Notes from the Left Coast

Drummond Pike’s Blog

Dear Mr. Beck,

Thank you for giving Tides such extraordinary and generous attention on your shows. In the “no such thing as bad publicity” category, it doesn’t get much better. My mother drilled into us that manners really matter, so thank you.

I doubt you realize it, but you’ve really begun to rally folks behind a commitment to change, of the sort that was so decisively demonstrated in last fall’s elections. I have to say that of all the things you decry about the people and programs we support, going after a video explaining sustainability to kids is really something.

Of course, your assertions about last night’s topic, The Story of Stuff (www.storyofstuff.com) were absurd, but the attention you brought to them really helped. It:

• Drove more than 25,000 new visitors to the www.storyofstuff.com site – more than twice their usual number of daily visitors. Thanks to you, 25,000 (and counting) visitors heard The Story of Stuff’s message and many signed up to get involved.
•  Raised more funds to help The Story of Stuff increase its impact and reach. Contributions are streaming in from existing supporters, as well as from brand-new donors who are now much more interested in supporting The Story of Stuff because you oppose it.
• Sparked an avalanche of calls and emails from parents, teachers, principals and school administrators from coast to coast about how valuable The Story of Stuff is to teaching kids about sustainability.
• Fired up the progressive netroots and grassroots in support of The Story of Stuff.

You’ve really done your part to help increase The Story of Stuff’s impact, and as our elected leaders grapple with the very real issues of global climate change and the need for sustainability, your assistance in rallying progressives has been just wonderful.

You know, with all you’ve had to say about Tides in recent months, we’ve never had the chance to talk. But if you are ever in San Francisco — you know, like for a wedding or something — I’d love to buy you a cup of coffee: Fair Trade, of course!

All the best!

In the rain, running through DC
VP sirens-blaring events of past years
Only rarely echo along Mass Ave,

Then, right around the Finnish, then the Belgian, Embassy,
across the Connecticut Ave sky bridge,
veering into the Embassy conclave covering
the escarpment above the Rock Creek,

So, Joe has replaced Cheney,
And….
what does it mean?

fewer sirens,
less torture.

My Country, ’tis of thee….

A week ago, I attended the Global Progressive Forum, organized by Poul Ryup Rasmussen, former Prime Minister of Denmark and held in the Parliamentary hall of the European Union – an amazing space for such an event. It is called the Hemicycle and is a large oval space surrounded by 3 floors of “sky booths” containing the translators who were borrowed from the EU for the purposes of this two-day session. For an American, at least of my generation, it is with some embarrassment that I watched many of the representatives from various African, South American, Asian, and European countries in a facile way move between languages depending on who their audience happened to be. Me, I was consigned to grabbing the earphones whenever the speakers departed from English. (I’m happy to say that both of my children have avoided the mono-linguistic shortcomings of their father…)

A second, equally simple, observation at the GPF was the comfort that virtually the entire rest of the planet has with the idea of socialism and, perhaps more to the point, social democratic systems where the state plays a far more important role ensuring the social welfare of all its citizens and workers. America’s often outright hostility and deep skepticism of the role of government – not to mention the idea that government can be as well run an enterprise as any private organization of similar scale – has confused me for years. After all, my parents generation benefitted from the astonishingly successful governmental intervention in both the domestic economy and in international relations with more success than any other period in modern history. Government was the answer to the Depression and to the rise of fascism across the globe. No private enterprise could have achieved either outcome, much less had the foresight that was the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Japan and Korea. Yes, and the same generation was on duty when Vietnam happened and the Cold War flourished, but as a whole, there were an awful lot of good things about that era, and one has to think we may well be headed into a similar time. Lord knows, there are as many compelling challenges on the table.

May we live in interesting times.

I’m a good way into Timothy Egan’s excellent The Worst Hard Time, a history of the Dust Bowl and its survivors, those gritty people who hung on and lived through one of the worst man-made disasters of all time. It truly is an amazing tale. First, how the boom in wheat prices drove speculators and real estate sharpies to plow up the prairie for perceived short term profits, and then kept plowing up more ground to compensate for falling prices as the market got saturated. Banks, largely unregulated at the time, took depositors’ funds and invested them in the frenzy, leading to the failure of thousands of banks. And then, the drought hit and went on for 6 years. No rain and scant snow across vast areas of northern Texas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere. And the land just blew away. Dust storms were so thick, drivers had to navigate from one telephone pole to the next. In less than a decade, people in the mid-west subdivided cattle ranches into homesteads, ripped up the grass for wheat, briefly made huge profits, and then sank into inexorable poverty as the rains deserted them, and the soil took flight.

Though Egan doesn’t focus on politics much, it is interesting when he does. Hoover, elected in 1928, declared in an early address, “Americans are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of the land.” Then, as the Dust Bowl and collapse of the stock market took their toll, Hoover was forever saying that we are about to turn the corner back to prosperity, as though his wish for it would make it so. “All the evidences indicate that the worst effects of the crash on unemployment will have passed during the next sixty days,” he declared on March 3, 1930 (p. 95). Egan goes on, “By the end of that year, eight million people were out of work. The banking system was in chaos. The big financial institutions had once looked invincible, with the stone fronts, the copper lights, the marbled floors, run by the best people in town. Now bankers were seen as crooks, fraud artists who took people’s homes, their farms, and their savings. In 1930, 1350 banks failed….The next year, 2294 banks went bust.” The political seachange that occurred in 1932 was unlike any other we saw in the 20th Century.

I’ve been thinking about Egan’s book as I listen to the many convention speeches about what is right and what is wrong with America from the perspective of the two major parties. Democrats see a people who need more from their government. They seem to want a government that plays a balancing role by regulating markets, a government that provides opportunity and a safety net, and a government that works. Republicans seem to want less government, less taxes, and less regulation of business, despite their record of having grown government with huge deficits over recent years. It was fascinating indeed to watch their Vice Presidential candidate decry special interest funding while she has pursued earmarks in Washington for her city and hired lobbyists to garner a share at the federal trough.

It would be very difficult to argue that we face in 2008 circumstances even remotely like those of 1931 when a quarter of the population was unemployed. Our economy may not be zipping along, but it is not in the tank (despite the best efforts of the sub-prime lending hustlers). The challenge, though, is how to galvanize public action on two related issues that will require a political shift in will as occurred with the election of Roosevelt in 1932; those issues are climate change and energy independence. Right now, it doesn’t seem likely that those issues will affect the election much in one way or another, but if you talk with any experts in those fields, the globe must curtail the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or the climate system will spin out of control with unforeseeable results – mostly catastrophic, one might imagine.

Somehow, chants such as one heard last night – “Drill, baby, drill!!!” – seem unlikely to move us in the right direction.

The 31st of May, and what a day in the bizarre world of modern America. A second crane crashed down to the street in NYC. A military judge in the Guantanamo trials was summarily dismissed after publicly expressing frustration that the military prosecutors weren’t sharing information with the defense. Is this a “show trial” or what?? The Obamacans and Clintonistas are slugging it out at the DNC Rules Committee over whether to seat delegations from Michigan and Florida where state parties knowingly scheduled their primaries earlier than the rules allowed. So the Rules Committee will decide whether their rules were really rules? And the rules shouldn’t be followed because….Hillary would lose? And then, yesterday, a Field Poll in California showed that if the elections were held today in CA, then Obama would win over Hillary and over McCain in the general. And a new report suggests that the world is experiencing more extreme weather than at any time since we have been recording such things. Oh, and GM is finding that people just aren’t snapping up those huge SUV’s that have been retooled (at a cost of $4k per) as “hybrids” thus increasing their mileage from 14 to 20 mpg. Now, there’s a shock.

So the real question I have this morning is “what in the world will progressives do if things really change next year?” In many ways, I don’t think we have a clue. We haven’t been in a position to drive policy for so many years, I think we have forgotten what matters. This recent experience watching the political machinations in Washington over the once-every-five-years Farm Bill does not give one comfort. For years, progressives on both sides of the aisle have been arguing that farm subsidies no longer provide a safety net for family farmers, as originally intended, but basically act as corporate welfare enriching the already large, successful agri-business enterprises.

So here comes President Bush saying that it is time to severely limit subsidies, especially because we are experiencing record commodity prices. And what did our progressive leaders in the Congress do? They decided that the status quo was just fine, not wanting to jeopardize recent wins in some rural areas. Wow. Makes you want to work really hard to make sure progressives win…..so they can continue the status quo? I think we still have some work to do. This whole “change” thing better be more than a slogan.

I’ve spent part of each of the past two weeks in DC - first for a Board Retreat of Island Press, and today for a meeting of the irrepressible Environmental Working Group. In both cases, these terrific organizations are dealing with complicated change. Island has to deal with the changing nature of the publishing worlds and the challenging economics of publishing books. IP, by the way, is one of the leading publishers of environmental subject matter in the country and have frequently published books that have directly led to policy changes and the like. Gretchen Daily’s Nature’s Services has literally shifted thinking about the economic role our natural systems play in our system. Alter them at our peril is one lesson you can derive. And Apollo’s Fire is helping people really understand the potential economic boom that can be fueled by agressively attempting to deal with climate change in our urban environments. Really good stuff.

In the picture above, you see Ken Cook, founder of the Environmental Working Group and his sidekick, Richard Wiles, who have built one of the most impressive environmental research and advocacy organizations in the country. Ken is holding forth on the prospects for their “Kids Safe Chemicals Act” idea which would change the way acceptable chemical burdens are measured. Kids just don’t do as well as adults in their ability to manage toxic accumulations, yet our regulatory system measures only adults. Crazy.

EWG also recently had a huge “win” when reports finally confirmed their long held argument that endocrine disrupters (now there’s a mouthful) can be toxic in even small amounts. There is a call in California to ban the use of one - bisphenyl A - which has made EWG the object of, how does one say….the close attention of the chemical industry. The industry’s association, by the way, changed their name to American Chemistry Council to sound less corporate. Needless to say, they don’t like the idea that groups like EWG publicize that humans are bio-accumulating toxics in our systems at quite a clip. Have you seen Ken’s remarkable “10 Americans” presentation? You won’t come away unchanged.

Also of interest:
http://www.youtube.com/user/EnvironmentalWG

Just traveling back to SFO this morning after a great meeting of the Tides Canada Board in Vancouver. Wow. They are doing great! We helped establish our northern sister organization about 8 years ago under some not insignificant pressure from our friend Carol Newell and her sidekick Joel Solomon at the Endswell Foundation – an active funder of the British Columbia environmental community. As they have on and off and now on again made a commitment to spending out their endowment (truly the highest minded stewardship in my view), they wanted to leave an institutional legacy that supported progressive philanthropy and initiatives in the region to which they are so committed. And, boy, have they delivered. The founding ED, now CEO, Tim Dramin, has done a great job putting the organization on the map and developing a parallel to Tides Center – of which there are NO parallels in the entire country. But programmatically, they are rocking.

Here are some highlights:
• Tides Canada has been at the center of an incredible effort that brought together timber companies, First Nations leaders, environmentalists, US funders and, most remarkably, the Provincial Government in a joint effort to preserve the Great Bear Rainforest – 25% of the world’s remaining temperate rainforest is now permanently preserved while simultaneously a $120 million fund has been committed to support sustainable businesses in First Nations communities. Amazing stuff for an 8 year old institution.

• They have hired their first President to run things day-to-day who was the leading organizer of the Great Bear effort. Ross McMillan hails from Tofino on the west coast of BC, but now is in Vancouver helping to keep up with this rapidly growing enterprise.

• A recent draft strategic plan indicates Tides Canada will be aggressively launching into areas of social justice, climate change, and social finance. There was a long discussion at the Board Meeting about the critical state of low and moderate income housing in all of Canada’s major cities. Vancouver especially, it seems, has seen rental housing replaced by highrise condos that are largely held as investments and unoccupied. Lots to sort through on this issues, for sure.

On top of all this, CEO Tim Draimin is leading a policy initiative to establish program sponsorship and development - done up there by Sage Centre, a parallel to Tides Center - as an accepted and well developed way of doing business. No mean feat, I can assure you, given the complexities of the Canadian tax system.

All in all, I’d say our northern sister organization is in GREAT shape and continuing its innovative ways. Check them out!

As someone born and reared in the west, I have a great affinity for one writer in particular, also an offspring of the western US. She wrote in her recent book, In the open space of democracy:

“we are listening - ears alert - we are watching - eyes open - registering the patterns and possibilities for engagement…our strength lies in our imagnination, and paying attention to what sustains life, rather than what destroys it…Open lands open minds.”

However, Terry Tempest Williams confuses me. She captures the most heartfelt, deep sentiment about what exactly America is, and, more important, that to which it aspires. She makes a connection to social justice, and how corporations are unaccountable for prosperity’s costs to both community and the commons, but I so wish she would write about prescriptions and actions we could take to get to the other side.

I am the child of the WWII generation. My dad was in the Air Force and trained pilots in the use of the top secret airborn radar systems. My mom was accelerated into full medical practice straight out of medical school as civilian America adjusted to deal with the realities of the war. Few women of her generation even made the attempt, but our mom, at least according to family lore, got the hard training as a new doc by treating military families at McLellan Air Force Base near Sacremento. Eventually she became the first female pediatrician in Marin County, on the north end of the GG Bridge. Those years were a remarkable period during which regular challenges emerged to long-held social assumptions about the social roles, the international order, ideologies, and the relative roles of government and business.

In reflecting on that era, as many have come to do in recent years, much is made of the last “world war”, the rise of the American industrial/military capacity, and the march of the middle class into the previous void between the haves and the have-nots. What drove this, though, was innovation, creativity, and, above all, necessity. Solutions mattered more than anything.

I think what Al Gore has been trying to tell us is that there is no great value now in discussing research on climate change, exploring our feelings about it, or matching wits across an ideological or values divide. Rather, it is time for us to act into the crisis and begin doing things. Having a slightly more open-minded resident of the White House may help, but the machinery and processes that get people there still far outweigh any inclination to do right. Business has now decided that “green is the new green” and they are scampering to productize - what a word! - all things environmental. Serious investment in solutions is paltry.

The sad truth, and one to which we all must become accustomed before business can do right, is that it has to come to grips with the fact that we have a very different playing field one that shortly governments, citizens organizations, labor, and consumers must come together to define. Terry, if she’s listening, can help us not simply to understand what is happening, but what to do about it.

• Hear an audio clip of Terry Tempest Williams, in an interview about her book Open Space of Democracy:
  http://boss.streamos.com/wmedia/wildsidenews/wsnsegments/091604c.wax

Check out this short film that was made with sponsorship from Tides Foundation. This YouTube clip is a preview. You can watch the whole 20 minute film at: www.storyofstuff.org

For your Thanksgiving pleasure (especially for those of you in NYC), “our” Tides film on the politics of climate, Everything’s Cool, which we essentially co-produced, is opening this weekend:
www.everythingscool.org

If you are in LA or NY, go see it! The screening times are the same every day:
from Friday Nov 23rd - Thursday Nov 29th
1:10 PM: 3:20 PM : 5:10 PM : 7:00 PM : 9:10 PM
http://www.cinemavillage.com/chc/cv/show_movie.asp?movieid=1167

We want a hit on our hands!

IN BRIEF:

EVERYTHING’S COOL is a film about America finally “getting” global warming in the wake of the most dangerous chasm ever to emerge between scientific understanding and political action. While industry funded nay-sayers sing what just might be their swan song of pseudo — scientific deception, a group of global warming messengers are on a high stakes quest to find the iconic image, the magic language, the points of leverage that will finally create the political will to move the United States from its reliance on fossil fuels to the new clean energy economy — AND FAST.

The good news: America finally gets global warming; the chasm between what scientists know and the public understands is closing and the debate is over.

The bad news: the United States, the country that will determine the fate of the globe, must transform its fossil fuel-based economy fast, like in a minute!

Just when you were thinking green is the new black, the candidates will make the clean energy revolution a central part of their presidential platform and everyone “gets” global warming, EVERYTHING’S COOL is here to offer up an energetic and surprisingly lighthearted look at the politics of climate change and why it took so long to go from SO WHAT? To NOW WHAT?

Hope your holiday was full of love and good food.