in 1971 which coincided with the very beginnings of Earth Day, and he warned Americans that a society which does not follow the basic laws of ecology and nature is a society courting disaster and turmoil. He said, "We are in an environmental crisis because the means by which we use the ecosphere to produce wealth are destructive of the ecosphere itself. The present system of production is self-destructive; the present course of human civilization is suicidal." Prescient, wise, and terrifying words..... and probably the first person ever in a modern media spotlight to say that capitalism is inherently anti-ecological. Nowadays, Bernie Sanders seems to be the most well-known standard-bearer for this belief, though he is not so blatant as to say exactly that. And there are others, like Naomi Klein, and a mix of lesser well-known eco-socialists.
In "The Closing Circle," Dr. Commoner proposed his now-famous Four Laws of Ecology, a thesis as timely today as it was when he first conceived this 49 years ago.
- "Everything is Connected to Everything Else."
- "Everything Must Go Somewhere." (Also known as There is No Such Place as Away.)
- "Nature Knows Best."
- "There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch."
Commoner's wonderful and exquisitely useful thesis has been summarized, expanded, analyzed with environmental examples for today's world, and discussed many times over, but ironically, a very hot news story this week regarding epidemics - the spreading CoronaVirus from Wuhan, China - presents us with an incredible example of how all four of Commoner's ecology laws apply to this now-international health scare. It turns out that Chinese "wet markets" are, according to Chinese scientist Zhenzhong Si, as quoted on NPR, "the predominant food retail outlets for fresh produce and meat in Chinese cities. A large city typically has a few hundred wet markets," and a huge variety of both plant and animal products are for sale, including live animals, such as rabbits, frogs, snakes, turtles, pigeons, foxes, and many others. Tragically, these animals are kept in notoriously unhealthy confined spaces and their excretions and illnesses are part of the overall market arena, which is visited by thousands of shoppers each day. Additionally, the live slaughtering of animals takes place on a regular basis. Wet markets are an established and ingrained part of Chinese community and culture, and thus it is no surprise that diseases are now jumping from animals to humans and humans to humans. This is how the SARS virus got started in 2002 and 2003.
In China and other parts of Asia, says Dr. Zhenzhong Si, "Eating wild animals is considered a symbol of wealth because they are more rare and expensive. And wild animals are also considered more natural and, thus, nutritious, compared to farmed meat. It's a belief in traditional Chinese medicine that it can boost the immune system...Of course, some people eat wild animals just because they were driven by curiosity."
If the Chinese wet marketplace in urban areas doesn't mesh with Dr. Commoner's big picture of how the world can go very very wrong if it doesn't follow nature's basic rules, then nothing does.... If "Nature knows best" then wild animals should be living wildly, not harvested en masse for consumption and imprisoned in cages or tanks in crowded markets. And if "There is no such thing as a free lunch" and then you set up an unsustainable system such as the wet markets, you will undoubtedly be bitten in the ass, or worse. "Everything must go somewhere", in my opinion, equates to the disease, viruses, bacteria and blood, which are produced by animals in awful modes of captivity and being killed, directly next to people working and shopping. And, of course there's "everything is connected to everything else," which kind of sums up this whole truly unfortunate and inhumane situation.
We're told on the daily news that airports all over the world are now being used as emergency health assessment centers for travelers who may have been exposed to the virus, and that several huge cities in China, with a combined population of 25 million, are quarantined and essentially shut down in fear of the virus spreading to large numbers of people.
A toxic brew, made worse by teeming populations and easy worldwide travel. No easy answers here but many Chinese cities have apparently been moving towards modern supermarkets and away from the socially-popular wet markets. Still, the whole thing is a fine but awful example of how easy it is to go off the rails when you don't think and act like mother nature.
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These Are A Few Of My Favorite Jews
Dec 27, 2019
Like the Passover story, the celebration of Hanukkah reminds us that people can overcome great obstacles and achieve great things if they have a vision of a better society and build movements that challenge the conventional ideas of their day.
Election results and public opinion polls reveal that among white Americans, Jews have consistently been the most liberal and progressive ethnic and religious group. In 1920, when only 3 percent of Americans voted for Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president, Jews gave him 38 percent of their votes. In 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover for president with 57 percent of the popular vote, 82 percent of Jews supported FDR. In 1960, John F. Kennedy squeaked out a victory over Richard Nixon, getting barely more than 50 percent of all votes, but among Jews, it was no contest, with JFK garnering 82 percent of their votes. In 2008, Barack Obama bested John McCain by a 53-46 margin, but he won the Jewish vote 78-22.
Despite the prominence of a small number of Jews in the Trump administration - including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and policy aide and alter-ego Stephen Miller - only a small number of Jews are conservatives or Republicans. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote against Donald Trump by 48 to 46 percent, but Jews favored Clinton by 71 to 23 percent. In the 2018 midterm elections that swept in a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, Jews led the "blue wave," giving Democrats 79 percent of their votes.
A 2012 survey found that 81 percent of Jews, compared with only 48 percent of all Americans, favored same-sex marriage should be legal. In the same survey, 93 percent of Jews believed that abortion should be legal in contrast to 53 percent of all Americans.
More than most other demographic groups - particularly among white Americans - Jews overwhelmingly disapprove of President Donald Trump's handling of most policy issues, including family separations at the Mexican border (78 percent), treatment of DACA recipients (74 percent), guns (74 percent), the Mueller Report (73 percent), building the border wall (71 percent), taxes (70 percent), Supreme Court nominations (69 percent), health care (69 percent), and banning immigration from certain Muslim-majority countries (66 percent). percent). Seventy-one percent of Jews disapprove of Trump's handling of the upsurge of anti-Semitism in America, a trend that Trump himself has provoked by consistently expressing anti-Semitic stereotypes and encouraging the rise of white nationalist hate groups.
Voting is the most basic of political activities, but social change happens only when people participate in activist movements that influence how people think and vote. Throughout American history, Jews have played and continue to play a disproportionately large role in the key social justice movements - as organizers and activists, politicians and jurists, and thinkers, artists, journalists, playwrights, poets, and novelists.
In 1900, anyone who advocated for women's suffrage, laws protecting the environment and consumers, an end to lynching, the rights of workers, a progressive income tax, or old-age insurance was considered a dangerous dreamer or a dangerous radical. Today such ideas are taken for granted. The radical ideas of one generation have become the common sense of the next.
Jews were among leaders and rank-and-file activists in all the great movements of the past century -- labor, civil rights and civil liberties, feminism, environmentalism, gay rights and the crusade against militarism - that have made America a more humane, democratic and inclusive country.
Consider Rose Schneiderman, a fiery socialist union organizer. She was on the front lines of the Progressive Era battles against slums and sweatshops. So were settlement house pioneer Lillian Wald, Rabbi Stephen Wise and lawyer Louis Brandeis (later a Supreme Court justice), whose writings and legal activism helped tame the growing power of corporate monopolies. Victor Berger, an Austrian immigrant and in 1910 the country's first Socialist congressman, introduced the first bill to provide old-age pensions. Eventually, the idea was adopted in 1935 when President Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security.
Jewish social activism helped spearhead the early civil rights movement as well. In 1909, Joel Spingarn was a founder and then long-term president of the NAACP. Julius Rosenwald of Sears & Roebuck was a pioneer in the new field of progressive philanthropy. He endowed Jane Addams' Hull House and Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, funded more than 5,000 schools for African Americans in the rural South, and supported the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee-based training center for labor and civil rights activists.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, labor leaders Sidney Hillman, David Dubinsky, Rose Pesotta, and Ralph Helstein led battles for workers' rights and economic reform, while composers Yip Harburg ("Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" and "Over the Rainbow") and Aaron Copland ("Fanfare for the Common Man"), artist Ben Shahn and playwright Clifford Odets ("Waiting for Lefty") gave shape to radical ideas that caught the public's imagination.
During the 1960s, Allard Lowenstein, along with African-American organizer Bob Moses, created the Freedom Summer project, which brought more than 1,000 college students to the South to register black voters. About half of the white volunteers were Jews. Many of them -- including Barney Frank, Heather Booth and Vivian Rothstein -- pursued careers in activism and reform that have lasted into the 21st century. Two of them - Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman - died at the hands of extremist segregationists.
Lowenstein, along with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, journalist I.F. Stone, critic Noam Chomsky and other Jews, gave voice to the rising tide of anti-Vietnam War sentiment. Jews constituted at least one-third of the early leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, the leading campus anti-war organization.
Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Judy Chicago, and Andrea Dworkin were at the forefront of second-wave feminism. San Francisco activist Harvey Milk, poet Alan Ginsberg, scientist Frank Kameny, writer Larry Kramer, and Edie Windsor (plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage) helped catalyze the gay rights movement. A 1970 Time cover story called scientist Barry Commoner the "Paul Revere of ecology." Saul Alinsky inspired several generations of community organizers. Jews in the arts and the academy -- including playwright Arthur Miller, filmmakers Sidney Lumet and Stanley Kramer, TV producer Norman Lear, folksingers Bob Dylan, Peter Yarrow, Theo Bikel, and Phil Ochs, writers Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich and Studs Terkel, and social critics like writer Paul Goodman, Lenny Bruce, historian Howard Zinn, and Harvey Kurtzman (founder of MAD magazine) -- gave voice to movements of dissent.
Today, when Jews represent less than two percent of the nation's population, a new generation of Jewish progressives is extending this activist tradition. The individuals listed below are deeply rooted in today's movements for social justice. Some of them are directly involved in the Jewish community, but most of them work for unions, community organizing and environmental groups, and other issue advocacy organizations, or serve in public office as allies and activists within government.
I have focused on organizers and activists, rather than writers, journalists, entertainers, artists, musicians, and academics, even though they make critically important contributions to progressive movements. Any history of contemporary progressivism would be incomplete without reference to opinion-shapers like Kate Aronoff, Dick Flacks, Eric Foner, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Michelle Goldberg, Amy Goodman, Jacob Hacker, Janis Ian, Sarah Jaffe, Naomi Klein, Jonathan Kozol, Paul Krugman, Tony Kushner, Robert Kuttner, Sarah Leonard, Nelson Lichtenstein, Harold Meyerson, Phranc, Francis Fox Piven, Sarah Silverman, Jill Soloway, George Soros, Jon Stewart, Evan Rachel Wood, and David Zirin.
I don't pretend this is a comprehensive list. These are people I know, or know about. They represent a wide spectrum of activism, but there are tens of thousands of other Jews who could be included on others' lists. These are a few of my favorite Jews:
1. Nan Aron is founder and president of the Alliance for Justice, which fights for federal court appointees who respect civil rights and civil liberties
2. Ady Barkan, a veteran activist and publicist for progressive causes, has become well-known as a fighter for Medicare for All after he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (A.L.S.), a disease that slowly takes away nearly every physical function while keeping the mind intact, and confined to a wheelchair. Politico called him "the most powerful activist in America."
3. Jeremy Ben-Ami is president of J Street, the leading organization within the American Jewish community committed to challenging Israel's rightward shift.
4. Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange and founder of the women-led peace group Code Pink that uses create civil disobedience and humor to challenge corporate and government decision-makers around issues of militarism and the environmental crisis.
5. Rabbi Sharon Brous founded IKAR, a progressive Los Angeles synagogue, in 2004, to attract unaffiliated Jews alienated from the mainstream Jewish community. Brous and IKAR have helped spark a revival of interest in Jewish spirituality, inter-faith ties, and political activism.
6. Heather Booth has been an organizer since the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War and women's movements of the 1960s. She created JANE, an underground abortion service started before Roe, and founded the Midwest Academy, a training center for social change leaders and organizers. She has been a key strategist and activist in movements immigrant rights, voting rights, bank reform, marriage equality, tax reform, and health care reform. She is the subject of the recent documentary "Heather Booth: Changing the World."
7. Dan Cantor was described in New York magazine as the "model of a grassroots political boss" for his role as Executive Director of the Working Families Party (WFP) of New York, a progressive third party established in 1998. Under his leadership, WFP led successful campaigns to reform New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws, maintain access to affordable mass transit, and raise New York's minimum wage. The WFP has helped elect progressive mayors, state legislators, city council members and members of Congress.
8. Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, led a major transformation of the union into a more militant, inclusive, and effective organization. Under his leadership, UTLA won major educational victories in 2019 following a week-long strike that catalyzed widespread support by building bridges with community and faith-based groups, parents and students in the country's second-largest school system.
9. Donald Cohen, founder of In The Public Interest, which works with unions, community groups, and local governments to challenge privatization, develop progressive policy ideas, and improve the effectiveness of progressive government
10. Stosh Cotler is the CEO of Bend the Arc, a Jewish social justice group, which has led the Jewish resistance to the Trump administration.
11. Janice Fine, spent more than 20 years as a community, labor, and electoral organizer before joining Rutgers University's labor studies faculty. She is a co-convenor of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, and works closely with many national and local immigrant rights, labor, and community organizing groups.
12. Lew Finfer, a Boston-based community and tenants rights organizer since 1970, is currently executive director of the Massachusetts Communities Action Network, a network of faith-based community organizations that has won significant victories around economic, housing, and racial justice. He has led successful campaigns around rent control, redlining, health care, paid family leave and the minimum wage.
13. Jacob Frey served on the Minneapolis City Council before being elected Mayor in 2017. A college track star and a lawyer by training, Frey provided legal aid to tenants who lost their homes after a tornado struck Minneapolis in 2011. The next year he organized the first Big Gay Race, a 5K charity race to raise money for Minnesotans United for All Families, a political group organizing for marriage equality. On the City Council, he drafted the city's minimum wage law and paid sick leave ordinance, led an effort to require landlords to provide tenants with voter registration information, and sponsored an ordinance requiring polluters to pay fees based on the amount of pollution they produce in order to fund green jobs. As mayor, he has dramatically increased city funding for affordable housing and pushed for a comprehensive zoning reform plan to allow three-family homes in the city's residential neighborhoods, abolish parking minimums for all new construction, and allow high-density buildings along transit corridors, making Minneapolis the first major city to end single-family zoning and confront the city's segregation, high housing costs, and sprawl.
14. Leah Fried, an organizer with the United Electrical Workers union, along with local union president Armando Robles led 240 workers to illegally occupy their Chicago workplace in 2008 after their employer, Republic Windows and Doors, abruptly told them that it was shutting down the factory, denying employees severance and vacation pay they had earned. The workers formed and incorporated New Era Windows, a worker-run cooperative, and raised the funds needed to buy the machinery from their former employer and keep producing windows under the new arrangement. It remains open for business.
15. Andrew Friedman is co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, a national network of local and state community organizing groups with 53 affiliates in 34 states that organize campaigns to advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial and economic justice policy agenda nationwide.
16. Marshall Ganz, the son of a rabbi, joined the Southern civil rights movement before serving as the organizing director for the United Farm Workers union. He teaches community organizing at Harvard, serving as a guru for activists around the world. He was the architect of Obama's 2008 grassroots election campaign
17. Jackie Goldberg's activism started with the Free Speech Movement at UC-Berkeley in 1964. After teaching in public schools, she won seats on the LA school board, LA City Council, and California state legislature, serving as an effective advocate for progressive causes, including spearheading battles for a living wage and responsible development. After a decade hiatus in public office, she was elected to the school board again in 2019.
18. Robert Greenwald, an award-winning TV and movie director, founded the nonprofit Brave New Films in 2000 to use documentary films to educate and mobilize for progressive causes. Its films have tackled such topics as Fox News, immigration, mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, Walmart, the NRA, the Koch brothers, racism, and voter suppression.
19. Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin co-founded Indivisible soon after Trump was elected president in 2016. Their on-line handbook for progressives soon mushroomed into a nationwide movement of volunteer activists, with over 6,000 chapters, devoted to mobilizing voters around progressive issues and candidates.
20. Ilyse Hogue, CEO of NARAL-Pro-Choice America, a leading women's rights organization. She previously worked at MoveOn.org, the Rainforest Action Network, and Media Matters for America.
21. Eddie Iny is the organizing director for OUR Walmart, a nationwide grassroots organization of Walmart employees, which has successfully pushed the nation's largest private employer to raise based pay from $7.25 to $11 an hour, institute paid family leave, and improve conditions for pregnant employees.
22. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T'ruah, the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, which raises awareness and engages in direct action to protect human rights in the United States and Israel.
23. Madeline Janis, organizer and founder of the LA Alliance for a New Economy and Jobs to Move America, has for over 35 years, been on the inside and outside of local and state government, working to create high road, equitable economic development.
24. Cameron Kasky, a survivor of the tragic shooting in 2018 at Marjory Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, is a founder of March for Our Lives and Never Again MSD, organizations that advocate for stronger gun control.
25. Larry Kramer is an iconic gay rights activist, playwright, and co-founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis. He helped start the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987, an influential direct action protest organization that is widely credited with raising awareness of HIV and AIDS-related diseases. Among his many plays are The Normal Heart (1985) and The Destiny of Me (1992).
26. Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum is the spiritual leader of New York's Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the largest LGBTQ synagogue in the country. She joined CBST in 1992, at the height of the AIDS crisis, and has become a powerful voice on social justice issues within the Jewish and LGBTQ communities.
27. Larry Krasner, a veteran radical defense attorney, won a surprise victory to become Philadelphia's District Attorney with a mission to end mass incarceration and the criminal justice system's racism.
28. Sheila Kuehl, a former child actress (Zelda on "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis"), co-founded and served as managing attorney of the California Women's Law Center. In 1997, she became the first woman to be named Speaker pro Tempore of the California State Assembly, just three years after becoming the state's first openly gay legislator. In the legislature, she sponsored successful bills to establish paid family leave, protect victims of domestic violence, establish nurse to patient ratios in hospitals, and prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis of gender and disability and led the campaign for a statewide single-payer health care system.She is currently one of five elected members of the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors which serves over 10 million people, where she has fought to reduce homelessness and to establish LA County's first affordable housing trust.
29. Brad Lander spent over a decade as a community organizer and neighborhood planner before being elected to the NY City Council, where he co-founded its Progressive Caucus. He has fought successfully to protect freelancers from wage theft, give fast-food workers a fair workweek, and make sure Uber/Lyft drivers earn a living wage, improve public transit, challenge the NYPD's discriminatory practices, combat school segregation, and expand affordable housing. Through #GetOrganizedBK, he brought Brooklyn residents together to stand up to the Trump administration's bigotry, corruption, and injustice. He serves as chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 800 progressive local elected officials in 45 states.
30. Stephen Lerner has spent three decades unionizing hundreds of thousands of farmworkers, garment workers, and other low-wage workers. He was the architect of SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaign, a nationwide campaign that led to dramatic improvements in the wages and conditions of mostly immigrant service workers. He is currently a fellow at Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative and working with unions and community organizing groups to expose and change the lax regulations and unsustainable practices of private equity firms.
31. Rabbi Joshua Levine-Grater served congregations in the greater New York and Los Angeles for 17 years before shifting gears and become the executive director of Friends in Deed, a local, religious-based non-profit addressing homelessness and poverty in Pasadena. He serves on the board of T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.
32. Yonah Lieberman, Emily Mayer, and Simone Zimmerman are founders of If Not Now, a movement to end the American Jewish community's support for Israel's occupation of Arab territories, including their criticism of Birthright tours of Israel for young American Jews.
33. Ruth Messinger is a former NY City Council member and Manhattan borough president, who served as president of (and current ambassador for) the American Jewish World Service, which has provided about $400 million to support thousands of social justice organizations in the developing world to reduce poverty, amplify the voices of poor and persecuted minorities, defend the land and water rights of indigenous communities most affected by climate change, and advance sexual health and rights for women, girls and LGBT people.
34. Karen Nussbaum co-founded 9to5, an organization to address the concerns of women office workers in 1973. That group inspired the 1980 film "9 to 5" starring Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin. She founded a vision of SEIU devoted to organizing office workers and during the Clinton administration directed the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau. She is the founding director and now a board member of Working America, the community organizing arm of the AFL-CIO, dedicated to giving non-unionized workers a voice in such issues as raising the minimum wage, paid family leave, and health care reform.
35. Eli Pariser, was executive director of MoveOn from 2004-2009 and has been a pioneer in figuring out how technology can be utilized to promote progressive movements. He is currently a fellow at New America.
36. Rabbi Jonah Pesner is director of Reform Judaism's Religious Action Center, which mobilizes Jews around immigration, health care, voting rights, gun control, civil rights, poverty, Islamophobia, LGBTQ equality, environmental justice and other social justice issues.
37. Jane Ramsey, for over three decades, led the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, leading struggles against poverty, racism and anti-Semitism in partnership with Chicago's diverse communities.She is now a consultant to nonprofit advocacy groups and a member of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
38. Cong. Jamie Raskin served in the Maryland state legislator before his 2016 election to Congress. Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe called Raskin, who taught law at American University for a quarter-century, "the best constitutional lawyer in all of Congress." In 2008 he started Democracy Summer, a program to teach political activist skills to 16-to-22-year olds. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, he's played an important role in the current impeachment fight.
39. Hillary Ronen was an immigrant rights lawyer before being elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, where she's been a strong advocate for tenants' rights, public transit, and environmental justice. She led the successful fight for a tax on big business to fund affordable housing, a ballot measure approved by 60% of the voters.
40. Steve Rosenthal has been described by the New York Times as one of the Democratic Party's "smartest and most influential strategists" and by the Washington Post as, "one of the party's best-known voter turnout specialists." He began is career in the labor movement as an organizer with the Communication Workers of America, served as Associate Deputy Secretary of Labor under Secretary Robert Reich in the Clinton administration, founded America Coming Together (one of the largest voter mobilization campaigns in Democratic Party history), and served as political director of the AFL-CIO. He is currently president of The Organizing Group, which works with unions and other progressive organizations to increase voter turnout.
41. Amy Rutkin, chief of staff for Cong. Jerrold Nadler, has been a key behind-the-scenes architect of the Democrats' impeachment strategy.
42. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has sparked a grassroots upsurge and changed the national debate with his two presidential campaigns, putting democratic socialism on the political map.
43. Cong. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) has been one of the most progressive members of Congress since she was elected in 1998, after serving for eight years in the Illinois State Assembly. During the previous 20 years, she was a community organizer, serving as program director of Illinois Public action and director of the Illinois State Council of Senior Citizens. In Congress, she has been deeply involved in the fight to protect women's reproductive freedom, supports a single-payer health care system, opposed the Iraq war, and has been a leader on issues of consumer safety, opposition to U.S. military, and LGBT equality.
44. Amy Schur, the organizing director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, spearheaded the successful campaign for statewide rent control and just-cause eviction law in 2019, and building the power of the tenants rights movement
45. Marilyn Schneiderman, longtime union organizer, is currently director of the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers University, which conducts research and sponsors workshops to strengthen the influence of community organizations, worker centers, and labor unions. She previously directed the National AFL-CIO's Department of Field Mobilization and served as executive director of AVODAH, a national Jewish social justice organization.
46. Leah Simon-Weisberg has been on the front lines of the housing crisis for over a decade. She is the Directing Attorney of the Tenant Rights Program at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland, working closely with community organizers to fight rent increases and evictions. She's worked with Tenants Together, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and other groups to challenge bank foreclosures and predatory lending, drafted rent control and other laws for Bay Area cities, and serves as an elected member of Berkeley's Rent Board.
47. Daniel Sokatch is CEO of the New Israel Fund, the largest funder of grassroots activist groups in Israel that promote Arab-Jewish cooperation, human rights, LGBT rights, and democratic change and oppose the Occupation and violation of Palestinian rights.
48. Gloria Steinem is a feminist icon and founder of MS magazine, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, and the National Women's Political Caucus.
49. Becky Wasserman is the director of Government Relations for the Service Employees International Union. She previously worked for J Street and the American Jewish World Service and was President of the United States Student Association for two years. She serves on the boards of Local Progress and the Center for Community Change.
50. Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers since 2008, has pushed to improve education standards, raise teachers' salaries, and challenge efforts to allow teachers to carry guns in schools.
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Who Will Displace the Omniciders?
The only reason Congress has been an oil, gas, and coal toady, instead of an efficient, renewable energy force, is because we have sat on the sidelines watching ExxonMobil be Congress’ quarterback
Mar 07, 2019
Citizens challenging the towering threat of climate crisis should never underestimate the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuel corporations. Real engagement with the worsening climate disruption means spending more of our leisure hours on civic action. The fate of future generations and our planet depends on the intensity of these actions.
This was my impression after interviewing Dahr Jamail, author of the gripping new book, The End of Ice, on my Radio Hour. Jamail, wrote books and prize-winning articles, as the leading freelance journalist covering the Bush/Cheney Iraq war and its devastating aftermath. For his latest book, Jamail went to the visible global warming hot spots to get firsthand accounts from victims of climate disruption. His gripping reporting is bolstered by facts from life-long specialists working in the regions he visited.
Readers of The End of Ice are taken on a journey to see what is happening in Alaska, the mountain forests of California, the coral reefs of Australia, the heavily populated lowlands of South Florida, the critical Amazon forest, and other areas threatened by our corporate-driven climate crisis.
Jamail, an accomplished mountaineer, precisely illustrates the late great environmentalist, Barry Commoner's first law of ecology. Namely, that "everything is connected to everything else." Jamail makes the connection between the rising sea levels and the untold catastrophes engulfing forests, mountains, and the wildlife on land and in the sea. Jamail is not relying on computer models. What he is seeing, photographing, and experiencing is often worse than what the models show in terms of accelerating sea level rises and the melting ice of the glaciers.
Jamail's trenchant conversations with bona fide experts who have spent a lifetime seeing what mankind has done to the natural world, presents a compelling case of the threat the climate crisis poses to human survival.
Jamail, near the end of his narrative, writes: "Disrespect for nature is leading to our own destruction... This is the direct result of our inability to understand our part in the natural world. We live in a world where we are acidifying the oceans, where there will be few places cold enough to support year-round ice, where all the current coastlines will be underwater, and where droughts, wildfires, floods, storms, and extreme weather are already becoming the new normal."
If you don't know that melting ice and permafrost is a big tragedy, then that is all the more reason to read this book and immerse yourself in its vivid prose.
His chapter on south Florida and its millions of residents is probably the one scenario that will bring the alarming message home to people in coastal communities worldwide. South Florida could be underwater in fifty years or less. Many of the houses, buildings and infrastructures are located only a few feet or yards above sea level. Engineers and some city officials see Miami Beach as doomed and say Floridians must prepare for evacuations.
There are other more approaching, intermediate dangers. As Jamail writes: "One major source of concern is the Florida aquifer. Once that water is contaminated by saltwater, it is over."
Already, some banks will not provide 30 year home mortgages for vulnerably located houses. Some home values along the ocean are starting to be adversely affected. Insurance companies are reluctant to publicize their projections but their actuarial tables are not, shall we say, consumer friendly.
Then there are the lethal-storm surges during major hurricanes as sea levels and high tides rise relentlessly.
Most businesses, people, and municipalities are looking the other way. Two-term Governor Rick Scott (a corporate crook) even prohibited state employees from uttering or writing the words "climate change" in any state documents. It is admittedly hard to face such catastrophe while the sun is shining and most normal life continues. In 2017, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave Florida Power and Light, the go-ahead to build two new nuclear power plants (they're too expensive and won't be built) to join its aging plants on the beach. Shades of the Fukushima disaster in Japan 8 years ago.
None of these warnings are recent. Climate scientists warned President Lyndon Johnson about the dangers associated with carbon release in the atmosphere in 1965. President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore released a detailed, urgent, report, with pictures and graphs, about climate disruption in 1993 to demonstrate that the clock was ticking. Unfortunately, in the following seven years, they mostly did what the auto industry wanted them to do--nothing.
Some of the most poignant passages in Jamail's book are the informed cries and worries of the onsite specialists he interviewed. People you have never heard of, but who should be heard all the time. One of them, Dr. Rita Mesquita, a biologist with the largest research institute in Brazil for the Amazon forest says, "We are not telling the general public what is really going on." While the general public is spending more time in virtual reality and, with growing urbanization, becoming estranged from nature, this ominous disconnect is widening.
The new president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has openly vowed to bolster more commercial development in the Amazon and on indigenous tribal land.
How will India's billion plus people get their water if its rivers dry up because the glaciers in the Himalayas have melted? How do you relocate 30 million people from Mumbai from rising sea levels? How do you head off spreading diseases due to habitat destruction? Meanwhile, 100 corporations (e.g. ExxonMobil, Shell, and state entities) continue to be the source of 71% of total global carbon dioxide emissions.
There are 600 cable channels in the U.S. transmitting largely junk programs. How about one percent of them (six) being dedicated to the global stories and urgencies of climate catastrophes, and to how movements like Drawdown (of greenhouse gases) are succeeding in cutting these menaces (see Drawdown by Paul Hawken) around the world?
Think about what we should be doing with some of our time for our descendants so as not to have them curse us for being oblivious, narcissistic ancestors!
We can start with instructing our Congress to deploy its transformative leverage over the economy. The only reason Congress has been an oil, gas, and coal toady, instead of an efficient, renewable energy force, is because we have sat on the sidelines watching ExxonMobil be Congress' quarterback.
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We Need Cities of Resistance: Climate Adaptation Is No Longer an Option
The old adage that a crisis is never a crisis until it is validated by disaster has become a reality for seventy percent of our cities already dealing with flooding, drought, fire and environmental decay
Oct 12, 2018
IOWA CITY--The arrival of Hurricane Michael on the heels of the landmark IPCC climate report is a reminder that climate "adaptation" is no longer a viable option.
Adapting to a failed system in an age of climate change, as the devastation from Hurricane Michael attests, is failure, not adaptation.
My own town in Iowa had to cancel celebrations this week for a recently completed $60 million flood mitigation project on our Iowa River, due to even more flooding. With the red lights of the University of Iowa's coal-fired power plant burning in the background, the irony of climate failure was not lost on anyone.
Our nation spent more than $300 billion on recovery from climate disasters last year. The historic barrage of hurricanes in 2017--wiping out Puerto Rico's and the U.S. Virgin Islands' infrastructure, grinding the city of Houston to a stop, and placing Miami's downtown streets under water--served as a brutal and costly reminder that our major cities along the coasts have reached a reckoning with the rising tide.
"We can no longer continue with the delusional planning that somehow doing 'less bad or harm' is sustainable; instead, we must actively break from our dependence on fossil fuels and rebuild our local economies in ways that restore our relationships with nature and regenerate the ecosystems we depend on."
The old adage that a crisis is never a crisis until it is validated by disaster has become a reality for seventy percent of our cities already dealing with flooding, drought, fire and environmental decay.
Cities, towns and campuses can no longer champion the disingenuous framework of climate adaptation plans based on volunteer efforts to recycle, change light bulbs, eat less meat on Mondays or carpool with coworkers that willingly cross a bridge to the future that everyone now knows is on the verge of collapse.
Calling for a 45% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 to avert further catastrophe, the IPCC climate action recommendations should be a clarion call for every town, cities and campus to halt their business-as-usual models and re-envision urban planning for a new era.
We can no longer continue with the delusional planning that somehow doing "less bad or harm" is sustainable; instead, we must actively break from our dependence on fossil fuels and rebuild our local economies in ways that restore our relationships with nature and regenerate the ecosystems we depend on.
We need to launch a new era of "regenerative cities," or rather, cities of resistance that restore our ecosystems, reclaim the public commons and give new meaning to renowned theorist Buckminster Fuller's vision in an age of climate change. "You never change things by fighting the existing reality," Fuller told us decades ago. "To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
No one understands this better than the "Just Harvey Recovery" movement, where an alliance of groups in the Gulf region has been calling for a "just transition" for communities and ecosystems on the cusp of being left behind as a sacrifice zone for our country.
No one understands this better than a growing movement of residents in Gary, Indiana, a devastated steel city that has received more requiems of poverty and environmental ruin than any other city in the country.
Earlier this summer, I was inspired by a group of young people who took part in an "Ecopolis" program to envision the rebirth of their community and local economy as a "regenerative city," based on green enterprise zones and green jobs training, walkable urban planning and efficient housing, decentralized renewable energy, local food production and soil carbon sequestration initiatives.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." The program was not just a wished-for vision; it took place in the Progressive Community Church, powered by solar energy, and cornered by four hoop houses for year-round food production and an orchard.
They called for "cities of resistance," not simply adaption to a coal-fired system that has contaminated their air and soil, but left their future in peril.
"Love song to the scarred lungs of my people," young poet Krystal Wilson rapped, "because in my city, glocks ain't got nothing on poison and hostile air."
Young climate activists in Gary, like those in the Gulf, are giving us a new climate narrative that reclaims scientist Barry Commoner's long overlooked warning for a post-carbon age. Hailed as the "Paul Revere of Ecology" on the cover of Time Magazine in 1970, author of the classic work, The Closing Circle, Commoner forewarned that a corporate takeover of environmental governmental policy was carrying us "to the brink of ecological disaster not by a singular fault, which some clever scheme can correct, but by the phalanx of powerful economic, political, and social forces that constitute the march of history." Only the resistance to the current economic and environmental structure could "change the course of history," he concluded.
That type of resistance took place a day after the IPCC report, when a state judge in Minnesota acquitted three climate activists of using bolt cutters to cut through chains and padlocks at a valve site for two oil pipelines.
But another type of resistance is also taking place in our cities--as regenerative cities become cities of resistance. Take St. Louis, headquarters of the world's largest coal company, Peabody Energy, and dependent on coal-fired plants for 75 percent of its electricity; the St. Louis Board of Aldermen unanimously voted last fall to adopt a goal of obtaining 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2035.
This is the first step toward a regenerative city.
By building on Commoner's landmark "four laws of ecology," urban theorist and author Herbert Giradet has spent years developing "regenerative cities" as a natural sequence in planning in an age of climate change. "The urban metabolism currently operates as an inefficient and wasteful linear input-output system," Girardet posited in his groundbreaking work in cities in Europe, Australia, and around the globe. "It needs to be transformed into a resource-efficient circular system instead. The only way to overcome notions of ever-greater scarcity is for cities to continually regenerate the living systems on which they rely for their sustenance."
Following this regenerative approach, the Australian city of Adelaide reduced its carbon emissions by 20 percent from 2007 to 2013, and is on track to become the first carbon neutral city in the world. The city galvanized a boom in green jobs, developed walkable neighborhoods powered by solar energy, converted urban waste to compost and revamped local food markets. The city also planted three million trees to absorb carbon.
In an age of climate change, such a vision is not only an essential framework for a new climate resistance.
It may be our only option--for adaptation.
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Seeing Red? Think Blue
Election day is just one day in the political calendar: if you care about climate change or medical care or mass incarceration, all the other days are just as important, because it’s then that you build the movements that really shift the Zeitgeist
Aug 15, 2018
On Friday evening, the Democratic National Committee reversed a decision it had made two months ago: the committee would now welcome money from fossil-fuel corporate PACS. In the same resolution, the DNC saluted "forward-looking employers" who are "powering America's all-of-the-above energy economy."
My heart sank when I read the news. I'd spent a good deal of time and effort in 2016, as one of the Democratic Party's fifteen platform-writers, removing the "all-of-the-above" energy language that was code for "fossil fuels" from the party platform, and replacing it with a straightforward commitment that America would be "running entirely on clean energy by mid-century." Now that work has been undone--and in a summer week in which the smoke from wildfires covers most of the lower Forty-Eight. I suppose I had as much right as anyone to feel undercut.
Actually, if anyone had that right, it was the young people of the Sunrise Movement, who have spent this election season encouraging candidates to sign a pledge not to accept money from the fossil-fuel industry. These kids have been exemplary activists, risking time in jail for their civil disobedience and dedicating months of their lives to getting dirty money out of politics. They have signed up nearly a thousand election candidates, and the DNC ban, passed two months ago, had been a high-water mark of their achievement. Now they will have to fight this backsliding--and knowing their organizing skills, they will do it with verve. Here's the online petition they're circulating, and I imagine there will be protests outside the next DNC meeting in late August.
Still, I can only imagine that they must feel deflated, too. And in truth, that's the main reason my heart sank. The fossil-fuel decision is a stupid setback. I think it will eventually be reversed because the physics of climate change makes clear which direction we, as a nation, must go. But the deflation is a mortal peril headed into the fall election. Immediately, my Twitter feed filled with dismayed reaction, some sad and some cynical and some both: "Tell me again how the parties are different?" "The final straw--Bye Bye Dems." "Can't even say I'm surprised."
As much as I sympathize, this scares me. We desperately need a huge Democratic turnout for the midterm elections. So let me explain why I'm laying my own anger aside and hoping everyone else will do the same--why it's important to distinguish between "the DNC" or "the Democrats," on the one hand, and whoever is running for office in your local district, on the other. And, in the process, let me explain how this one activist, at least, thinks about electoral politics.
Fifty years of environmental progress, established and maintained under administrations of both parties, are now being undone in a single presidential term--protections that millions of people fought for over decades are simply disappearing
The first reason is obvious: the Republicans are worse by an order of magnitude, on environmental issues as well as many others. Fifty years of environmental progress, established and maintained under administrations of both parties, are now being undone in a single presidential term--protections that millions of people fought for over decades are simply disappearing. In this case, it's less the responsibility of Donald Trump than it is of the Koch brothers, who have long lobbied against regulations in the fossil-fuel industry. On these questions of regulation, as with tax policy, the Kochs are reaping a return on their long-term investment in the GOP--and at precisely the moment when the planet can least afford it. The Democrats may move more slowly on climate change and environmental protection than they should--and with climate change, going too slow is a huge problem--but at least they don't go backwards. If they were in power today, we would not be seeing these shameful regressions.
Still, this goes beyond any particular field of policy. The Republicans under Trump are a crazy-eyed threat to the constitutional order. Their leader is a corrupt racist who clearly seems willing to bring down our democracy. I listen every week to the former high-level Obama staffers who run the podcast "Pod Save America." The environment is not one of the issues they spend time on, and my guess is they don't have much use for activists like me--they were serious insiders, after all. But the basic point they repeat in each segment is undeniable: if the Democrats don't regain control of at least one wing of Congress at the next election, there will be effectively no check of any kind on Trump. He will be able to fire the prosecutors investigating him without interference; his plunder of the government will continue without oversight. A GOP win in the mid-terms would further engorge his ravening narcissism, with ramifications from which the country may never recover.
Though that's the main reason for voting Democratic, it's not the only one. The Republicans in their current form are detestable,while the Democrats--though compromised at the top, chummy with corporations, frustratingly split on crucial issues, and notoriously unwilling to stand their ground--are, in certain ways, sort of great. I don't say this as some party lackey--in fact, I helped organize what I think were the largest demonstrations outside the White House during the Obama years, to protest the Keystone pipeline--and I don't say it as some kind of party insider. Actually, I'd never been to a party meeting or paid any attention to its inner workings until Bernie Sanders named me to that platform-writing team at the end of the primaries in 2016.
The first day of our work, the fifteen of us gathered in some miserable hotel ballroom and spent a solid eight hours listening to nonstop earnest testimony from different groups that wanted their viewpoints represented in the platform. I was sitting next to Representative Barbara Lee of Oakland, California, who was quick, sharp, and quite delightful. After the first forty witnesses, I leaned over to whisper: "You know what's interesting: we haven't heard from a white guy yet." She took a minute to look up and down her agenda to make sure I was right, and then she flashed me a wide grin. "Now you know how it feels," she said.
The Republicans in their current form are detestable,while the Democrats--though compromised at the top, chummy with corporations, frustratingly split on crucial issues, and notoriously unwilling to stand their ground--are, in certain ways, sort of great.
My sense, after many days of such hearings, was that the Democratic Party at its best operated as a kind of support network for the decent people who get pushed around in America--people of color, working people, disabled people, gay people, people who have to breathe the fumes from refineries. It's highly imperfect: one wants to distinguish between the party and the DNC, because self-interested (and not all that competent) campaign consultants and pollsters clearly infest the upper reaches of the machine. And even many of the groups with which one wants to feel solidarity are compromised and short-sighted. It appears, for instance, that the DNC reversed its decision on fossil-fuel funding less to please the oil companies than to appease a couple of the labor unions that have aligned themselves with the industry they serve by building pipelines and refineries, and who work hard to keep the party from having a whole-hearted commitment to a clean-energy future.
For all that, there was something very moving about sitting there day after day in those hotel ballrooms and hearing from voices like Rev. William Barber's, and from civil rights icon Bob Moses. Or, even more, the women of color who are clearly the party's backbone. At its most compromised, the Democratic Party nonetheless remains a bulwark of America's minimal efforts to support the vulnerable, efforts that would otherwise disappear. If you don't depend on food stamps or Medicaid or Head Start or free school lunches, it's easy to forget how important this is.
And the third reason is that--on election day--there is no alternative. If you don't vote for the Democrats, or the Republicans, then, in effect, you don't vote, and if you don't vote, then, for practical purposes, you vote for the Republicans, too, since in our gerrymandered nation they have a built-in advantage. This is only true in America--I've given grateful speeches, for instance, at Green Party gatherings in Europe and Australia and Canada, and I count my colleagues there among the most astute and capable politicians I know. But in their political systems--parliamentary, for the most part--you can vote for the Greens without being a spoiler. In fact, sometimes, they end up holding the balance of power. Here, you simply can't. We have plenty of evidence, between Ralph Nader's and Jill Stein's runs, that it doesn't result in building an important or useful third party; it just makes it easier for the right to rule. Longtime Green Party member Ted Glick--a veteran activist I greatly admire--recently made a powerful case that though there may be local races in which the Greens could safely and usefully run, they should stop fielding a national candidate.
Still, I think I understand the impulse to support such a third party. In 1980, I wrote my college newspaper endorsement of a man named Barry Commoner who was running for president. He was the candidate of the Citizens' Party, a kind of precursor to the Greens, and since I was disgusted with both Carter and Reagan, and because he was an environmentalist well ahead of his time, I thought it made sense to back him. It made emotional sense at the time--though it's hard for me to remember why I was so righteously indignant about poor Jimmy Carter--but it made no logical sense. Since this was a college paper, and since it was in reliably Democratic Massachusetts, it didn't really matter--but my self-absorption did teach me a lesson I haven't forgotten.
That lesson wasn't: do not disrupt the political status quo if there is a risk of making it worse. Instead, it was figure out how to disrupt the status quo in other ways. I can think of three ways, immediately.
The first is: make use of primaries. The only real way to introduce new ideas into our political system is during primary season, in the narrow window when the otherwise entrenched have no choice but to listen. It was crucial that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran in her New York congressional district primary, not because her opponent Joe Crowley was a bad guy (on roll call votes, I imagine they'd come out in the same place 98 percent of the time), but because a new, different, loud voice pressing new priorities had emerged.
It's tricky--you need to run a vigorous primary campaign without so weakening your opponent that the Republican can then pick them off, and given human nature (and Russian bots), campaigns routinely get overly intense and personal. It helps, I think, if you emphasize programs over personalities, and it helps even more to have a sense of both humor and humility. When the Bernie-ish candidate Abdul El-Sayed lost his primary bid for governor in Michigan last month, he told the crowd, "Do not walk out of here saying anything like 'Abdul or Bust.' Tomorrow, we turn around and we turn this into a movement," to beat the Republican in November. (Props to Crowley, too, who picked up a guitar during his concession speech and dedicated a reasonably rocking version of "Born to Run" to his opponent.)
The second way is to change the system so that outsider parties aren't automatic spoilers. This is less impossible than it sounds: virtually the only good result of the 2016 election was that Maine adopted a ranked-choice voting system, which could potentially revolutionize politics in America. Under this system, you'll be able to vote for, say, a Green, but without wasting your vote: if they don't win, your ballot will pass to whomever you marked second--a Democrat, say. The change would mean everything to the way we think about election, opening up the system to a much wider range of views, while simultaneously encouraging people to be civil. (If you're the Democrat who wants the number two votes of the Green Party candidate, then you don't disparage them or their ideas, and vice-versa). The group Represent.Us, which helped win the Maine fight, is trying to bring ranked-choice voting to many more places: anyone who cares about a vibrant democracy should be helping the effort in some way.
Third, and most important, we need to remember that elections are not synonymous with politics. Yes, in the autumns of even-numbered years, elections offer a high-leverage opportunity to make one's voice heard. But election day is just one day in the political calendar: if you care about climate change or medical care or mass incarceration, all the other days are just as important, because it's then that you build the movements that really shift the Zeitgeist.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can't, on her own, go to Congress and make huge change: she'll be stuck in a system that needs us to keep pushing it.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can't, on her own, go to Congress and make huge change: she'll be stuck in a system that needs us to keep pushing it. Some of her Democratic colleagues will be as progressive and dynamic as she is, and others will be mediocrities, and still others will be annoyingly conservative. For all of them, though, the most consequential vote they could cast next year would be to elect a member of their party as the Speaker of the House. If the Democrats win a House majority, then they will get to form committees, approve hearings, organize investigations, and schedule votes. The world will be different--mostly in the sense that those of us currently shut out of the system will have a chance to take part again. It's both unfair and unwise to elect people, even very good ones, and then consider our part of the job done.
If you think about it this way, it's a little easier to swallow your hurt and disappointment when the DNC does stupid stuff. Elections are not about electing saints, or giving power to parties who will then automatically do the right thing. Elections are about electing people whom you can then push effectively to do more. As FDR is said to have told labor leaders: "I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it."
Hillary Clinton would have been far, far better as a president than Trump not just because she's sane and competent, but because she would have been susceptible to pressure from those who care about, say, the planet's future. Bernie would have been great, too--but as I told him at the start of his primary campaign, "I'm happy to stump for you, but if you're elected you'll doubtless find me chained to the White House gate six months later, pushing you to do more."
The moral choices are: Do I get arrested to take a stand? Do I devote many hours of this day to making phone calls when I'd rather be making dinner? Election day, oddly, is the only day not to make moral choices. It's the day for clear-eyed logic to rule. Which of these people makes it easier for us to make progress? And this fall, even more than most, the answer couldn't be clearer. Even if you're seeing red, think blue.
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Nature Lovers May #OptOutside on Black Friday, but They Consume Resources Year-Round
REI’s Black Friday campaign can look like an unabashed marketing ploy that ignores the fundamental source of our environmental problems: humans’ overuse of the earth’s resources.
Nov 26, 2017
While shoppers scramble for Black Friday bargains this year, outdoor retailer REI is closing its 154 U.S. stores. This is the third consecutive year that the Seattle-based company will ignore the frenzy that traditionally marks the start of the holiday shopping season. REI's nearly 12,000 employees will get a paid holiday and will not process any online orders.
Instead, REI exhorts workers and customers to get outside with family and friends. #OptOutside, a Twitter hashtag that REI coined to promote its anti-Black Friday, has been widely adopted by outdoor lovers, as well as environmental groups and businesses that partner with REI to promote this event.
The campaign has drawn international praise from the advertising industry and has become a yearly phenomenon. State parks from Oregon to Indiana, often in concert with local nonprofits, offer free admission and other perks on Black Friday. This year REI is launching an "experiential search engine" where users can share photos and video of their favorite outdoor destinations, augmented with information such as directions to trailheads or events celebrating our nation's public lands.
Many observers have praised REI for mixing business savvy with crunchy acumen. But how did REI and other outdoor companies align themselves with conservation? How do they square selling expensive apparel and promoting carbon-spewing tourism with their customers' love for the outdoors? And how radical is "Green Friday," especially if the OptOutsiders are carrying backpacks stuffed with the latest gear made from precious petroleum, rare metals and pricey fibers?
The answer is that shoppers have long expressed their affection for nature in what they buy. Consumption and environmental concerns, past and present, fit together as snugly as a foot in a beloved hiking boot.
Consuming nature, dividing people
The paradoxes of modern outdoor retailing have deep roots in the American conservation movement. Nineteenth-century trailblazers such as John Muir grew alarmed as they saw wildlife decimated, forests denuded and scenery despoiled. Among the loudest protesters were affluent outdoorsmen, such as Theodore Roosevelt, founder of the Boone and Crockett Club, and William Temple Hornaday, first director of the New York Zoological Society.
Class differences pervaded other forms of outdoor recreation too. People with means vacationed at posh resort hotels. Middling Americans took more rustic routes. Outdoor groups such as the Appalachian Mountain Club, founded in Boston in 1876, and The Mountaineers, founded in Seattle in 1906, taught woodcraft to middle-class urbanites who yearned for authentic escapes.
Others chafed against even these austere types of play, seeing outdoor recreation as an costly privilege. They mobilized leisure as political protest. Seattle's Co-Operative Campers, launched in 1916 as a cheaper alternative to The Mountaineers, pledged to "make our mountains accessible through co-operative camps" for the city's blue-collar citizens. Socialist activist Anna Louise Strong was the Co-Op Campers' first president. She and the Co-Op Campers often clashed with The Mountaineers over politics and camping techniques until the club disbanded during the 1920s Red Scare.
REI took root in this contested consumerist soil. Lloyd Anderson, REI's founder, conspired with other members of The Mountaineers to promote riskier activities, such as rock climbing. He quickly learned that they did not have the requisite gear. Influenced by other local co-ops, Anderson organized REI in 1939 to pool members' annual fees so the group could purchase quality equipment from Europe at affordable prices.
As costs for lightweight materials such as aluminum and nylon fell after World War II, REI attracted a burgeoning following locally and nationally. And it continued to trade on its founders' cooperative and environmental vision. In 1976, a year after opening its first retail store outside of Seattle, it launched an environmental grants initiative, and in 1989 the firm cofounded the Conservation Alliance, a group of outdoor businesses dedicated to environmental protection.
Critics have accused Patagonia of playing the snob card and promoting chic travel to imperiled and faraway places. Chouinard himself freely accepts these accusations. As he cynically admitted in a recent New Yorker profile, "everyone's just greenwashing," because "growth is the culprit."
In this context, REI's Black Friday campaign can look like an unabashed marketing ploy that ignores the fundamental source of our environmental problems: humans' overuse of the earth's resources.
Maybe Chouinard is right: we are all being greenwashed.
Is green good - or possible?
But is this a bad thing to admit? Perhaps. To deny the inherent contradictions of Green Friday is to ignore how affection for nature collides with our longing to consume it. By asking customers to think about what they are buying, Patagonia tries to foreground the environmental and social ethics of buying a new fleece jacket. REI, by contrast, asks us to take a one-day shopping holiday to help the planet. At best it is a lighter green vision.
REI and its competitors are businesses, and none of these efforts supersede retailers' bottom lines. Greenwashing is just the latest term for an old phenomenon: tethering consumption to environmental values. And consumers have proclaimed their environmental values through purchasing power since the dawn of the conservation movement.
Ultimately, there is no such thing as truly green consumption. Consider Cyber Monday, just after Thanksgiving, when retailers seek to entice consumers to spend online with early holiday discounts. Is internet shopping better for the environment than driving to the mall? It may keep us off the road, but online shopping does not eliminate environmental costs - it just diverts them to the data warehouses that power retailers' mail order divisions, and the planes and trucks that deliver the goods to consumers.
Moreover, is hitting the trail really escaping "the Internet of things" when hikers can share their every move and thought by mobile phone or other wireless devices?
This Thanksgiving, take time to remember the late biologist Barry Commoner's famous aphorism: There's no such thing as a free lunch.
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Where Are All the Monuments to the Progressive Americans?
The organizers, activists, artists, writers, and occasional elected officials who fought to make the United States a more humane and inclusive country often go unacknowledged.
Sep 16, 2017
The current controversy over whether to dismantle statues of some prominent Confederate figures is a battle over whom we admire and consider as heroes. It is also a battle over who has power to shape how we view our history.
"Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee," President Donald Trump said last month after the struggle in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. "So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?"
In May, the New Orleans City Council declared monuments of Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard public nuisances and had them removed. In August, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh ordered Confederate monuments removed from the city's public spaces. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, directed the dismantling of a statue in front of the State House of Roger Taney--a Supreme Court justice who was chief author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that ruled that African-Americans could not be American citizens. Earlier this month, in response to student protests, Yale University renamed Calhoun College--a residential complex named for John C. Calhoun, a senator from South Carolina, vice president and influential advocate for slavery--Hopper College, after Rear Adm. Grace Murray Hopper, a computer pioneer and naval officer. To buttress the symbolism, Yale removed a portrait of Calhoun from a dining hall.
Shouldn't we also honor the organizers, activists, artists, writers, athletes, judges and occasional elected officials who fought to make the United States a more humane and inclusive country? The New York Times recently published a list of the Confederate monuments that are now subject of controversy in cities across the country.
Not surprisingly, most monuments celebrate political, business and military figures. You can criss-cross the country and find statues, schools, government and university buildings, museums, parks, and streets celebrating presidents, senators, governors, jurists, inventor-entrepeneurs, founders of major corporations, generals and fallen soldiers. But our veneration of them often comes at the expense of recognizing other citizens who had a major role in shaping our nation's history.
Shouldn't we also honor the organizers, activists, artists, writers, athletes, judges, and occasional elected officials who fought to make the United States a more humane and inclusive country? What about the pioneers who built movements and gave voice to the struggles for women's suffrage, protecting the environment and consumers, putting an end to lynching, giving workers the right to form unions, and pushing for a progressive income tax, a federal minimum wage, old-age insurance, the 8-hour workday and government-subsidized health care and housing?
When they first advanced their ideas, they were considered impractical idealists, utopian dreamers or dangerous radicals. Now we take these ideas for granted. We all stand on their shoulders.
To create a partial catalogue of monuments celebrating progressive figures, I've drawn on the people profiled in my book, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame. I've identified statues located in public places (but not busts of heads or paintings, parks or public buildings), celebrating these progressive figures.
The list focuses on people whose influence was primarily during the 20th century--so Tom Paine, Daniel Shays, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, William Monroe Trotter, William Lloyd Garrison, Mother Jones, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Henry Demarest Lloyd, John Muir, Ida Wells, Terrence Powderly, Thorsten Veblen and Jacob Riis, among other radicals and reformers, are not included.
A Short Tour of Monuments to Progressives
A statue of Tom L. Johnson, the progressive mayor of Cleveland from 1901 to 1909, is located in Cleveland's Public Square.
A statue of Robert M. La Follette Sr., the progressive Wisconsin governor and senator, sits in National Statuary Hall in the US Capitol. A number of public schools throughout Wisconsin are named for La Follette.
Crusading lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis adorns the campus of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Besides the university, many public schools--including high schools in New York City and San Antonio--are named for Brandeis.
Attorney Clarence Darrow spent most of his career defending radicals and labor activists, but he's most famous for defending evolution in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. A statue of Darrow sits on the lawn in front of the Rhea County Court House in Dayton, Tennessee. It was dedicated on July 14, 2017 and sits opposite the statue of William Jennings Bryan, who beat Darrow in that controversial case.
This statue of Theodore Roosevelt on Roosevelt Island in the Potomac River across from Washington, D.C. is one of many statues and schools named for the trust-busting president. You call also visit three national parks in honor of the environmental president.
The name of progressive philosopher and school reformer John Dewey adorns public schools in Denver; New York City; Warrensville Heights, Ohio; Flint, Michigan and elsewhere, but there are no statues with Dewey's likeness.
A sculpture of urban reformer Jane Addams, the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1931), can be found on the campus of Cal State University in Fresno. Schools in Seattle; New York City; Bolingbrook and Moline, Illinois; Long Beach, California and other cities are named for the founder of modern social work.
Students in Sacramento can attend Hiram Johnson High School, and the public can visit the state office building in San Francisco named for the progressive governor, but there are no statues celebrating his life.
A statue of scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois is located at his alma mater, Fisk University. The main library at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, a physics building at Fisk University, and dormitories at the University of Pennsylvania and Hampton University are named for DuBois. Public schools is Chicago, Baltimore, Wake Forest, N.C., and elsewhere are named for him, too.
This statue of Alice Hamilton, a crusading physician who founded the modern field of occupational health, sits in Headwaters Park in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
A middle school in New York City is named for Robert F. Wagner, the progressive New Deal senator who led fights for workers' rights and public housing, but there are no statues erected to honor him.
These statues of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt at the Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, New York are among the many statues and schools named in their honor. A stunning recent addition to the collection of memorials is The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial along the Potomac in Washington, D.C.
A 12-foot-high, 4-ton statue of Albert Einstein is set at the entrance to the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Einstein is holding a paper engraved with the equations for his major scientific contributions. There are dozens of other Einstein statues in the U.S. and around the world and many schools named after the famous scientist and socialist.
This statue of the pioneering and fearless birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, with a gag over her mouth, stands in Old South Meeting House in Boston. There are no schools named for the controversial socialist and feminist.
A monument to John L. Lewis--leader of the mine workers union and later the Congress of Industrial Orgnizations (CIO)--sits in Monongahela Township, Greene County, Pennsylvania, on a site where 37 coal miners lost their lives in a mine explosion in 1962. There's another statue of the brilliant orator and labor leader at the John L. Lewis Mining & Labor Museum in Lucas, Iowa.
Several statues of Helen Keller portray the socialist, feminist and pacifist as a young girl learning how to speak, like this one located in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, of Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan. The Keller statue in National Statutory Hall in the US Capitol in Washington, DC shows her at a pump, where she spoke her first word, "water." There are many schools around the country named for the founder of what is now called the disability rights movement.
There's no sculpture of consumer and labor activist Frances Perkins, but the US Department of Labor building and the Frances Perkins Academy in New York City are named for the first female Cabinet secretary and a crusading New Deal reformer. However, the governor of Maine recently tried to have the Frances Perkins Conference Room in the state capitol renamed in view of her pro-labor stance.
Famed New York City Mayor and congressman Fiorello La Guardia sits in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. New York's La Guardia High School is one of the premier arts high schools in the country.
Norman Thomas High School in Manhattan and the Norman Thomas '05 Library at Princeton University are named after the leader of the American Socialist Party and frequent presidential candidate, from the 1930s through the 1950s. A plaque at the Princeton library reads: "Norman M. Thomas, class of 1905. 'I am not the champion of lost causes, but the champion of causes not yet won.'"
Swarthmore College named a dormitory after suffragist leader Alice Paul, a graduate of the college. Montclair State University in New Jersey has also named a building in her honor. And you can pay homage to Alice Paul and other women's rights luminaries at the National Park Service's Belmont-Paul National Historic Site.
An apartment building in Philadelphia bears the name of Sidney Hillman, the founder and president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and a key backer of FDR's New Deal program.
A. Philip Randolph, civil rights and labor leader and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, sits in Boston's Back Bay Train Station. Another statue of Randolph was erected in the concourse of Union Station in Washington, D.C. Schools in Jacksonville, Florida; New York City; Philadelphia and Atlanta are named in his honor. Jacksonville renamed one of its streets A. Phillip Randolph Boulevard and an A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum is located in Chicago's Pullman Historic District.
Statues of the radical Minnesota Depression-era Farmer-Labor Party Gov. Floyd Olson, including one in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, have been constructed throughout state.
Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, sits outside St. Mary's Catholic Church in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Another Day statue can be found in front of the Solanus Casey Center in Detroit. Dormitories at Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois, the University of Scranton in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Loyola University in Maryland are named in her honor. Broadway Housing Communities, a supportive housing project in New York City, opened the Dorothy Day Apartment Building at 583 Riverside Drive in 2003.
The name of actor, activist, singer and linguist Paul Robeson adorns public schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, and New Brunswick and Trenton, New Jersey. In 1976, the apartment building on Edgecombe Avenue in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan where Robeson lived during the early 1940s was officially renamed the Paul Robeson Residence, and the street was renamed Paul Robeson Boulevard. The main library at Rutgers University, Robeson's alma mater, is named for him. There are no statues, but many busts of Robeson, including this one at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio.
The people of Yakima, Washington honored their native son, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, with a statue in front of Davis High School, his alma mater.
The Los Angeles Unified School District named a school in Wilmington after Harry Bridges, the longtime left-wing leader of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. There's a bust of Bridges in San Pedro, Los Angeles' waterfront district, and the union is currently seeking a home for a newlycompleted statue.
A statue of Langston Hughes--poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer and columnist--sits in the Watkins Community Museum of History in Lawrence, Kansas. Schools in Lawrence; East Orange, New Jersey; Baltimore; Chicago; New Orleans and Fairburn, Georgia are named for Hughes.
New York City named a school after left-wing congressman Vito Marcantonio, who represented Harlem in Congress from 1934-50.
The Ella Baker School in Manhattan, serving pre-K to eighth-grade students, is named for the civil rights organizer.
There's a statue of Theodor Geisel--whose children's books, under the pen name Dr. Seuss, took aim at bullies, hypocrites and demagogues--on the campus of the University of California-San Diego, not far from the Geisel Library.
In 2010, fans of William J. Brennan, Jr., unveiled a statue of the Supreme Court justice in front of the Essex County Hall of Records in his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. William J. Brennan High School, named for the author of many far-reaching decisions including Roe v. Wade and the Miranda rulings, is located in San Antonio, Texas. The historic Hudson County Courthouse in Jersey City, New Jersey, which had opened in 1910, was named the William J. Brennan Court House in 1989.
Schools named for Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the theologian who was active in the civil rights and anti-war movements, are located in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto.
A statue of environmental crusader Rachel Carson was dedicated in Woods Hole on Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 2013. Schools named for Carson are located in New York City; Chicago; San Jose, California; Herndon, Virginia; Gaithersburg, Maryland; Sammamish, Washington and Beaverton, Oregon.
Riverfront Park in Wheeling, West Virginia is home to a statue of Walter Reuther, longtime president of the United Auto Workers and a founder of the modern labor movement. Walter Reuther High School is part of the public school system in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Walter Reuther Middle School is located in Rochester Hills, Michigan.
A statue of Thurgood Marshall--the courageous leader of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, lead lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case and the first African-American justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, stands in front of the State House in Annapolis, Maryland. Another Marshall statue stands in front of the federal courthouse in Baltimore. High schools in San Francisco; Dayton, Ohio; and Missouri City, Texas are named for Marshall.
There's probably no progressive American with more monuments in his honor than Martin Luther King Jr. His name adorns many schools, streets, buildings and statues, including this one on the University of Texas campus in Austin. You can also visit the National Park Service memorial to Dr. King along the banks of the Potomac.
The West Chester (Pennsylvania) Area School District named its newest high school after native Bayard Rustin, a key organizer in the civil rights movement who coordinated the 1963 March on Washington.
Okemah, Oklahoma honored its most famous native, folk singer Woody Guthrie (who wrote "This Land Is Your Land") with a statue in its downtown area. Another Guthrie statue is located in Washington state near the Grand Coulee Dam, the subject of several Guthrie songs.
A statue of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was unveiled in her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi in 2012. Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School and Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School are located in the Bronx section of New York City.
The Los Angeles Dodgers unveiled a statue of baseball legend and civil rights activist Jackie Robinson outside Dodger Stadium in April 2017. There are also statues in Brooklyn; Pasadena, California; Jersey City, New Jersey; Daytona Beach, Florida; and Los Angeles on the UCLA campus honoring the Hall of Fame player who broke baseball's color line in 1947. Schools in Milwaukee, New York City and elsewhere also are named after Robinson.
A statue of Malcolm X can be found in the former Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, the site of his 1965 assassination.
Chavez Plaza at California State University San Marcos includes a statue dedicated to Cesar Chavez as does the University of Texas at Austin. There are public schools named for the leader of the farmworkers movement in Portland, Oregon; Coachella, California; Phoenix and many other cities.
New York City is home to Harvey Milk High School, named after San Francisco supervisor and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States. A bust of Milkis located in San Francisco City Hall.
Missing Monuments
You won't find statues of some of the nation's most influential radicals and reformers. We may stand on their shoulders, but we can't stand on their statues, because they don't exist.
Here are just a few of those who aren't commemorated in any substantial way: Eugene V. Debs, Florence Kelley, Victor Berger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lincoln Steffens, Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman, Lewis Hine, Upton Sinclair, Rose Schneiderman, Roger Baldwin, Myles Horton, Harry Hay, Saul Alinsky, Virginia Durr, Carey McWilliams, C. Wright Mills, I.F. Stone, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Arthur Miller, Jane Jacobs, Jerry Wurf, Barry Commoner, Pete Seeger, Howard Zinn, Michael Harrington, William Sloane Coffin, Allard Lowenstein, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ted Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Tom Hayden, and Paul Wellstone.
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Celebrating Barry Commoner, Father of the Modern Environmental Movement
Described in 1970 by Time magazine as the "Paul Revere of ecology," Commoner followed Rachel Carson as America's most prominent modern environmentalist. But unlike Carson, Commoner viewed the environmental crisis as a symptom of a fundamentally flawed economic and social system.
May 29, 2017
Described in 1970 by Time magazine as the "Paul Revere of ecology," Commoner followed Rachel Carson as America's most prominent modern environmentalist. But unlike Carson, Commoner viewed the environmental crisis as a symptom of a fundamentally flawed economic and social system. A biologist and research scientist, he argued that corporate greed, misguided government priorities and the misuse of technology accounted for the undermining of "the finely sculptured fit between life and its surroundings." Today's environmental activists and thinkers -- including radicals like Van Jones, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Robert Bullard, and Beverly Wright -- stand on Commoner's shoulders.
Commoner -- who was born 100 years ago, on May 28, 1917, and died in 2012 -- insisted that scientists had an obligation to make scientific information accessible to the general public, so that citizens could participate in public debates that involved scientific questions. Citizens, he said, have a right to know the health hazards of the consumer products and technologies used in everyday life. Those were radical ideas in the 1950s and '60s, when most Americans were still mesmerized by the cult of scientific expertise and such new technologies as cars, plastics, chemical sprays and atomic energy.
Commoner linked environmental issues to a broader vision of social and economic justice. He called attention to the parallels among the environmental, civil rights, labor and peace movements. He connected the environmental crisis to the problems of poverty, injustice, racism, public health, national security and war.
Commoner first came to public attention in the late 1950s when he warned about the hazards of fallout caused by the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. He later used his scientific platform to raise awareness about the dangers posed by the petrochemical industry, nuclear power and toxic substances such as dioxins. He was one of the first scientists to point out that although environmental hazards hurt everyone, they disproportionately hurt the poor and racial minorities because of the location of dangerous chemicals and because of the hazardous conditions in blue-collar workplaces. Commoner thus laid the groundwork for what later become known as the environmental justice movement.
Commoner grew up in Brooklyn, New York, the child of Russian Jewish immigrants. He studied zoology at Columbia University and received a doctorate in biology from Harvard University in 1941. After serving in the Navy during World War II, Commoner was an associate editor for Science Illustrated and then became a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, a position he held for thirty-four years. There he founded, in 1966, the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems to promote research on ecological systems. He later moved the center to Queens College in New York.
While serving in the Navy, Commoner discovered a disturbing unintended consequences of technology. He was put in charge of a project to devise an apparatus to allow bombers to spray DDT on beachheads to kill insects that caused disease among soldiers. The military wanted to remove the insects before troops landed. Commoner's crew discovered that the DDT sprayed from bombers effectively eliminated hordes of flies on the beach, but also that more flies soon came to feast on the tons of fish that the DDT had also killed. This lesson became a central theme for Commoner throughout his career: humans cannot take action on one part of the ecosystem without triggering a reaction elsewhere.
After the war, many scientists, including Albert Einstein, alarmed by America's use of the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, began to rethink their role in society. They questioned whether dropping the bomb had been necessary for the United States to win the war. They were shocked by the scale of the damage in terms of both immediate deaths and long-term human suffering. And they worried about the potential for a prolonged arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, which, they feared, could end in a nuclear war in which all humanity would be the losers.
As Commoner told Scientific American in a 1997 interview:
"The Atomic Energy Commission had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists. Although they knew how to design and build nuclear bombs, it somehow escaped their notice that rainfall washes suspended material out of the air, or that children drink milk and concentrate iodine in their growing thyroids. I believe that the main reason for the AEC's failure is less complex than a cover-up but equally devastating. The AEC scientists were so narrowly focused on arming the United States for nuclear war that they failed to perceive facts--even widely known ones--that were outside their limited field of vision."
Commoner and other scientists--including chemist Linus Pauling (a professor at the California Institute of Technology and a Nobel Prize winner)--believed they had a responsibility to sound the alarm about the potentially devastating effects of nuclear fallout. In 1956, when Adlai Stevenson ran for president as the Democratic Party nominee, he sought Commoner's advice and then called for the United States to take the lead in ending nuclear testing.
In 1958 Commoner and other scientists and activists formed the Committee for Nuclear Information with the goal of educating the public to understand how, in Commoner's words, "splitting a few pounds of atoms could turn something as mild as milk into a devastating global poison." Their new publication, Nuclear Information (later renamed Scientist and Citizen), was founded to discuss the responsibility of scientists to the larger society. They drafted a petition, signed by 11,021 scientists worldwide, urging that "an international agreement to stop the testing of nuclear bombs be made now." These activities created a groundswell of public opinion that eventually helped persuade President John F. Kennedy to propose the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Commoner's early experience with DDT led him to espouse what scientists call the "precautionary principle" --that new chemicals and technologies should not be introduced into society if there is reason to believe that they pose a significant public health risk. They should be approved only after it can be demonstrated that they are safe. Commoner warned about the risks to human health posed by detergents, pesticides, herbicides, radioisotopes and smog. He argued that polluting products (such as detergents and synthetic textiles) should be replaced with natural products (such as soap, cotton and wool). He alerted the public to the negative effects of nuclear power plants, toxic chemicals and pollution on the economy; birth defects; and diseases like asthma.
In the 1970s Commoner spoke out against the view that overpopulation, particularly in the Third World, was responsible for the increasing depletion of the word's natural resources and the deepening ecological problems. The thesis was popularized by Paul Ehrlich (in his book The Population Bomb) and other scientists, but Commoner challenged those who echoed the ideas of the nineteenth-century British thinker Thomas Robert Malthus.
As Commoner argued, it is rich nations that consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources. And it was their systems of colonialism and imperialism that led to the exploitation of the Third World's natural resources for consumption in the wealthy nations, making the poor even poorer. Without the financial resources to improve their living conditions, people in developing countries relied more heavily upon increased birthrates as a form of social security than did people in wealthier nations.
As Commoner wrote, "The poor countries have high birthrates because they are extremely poor, and they are extremely poor because other countries are extremely rich." His solution to the population problem was to increase the standard of living of the world's poor, which would result in a voluntary reduction of fertility, as has occurred in the rich countries.
In The Closing Circle (1971), Commoner argued that our economy--including corporations, government, and consumers--needs to be in sync with what he called the "four laws of ecology":
- Everything is connected to everything else.
- Everything must go somewhere.
- Nature knows best.
- There is no such thing as a free lunch.
The Closing Circle helped introduce the idea of sustainability, a notion that is now widely accepted but was controversial at the time. As Commoner pointed out, there is only one ecosphere for all living things. What affects one, affects all. He also noted that in nature there is no waste. We can't throw things away. Therefore, we need to design and manufacture products that do not upset the delicate balance between humans and nature. We need to utilize alternative forms of energy, such as wind, solar and geothermal power. And we need to change our consumption habits accordingly--to use fewer products with plastics (which are based on oil), aerosol cans (which harm the atmosphere) and industrial-grown food (which is produced with harmful chemicals).
In his best-selling book The Poverty of Power (1976), Commoner introduced what he called the "Three Es"--the threat to environmental survival, the shortage of energy and the problems (such as inequality and unemployment) of the economy--and explained their interconnectedness: industries that use the most energy have the most negative impact on the environment. Our dependence on nonrenewable sources of energy inevitably leads to those resources becoming scarcer, raising the cost of energy and hurting the economy.
Commoner was neither a back-to-the-land utopian or a Luddite opposed to modern industrial civilization. He did not place the burden of blame on the consumers who buy these products or the workers who produce them. He believed that big business and their political allies dominate society's decision making, often leading to misguided priorities, a theme that paralleled the ideas of economist John Kenneth Galbraith and, later, Ralph Nader.
Commoner believed that the corporate imperative for wasteful growth is the root cause of the environmental crisis and must be corralled by responsible public policies demand by a well-educated public. As he told Scientific American: "The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production--in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation--essential as they are, make people sick and die."
Commoner's proposals for addressing these problems reflect his lifetime of promoting a progressive agenda. He told Scientific American:
"What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post-World War II changes in production technology. Restoring environmental quality means substituting solar sources of energy for fossil and nuclear fuels; substituting electric motors for the internal-combustion engine; substituting organic farming for chemical agriculture; expanding the use of durable, renewable and recyclable materials--metals, glass, wood, paper--in place of the petrochemical products that have massively displaced them."
Commoner acknowledged some of the environmental movement's victories, including bans on DTT and on lead in gasoline. Commoner saw this as a evidence that society can prevent environmental hazards by changing the way we produce and consume. But in a 2007 interview with The New York Times, he warned that these measures did not go far enough.
"Environmental pollution is an incurable disease," he said. "It can only be prevented. And prevention can only take place at the point of production. If you insist on using DDT, the only thing you can do is stop. The rest has really been sort of forgotten about."
Many Americans embraced Commoner's ideas about workplace hazards, nuclear power plants, and recycling. But he grew frustrated by the influence of corporate America over both political parties and by the failure of the mainstream environmental movement to join forces with other progressive movements to heed his warnings and challenge the basic tenets of the free-market system.
In 1979 Commoner helped form the Citizens Party, hoping it would gain influence similar to that of the Green Party in Europe. The next year Commoner ran as the party's presidential candidate. He got on the ballot in twenty-nine states but received less than one-third of 1 percent of the national vote. Like most third parties in the American system, the Citizens Party wound up being a minor fringe force. Commoner did not run again for office, but he advised Jesse Jackson's Democratic Party presidential campaigns in the 1980s.
In the 2007 interview with the New York Times, the 90-year-old Commoner remained the relentless radical:
"I think that most of the 'greening' that we see so much of now has failed to look back on arguments such as my own--that action has to be taken on what's produced and how it's produced. That's unfortunate, but I'm an eternal optimist, and I think eventually people will come around."
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The Bernie Sanders Moment
THE white-haired politician stands before 10,000 cheering supporters in Madison, Wis., and calls for "political revolution," denouncing a "rigged economy" that produces "a grotesque level of inequality," returning to a theme that '60s radicals have long been trumpeting.
Jul 11, 2015
THE white-haired politician stands before 10,000 cheering supporters in Madison, Wis., and calls for "political revolution," denouncing a "rigged economy" that produces "a grotesque level of inequality," returning to a theme that '60s radicals have long been trumpeting.
It may have seemed, only a few years ago, that the '60s radical moment was consigned to documentaries on Woodstock, pushed out of the spotlight for Occupy Wall Street and a new generation of activists to enter stage left. But here it is again. And it is perfectly timed to crusade against what Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, calls an "oligarchy."
In Mr. Sanders's run -- and in the absence of a White House bid from Senator Elizabeth Warren -- progressives have found a candidate they can support wholeheartedly. To understand the moment that the 73-year-old Mr. Sanders is enjoying, we have to see how he got here, waiting for national politics to catch up.
The road he took out of the 1960s student movement was not the most conspicuous one, but it was the widest. And Senator Sanders now represents a culmination of one of the primary currents of the left in the past half century.
In the late 1960s and early '70s, the headlines about the New Left went to the tiny minority who planted bombs and burned down R.O.T.C. buildings to stop the Vietnam War and usher in a phantasmagorical "revolution." Far more numerous, however, though less photogenic, were the activists who resolved, in the words of a Students for a Democratic Society document written in 1965, to convert the antiwar movement "from protest to radical politics," by which they meant to develop "independent and mass constituencies" out of "the immediate aspirations of the poor, welfare recipients, trade-unionists, students, and others."
One co-author of that proposal, Lee Webb, moved to Vermont in 1970 and, like many other immigrants to what had been a rock-ribbed Republican state, threw himself into antiwar organizing there. Mr. Webb was a veteran of the student movement (he was national secretary of S.D.S. the same year I was president, 1963-64). In Vermont, he ran into another immigrant, originally from Brooklyn, a civil rights activist at the University of Chicago who had bought some land and moved there several years before. The man, who carried his young son on his shoulder, was Bernie Sanders. "Bernie didn't own a car," Mr. Webb remembers. When he did, it was often out of commission.
Vermont welcomed not only hippie communards but also veterans of the antiwar and feminist movements, looking for a continuation of radical politics by other means and smaller-scale lives. Mr. Sanders got involved with the tiny Liberty Union Party.
"Bernie," Mr. Webb told Mr. Sanders, "you're never gonna get anywhere in politics if you don't join the Democratic Party."
The Brooklyn transplant didn't listen. He preferred his politics neat, independent of major parties, and started running for statewide offices on the Liberty Union ticket, but never got more than 6 percent of the vote in four runs for senator and governor. Then, in 1981, he ran for mayor of Burlington (1980 population: 37,721), and narrowly defeated the Democratic incumbent. Then he won three more two-year terms, and went on to win Vermont's single congressional seat.
He won by making good on promises. One example: A few years after Mr. Sanders left Burlington's city hall, the mayor's office was occupied by a Republican, who cut back the budget for snowplowing, then ran afoul of a heavy winter snowfall. In the next election, remembers the University of Vermont sociologist Thomas Streeter, a bumper sticker read: "At least the hippies plowed the streets."
That is the secret of Mr. Sanders's style of politics, once called "municipal socialism." It's the '60s reformist impulse without countercultural baggage. It's the kind of square that needed time to become hip. It's a moralistic politics that takes seriously the democratic proposition that elected officials must deliver results.
"The fact that he wins elections says there's an alternative to Clinton-style politics," says Mr. Streeter, referring to the reliance in the 1990s on conservative budget-balancing. It was precisely that sort of alternative Lee Webb and others promoted in the 1970s, with the Vietnam War over and the former New Left at sea.
At the same time, to stake out what the writer and activist Michael Harrington called "the left wing of the possible," many '60s student veterans and others went to work in inclusive "progressive" politics, eventually to triumph in many cities, including Bill de Blasio in New York.
Not that the call of electability always arouses the left. The onerous work of endless meetings, self-sacrificing coalitions and power struggles in local Democratic parties turns off many single-issue activists of the post-'60s. Because deliverable results are so hard to come by, progressives of various ages have often gone for electoral politics of the proudly, defiantly independent sort.
In 1980, the environmentalist Barry Commoner ran a campaign for president as the standard-bearer of a rudimentary Citizens Party. He won fewer than 250,000 votes. The interior of the Democratic Party itself was much more fertile territory for the right kind of candidate. In 1984, Jesse L. Jackson won roughly three million primary votes; in 1988 he won more than double that number.
After the disappointments of the Clinton presidency -- spiking inequality even as median income grew -- Ralph Nader's supporters thought their time as outsiders had come around. Years of effort in mainstream party operations and primaries were too compromised for them. (Mr. Sanders solved this problem in Vermont by staying outside the Democratic Party but creating an alternative apparatus that proved it could govern.) So Mr. Nader ran as a Green against Al Gore, and the rest is history. Since 2000, to put it mildly, third-party politics has not been popular on the left.
With the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, the weak recovery and the flash point of Occupy Wall Street, the theme of income inequality was an undeniable part of our economic reality and it went mainstream. To many progressives, America began to look like Bernie Sanders country writ large.
Is he a generational candidate, then, seizing the spotlight to vindicate fellow '60s-era radicals who may have felt their moment was gone? Yes and no. His enthusiasts cut across age lines. Tim Ashe, a Vermont state senator who got his political start working for Mr. Sanders, is 38. He has met 20-somethings and 40-somethings who say they moved to Vermont because of Mr. Sanders's appeal -- not in order to vote for him, but to live in a place that would elect him. The Howard Dean of 2004, a far more moderate Vermont immigrant, was for some a first hurrah in national politics. Now Mr. Sanders is the purer vintage.
So once again, we are not done with the '60s. Bernie Sanders is saying, "Think big." Hillary Clinton is, at least for now, campaigning like the college senior who embraced high expectations in her Wellesley commencement address of 1969, the woman who went on to work for Richard M. Nixon's impeachment and for the Children's Defense Fund.
However unpromising his prospects for electoral victory, Mr. Sanders's campaign is already a force. His supporters may not be happy with the Democratic candidate they will probably get, but their influence will persist.
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In the Age of Global Neoliberalism, Solutions Must Come From Below
Jun 16, 2015
Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations.
We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet.
What has capitalism done to us lately?
The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment.
We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate. The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998. The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2deg Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2degC requires reducing global emissions by 6% per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.
Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites.
Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million. Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800%. It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour. Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty. A majority of public school students are low-income. 85% of workers feel stress on the job.
Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive.
Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks. The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50% of the global population (3.5 billion people). By 2016 the richest 1% will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined. The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80% of the global population.
Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid.
What's the nature of the beast?
Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category.
Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure.
Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones.
What should political action aim for today?
The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase.
It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there."
What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.
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