Invisible No More by Raymond Foxworth and Steve Dubb
People, Planet, Design by Corey Squire
Barons by Austin Frerick
Making Climate Tech Work by Alon Tal
Gaslight by Jonathan Mingle
When Driving Is Not an Option by Anna Zivarts
The Heat and the Fury by Peter Schwartzstein
Threat Multiplier by Sherri Goodman
Multisolving by Elizabeth Sawin
Science with Impact by Anne Toomey
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At the Table
The Chef’s Guide to Advocacy
Katherine Miller
hen Katherine Miller was first asked to train chefs to be advocates, she thought the idea was ludicrous. This was a group known for short tempers and tattoos, not for saving the world. But she quickly learned that chefs and other leaders in the restaurant industry are some of the most powerful forces for change in our troubled food system. Chefs are leading hunger relief efforts, supporting local farmers, fighting food waste, confronting racism and sexism in the industry, and much more.<BR /> In <I>At the Table</I>, Miller presents the essential techniques she developed for the James Beard Foundation’s Chefs Boot Camp for Policy and Change. Readers will learn how to focus their philanthropic efforts; pinpoint their audience and develop their argument; recruit allies and support action; and maybe most importantly, grab people’s attention in a crowded media landscape.  You don’t have
Katherine Miller
Called one of the most innovative women in food and beverage by Fortune and Food & Wine magazines, Katherine Miller was the Vice President of Impact at the James Beard Foundation and the founding executive director of the Chef Action Network. She was the first-ever food policy fellow at American University’s Sine Institute for Policy and Politics and served as a Distinguished Terker Fellow at George
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Washington University. She is also an adjunct professor at the Culinary Institute of America. She is a past board member of RAINN, the national sexual assault hotline, and NARAL ProChoice America. She is a member of Les Dames Escoffier and on the board of directors of the New Venture Fund. She lives on the ancestral lands of the Anocostans in Northeast Washington DC with her husband Lou and their kitty Lily.
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Keywords: Certified B Corporation; Chef Action Network; Chef Bootcamp for Policy and Change; Chefs Collaborative; environmental impacts of food; farm to table; farmworkers; food insecurity; Food Policy Action; food waste; hunger relief; Independent Restaurant Coalition; James Beard Foundation; National Restaurant Association; restaurant aid; restaurant industry; sustainable agriculture; sustainable seafood; tipped minimum wage; waitstaff
For Gracie, Tessa, Katherine, and Samantha: Use your voice.
Foreword
by Chef Tanya Holland
As a young chef, I trained in a brigade system in which the head chef ruled. Working in near silence, I perfected mother sauces, learned to dress pheasants, and cut thousands of basil leaves into delicate chiffonade. In those days, professional kitchens were exclusively the domain of white men. We, all the students, wore the same chef whites, carried similar knives, and put up with militarystyle hazing considered part of our culinary training. As a Black woman, I was regularly harassed—sometimes with microaggressions, sometimes with more extreme and unique forms of abuse. Pitched as a way to bring order to the chaos of restaurant kitchens, the brigade system was—and still is—the prevailing way chefs are trained.
The only thing that matters in the old way of teaching is the preservation and proliferation of cooking techniques. Not until many years later did I understand that professional cooking didn’t come automatically coupled with jokes mocking my Blackness or with sexually explicit gestures. As I grew into being a chef, into being a leader—first in restaurants and then as the host of the first cooking show helmed by a Black woman and successful restaurateur, and now as a member of the board of trustees of the James
Beard Foundation—I was, and am, constantly processing and unlearning the lessons of the past.
It isn’t easy. Even decades after I first entered cooking school, I still often find myself the only woman (and certainly the only Black woman) at the tables where knowledge is shared and decisions are made. That’s because societal and cultural barriers block me, and others like me, from access to certain opportunities. It’s also because structural racism and white supremacy exist in every facet of our society and are baked into the policies that govern our food system.
Becoming more and more aware of the structural flaws that prevent change, I knew that I wanted to do something about it. I am not a shy person, and I have never been scared to use my voice. In the past, however, I wasn’t particularly successful at changing things. In some cases, I thought people didn’t hear what I had to say no matter how forcefully I was saying it. One chef accused me of “playing the race card” when I approached him about obviously being treated differently by the sous chefs who clearly had racial and gender biases. The old ways felt caked on, and progress moves too slowly for my liking. And my self-preser vation and awareness were perceived as defensive and whiny.
Women chefs and restaurateurs, even after the MeToo years and dozens of programs designed to change the game, still earn less than our male counterparts. We still get less than 10 percent of investment capital when we open restaurants. Without outside capital, it is hard for small restaurants to grow and for our brands to grow. I was hosting my own cooking show on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network, but the only way to save my restaurant
from predatory partners and financing was to shut it down.
The societal flaws that exacerbated the closing of my business aren’t new. The same racism and systemic bias exist in efforts to reduce emergency hunger programs such as the school lunch and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Lawsuits that blocked the Small Business Administration’s ability to prioritize restaurants owned by women or people of color for special loans during COVID-19 were similar to those filed against the United States Department of Agriculture to prevent Black farmers from accessing funds to buy farmland.
Today, I know that one of the most powerful things we can do is to fight for policy changes at the state and federal levels. As a business owner, but most importantly as a vocal constituent, I have experience that matters in the rooms where policy is written. My voice, connections, and public platform can help accelerate change in my community.
That’s something I always knew, but I never quite had the formula down until I attended a training program put on by the Chef Action Network and James Beard Foundation at TomKat Ranch in California in 2016. It was there I first met Katherine Miller, along with many other chefs from Northern California, including a few who worked just a few miles from my restaurant but I had never met. At this regional Chef Bootcamp for Policy and Change, I truly learned that with the right recipe, I could cook up change.
During those three days, we went through an early version of the “A Is for Advocacy” training contained in this book. We participated in role-plays on how to talk to
elected officials, toured the farm, and cooked together. I built powerful relationships within the chef and restaurant community. Most importantly, I learned valuable advocacy skills that I still use today. The training also helped expand my appetite for change. I was so locked into fighting for equity and inclusion in the industry—and still am—that I hadn’t truly seen how connected our food system is to almost every other aspect of our lives. From who grows our food to who serves it, our individual actions can support—or bring down—the system that controls us.
At the end of that weekend, I started getting more deeply involved with organizations such as No Kid Hungry. Universal school meals are a human right, and we’ve passed a law that codifies that right in California. Climate change is threatening our very existence. Chefs across the United States are working to raise awareness about regenerative agriculture and healthy soils. Also, in my home state of California, we passed a law to provide new funding for farmers who use more cover crops and climate-friend ly growing techniques.
Change can take a long time, but I saw how quickly policy can affect our daily lives when, shortly after returning from TomKat, I joined the campaign to implement a tax on sugary drinks and soda in Oakland. Sugar-laden beverages are proven to contribute to diet-related diseases—diseases that disproportionately impact the Black community. We passed our soda tax in 2016, and today it is considered a successful model for improving diets and reducing disease rates in the city.
There is nothing easy about these issues, but thanks in part to Katherine’s guidance, I can now translate
complicated issues around food and make them tangible and actionable for others. It’s a skill that I have honed over decades of working in kitchens. It’s a skill I share with my fellow chefs. It is also, like all knives, a skill that needs to be regularly sharpened. The work I did with Katherine helped me develop an approach and strategy that worked for me. I feel empowered to impact change in my community.
The tips, tools, and tactics from that training stay with me and inform many of the decisions I make about what issues I’m going to take on and exactly how I want to work. I use the advice described throughout this book almost every day. I know you will find it equally useful.
I also need to say a word about Katherine. I entered that first training not knowing anything about her. Starting when she was the first vice president of impact at the James Beard Foundation, Katherine and I have worked together to strategize everything from launching my cookbook to the Farm Bill. After years of traveling the country with her, including to other trainings, and while walking the halls of Congress, I have come to respect her knowledge and experience about advocacy. This book is your chance to tap into her decades of experience crisscrossing food, politics, and policy and then apply what you learn to your own work.
Katherine also lays out some of the most pressing challenges we face as a culinary community— and as citizens of the world. The word chef means leader. Too often, it has meant being a boss or dictator. not a mentor or champion. That changes now. It’s time we’re known for more than delicious and precious food. What you’ll find in At the Table will help guide you and introduce you to new ways of doing business.
I look forward to seeing what you do with tools here and how you will change the world.
About Tanya Holland
Holland is a chef, restaurateur, podcast host, writer, and a renowned expert on soul food. The author of the recently released Tanya Holland’s California Soul, The Brown Sugar Kitchen Cookbook, and New Soul Cooking, Holland competed on the fifteenth season of Top Chef on Bravo, was the host and soul-food expert on Food Network’s Melting Pot Soul Kitchen, appeared on the HBO Max show Selena + Chef featuring Selena Gomez, and hosted Tanya’s Kitchen Table on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN Network. She is a member of the James Beard Foundation’s board of trustees and the esteemed Les Dames d’Escoffier organizations, as well as a senior advisor to the Stanford (University) Food Institute.
Chapter 1
The Power of Chefs
I consider myself an advocate. I take the time to learn about the things I care about, and then I use my voice so that others can learn more and join in. We can’t change anything if we don’t do something. Che f-author Kwame Onwuachi1
In 2012 chef Michel Nischan and entrepreneur Eric Kessler approached me to help them design and lead a training focused on turning chefs into political advocates. At first, this idea seemed the most ludicrous thing I had ever heard. It also seemed frivolous and unnecessary. I remember thinking—and probably saying—that those chefs and restaurateurs were probably best left in the kitchen. After all, how is a group of people better known for their tattoos, tempers, and television appearances going to have a real impact in politics and the halls of Congress? No one was going to take them seriously, I thought.
Don’t misunderstand me: I love restaurants. For years I considered myself a “foodie,” admiring chefs, following who
was opening which restaurant and where, and devouring any and all media featuring chefs, from the latest competition to their fashion choices. Restaurants are cool: the physical spaces, the people that work in them, the food they prepare, and the creativity and entrepreneurship that is present in every single restaurant, whether it is a neighborhood café or a place where one set of table linens costs more than my car payment. I also believe that food is art, and restaurants and bars are where I find modernists, classics, and everything in between. The booths, tables, and barstools of the world’s restaurants are where I’ve celebrated most of life’s milestones—birthdays, signing mortgage papers, ending relationships, starting new jobs, getting married. They are places where I created space for big conversations, made important memories, and shared the love and wisdom of family and friends. They are also places where I got to come face to face with my culinary idols.
Despite my love of these spaces, and my fangirl moments, I never really thought of chefs and restaurants as leaders, activists, or advocates. For me, restaurants were places to extract beauty, deliciousness, warmth, and friendship. My gratitude for their work was expressed with a big tip, a hearty thanks, and a return visit.
I considered my own work in a vastly different sphere. Since the 1990s, I’ve traveled the world working with activists and advocates in hopes of helping them use their voices to make real progress in the areas of climate change, gender equity, sexual violence, and global health. For a long time, though, I did not see what was right in front of me: that all these issues are intimately connected to food.
Like most consumers, I thought of food as, well, just food. I came to realize that food is one of our most personal and political daily acts. Too many in the food world—especially in restaurants—focus on flavor first (and often exclusively). Our food choices, though, affect more than just our stomachs. Our food choices impact everything from our personal health to the preservation of the planet.
Understanding the connection between our plates, personal preferences, and the politics governing our food system feels both obvious and challenging. Too often, we focus on the plate because it’s easier to talk about how fresh blueberries taste than it is to talk about how they were grown and harvested (often by underage and undocumented farmworkers). When we exchange recipes for shrimp tacos, we can simply ignore the discussion around whether the shrimp was raised in polluted farm waters or caught by third-generation shrimpers or if the corn for the tortillas was genetically modified (more than 90 percent of all corn grown in the United States is,2 by the way).
We have to start looking beyond our own plates and preferences and see what our choices are doing to our communities. The policies, choices, and trade-offs holding up our current food system are inextricably linked—and not always in a good way.
Nowhere is this clearer for me than global meat consumption. The first time I saw a live animal slaughter, as part of the first Chef Bootcamp for Policy and Change, I better understood the issues in front of us. If we choose to eat meat, there are dozens of questions we need to, as consumers, ask ourselves. Was the animal raised by a small family farmer who doesn’t use feed that includes additional
antibiotics, or was it bought from a large multinational company that relies on concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, to keep up with global demand? Was it processed on a small farm, or was it sent to a slaughterhouse where millions of pounds of meat are processed each day? Were the workers on the farms, in the slaughterhouses, and in the grocery stores all paid a living wage, free of harassment and violence, and were they able to access health care and other benefits? How much are we willing to pay for products that are in sync with our personal values?
To a consumer, these questions can be overwhelming. Each answer leads to another question, and every decision feels like the wrong choice. It all leads, very quickly, to information paralysis, and when faced with so many choices, we often default to the status quo—the thing that takes the least amount of effort and thought. That stand is no longer acceptable. Consumers, companies, and yes, even chefs need help understanding our food system and finding ways to improve it.
I believe we all must work to ensure that the food we eat is delicious but is also good for us and the planet. That’s where chefs come in. Chefs can help translate what goes into producing our food to what is on our dinner table—and can help us all understand how food policy, from cottage food laws to global fishery management treaties, affects what is available to us and at what cost.
The laws that control our food system are often intentionally opaque. For example, did you know that there is no single, federal food agency? Before starting this work, I didn’t. Now after a decade of working on food policy advocacy, I know that (at least) twenty federal departments and
agencies play some role in shaping our food system. Take food safety, for example, which is notoriously convoluted in how it is governed. At least thirty federal laws touch on the issue of food safety. Although fifteen federal agencies play some part in implementing these laws, the regulation of food safety largely falls on the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).3 But the division of authority between the two is not always neat.
Let’s use eggs as an example. USDA runs a marketing program promoting eggs and regulates the safety of eggs removed from the shell. At the same time, another agency, the FDA regulates the safety of eggs inside the shell. To get from the chicken to the farmer to you, eggs will have successfully navigated dozens of laws overseeing their production and making sure they land safely (in every way) on your plate.
Even though there are dozens of laws around food safety and production, the system does not bring the same urgency to ensuring that food jobs pay fair wages, support local economies, or try to address climate change. To create change, we must work to unravel and rewrite hundreds of years of public policies that perpetuate the racism, sexism, wage discrimination, and environmental degradation that is baked into the way food is produced, sold, and distributed.
Even as I became more aware of the need to reform the food system, I didn’t think of the restaurant industry as part of the solution, partly because restaurants are a major part of the problem. The food system in which most restaurant owners and chefs (and their purveyors) work functions exactly how it was designed: it delivers cheap,
calorically dense, and convenient food to the largest number of people possible without real concern for the people or planet that deliver our food. (Let’s be clear: there is always a difference between small, independent restaurants and large, multinational chains, but they all must mostly operate within the same flawed system.)
Still, many restaurant workers express pride in being part of an industry where “anyone” can get a job. Restaurant work is often sold as a place for those who do not necessarily fit into other industries or companies to grow and succeed. The hip and cool factor masks many of the endemic problems within the industry. Only about onethird of restaurants are owned by women, less than 10 percent of head chefs are women, and the numbers are even worse for owners of color.4 It is also a place that—with shift drinks, long hours, and a work- hard, play- hard vibe—fosters some of the highest rates of drug and alcohol addiction and suicide of any profession. That restaurants are still able to create delicious meals and meaningful experiences is a testament to the dogged personality and creativity of the people who own them and work in them. But it was not an industry I was looking to for inspiration or counting on to drive change.
I wasn’t alone in these feelings. Food justice activists have been skeptical of the chef and restaurant community’s commitment to social change for years. The largest industry group, the National Restaurant Association (and before 2020 the only national lobbying group representing restaurants), actively fought against the Affordable Care Act (“Obama Care”)5 and state and national efforts to raise the minimum wage.6 I’ve been told, numerous times by
leaders I admire, that until chefs clean up their act and run fairer businesses, they have no real place in the good food movement.
I don’t entirely disagree. I spent more than a decade directing opposition research efforts for the Democratic Party. I know that if you’re going to speak out about issues, you better clean up your own kitchen first.
That cleanup takes time—and it is complic ated. Some of the chefs and restaurateurs I know provide health care and other benefits for their employees, pay above the minimum wage, and look for meaningful ways to engage in their communities, but often they are anomalies in their industry. Most restaurateurs struggle to simply keep the doors open. The business model is broken: wages are low; sexism, racism, and sexual harassment are rampant; the hours are insane and ingredients increasingly expensive. The profit margins, if you’re lucky, run between 3 and 10 percent annually. 7 At this time, there are few financial incentives for chefs and restaurant owners to source from local businesses, provide health care, or pay a livable wage. There are demands and expectations that these small business owners provide all the protections and benefits of larger corporations, but they are trapped by myriad opaque laws, age- ol d practices, and financial considerations that hinder their efforts to clean up their kitchens and the industry. For too long these traps have been used as excuses, but I’m hoping they now provide motivation for change.
Despite the institutional challenges they face, what Nischan and Kessler knew (and I realized) is that chefs are uniquely positioned to spur big-picture change in their
industry and in the larger debates around the future of our food system.
In other words, chefs are a key ingredient in making not just restaurants, but the food system itself, more just and sustainable. They influence what we grow and produce and how we eat, and they shape almost every conversation we have about food, from the fun (trending flavors) to the serious (exploitation of workers). They have a deep knowledge of the business and economics of the food system and influence culture through social media, television, and books. They have expansive networks and unprecedented access to politicians and other influencers. Most importantly, there is strong demand for them to step out of the kitchen— especiall y from other food systems advocates who understand their reach and influence.
Recipe for Making Effective Advocates
Required ingredients: Cultural influence, economic clout, unique networks, direct access, trusted voice, powerful storytellers, demand for your voice
Proportions may vary.
Mix generously and apply often to causes and issues you care about.
Like It or Not, Chefs Are Celebrities (and Influence Culture)
One of the first things that Kessler said to me when pitching the idea of a Chef Bootcamp was that chefs are, for
better or worse, cultural influencers and celebrities. He shared his experience collaborating with musicians and other artists and how through training and education, global icons such as Bono had become trusted partners in discussions about global poverty reduction. He thought the same was possible for so-called celebrity chefs.
He wasn’t—and isn’t—wrong to compare chefs to musicians and other artists. Food is a dominant part of our entertainment culture. Chefs have more followers and fans on social media than they are likely to ever have customers, and television, blogs, and newsletters reach billions more. Just consider the following:
• There are more than 3.6 billion social media accounts in the world, and more than half of the top shared content is focused on food.8
• Nearly four million unique users visit the top 160 food blogs each month.9
• Nearly 80 percent of Americans watch cooking shows,10 and all the major streaming platforms—Amaz on Prime, Netflix, Hulu—create and showcase food in everything from documentaries to classic cooking shows to the craziest of food contests.
• The Food Network is distributed to nearly one hundred million US households (or 87 percent) and draws more than forty-six million unique web users monthly.11
• In 2021, chef and food personality Guy Fieri signed a production deal with the Food Network worth more than $80 million. Compared to contracts for
professional athletes, Fieri’s deal was the equivalent of a top contract in the National Football League.12
Chefs can reach more people through television and social media than almost any other group or organization. Chef Andrea Reusing, known for her restaurant Lantern in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, said it best: “I was an activist before I was a chef, and my decision to cook was as much about politics and making change as it was food.”13
Restaurants Support Economies in Every City
Having worked with members of Congress and governors across the United States, one thing that struck me early on about chefs was that they, more than other advocates, could speak to their industry’s direct contribution to the economy. Restaurants are one of the few employment sectors that have a presence in almost every US city. There are more than one million restaurant locations. They include quickserve, chain, and independent restaurants, and they make the industry one of the country’s top employment sectors. Consumers spend nearly 40 percent (36.7 percent) of their food dollars in restaurants—this money pays for others to host, prepare, and serve our meals, and clean up afterward.14
From small diners to fast-food franchises to fine dining, restaurants are integral to our communities and support economic growth and development. According to a US restaurant industry white paper published in 2020:
In addition to contributing significantly to the more than $760 billion [about $2,300 per person in the United States] in annual sales in the broader restaurant economy,
these restaurants directly employ 11 million people [about twice the population of Arizona] across the country. Nearly three million of these jobs were created in just the last decade. . . . Further, as mainstays of regional, local, and ethnic cuisine, independent restaurants also drive domestic and international travel and tourism to all parts of the country, from big cities (e.g., Miami) to smaller locales (e.g., Portland, Maine). Food culture and food tourism have become ingrained in the American economy and underpin the travel, leisure, and hospitality sector. Foreign and domestic travelers spend hundreds of billions annually in US restaurants ($279 billion [about $860 per person in the United States] in 2019).15
The industry is also responsible for another five million jobs, including dairies, farmers, fisheries, and other producers, which together accounted for more than $900 billion (about $2,800 per person in the United States) annually in direct sales in 2019.16 Although the industry took a significant hit in both earnings and jobs as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic—earnings in 2020 were down by about $200 billion (about $620 per person in the United States), and about one million jobs were lost between March 2020 and September 202117 forecasters predict that restaurants and food service will continue to be an area for economic growth for years to come.18
The restaurant industry employs hundreds of people and generates millions in local revenue. The chefs, owners, leaders, and staff are exactly the communities and constituents that should be in conversation with policy makers and legislators.
Chefs’ Networks Are Unique and Powerful
In the food system, few people are as well connected and naturally networked as a chef or restaurant owner. Chefs have most of the attributes sociology experts point to as signs of highly networked individuals, including “a genuine interest in other people, a desire to help others, patience, a futurefocused mindset, and a focus on quality over quantity.”19 Most would agree that except for patience, these are also common personality traits for a successful chef or restaurateur.
Think of a network as the table you’re trying to set. Everyone you meet has the potential to sit at the table and help you advance the issues you care about.
“One reason that chef voices matter so much, in whatever battles we are fighting, is that we have amazing and very different networks— netw orks of people and communities that haven’t in the past had a voice in the way things are run,” said chef- owner Jamilka Borges of Pittsburgh’s Wild Child. “Whether it’s our own personal networks, our customers, our employees, our producers/ vendors, or our fellow chefs—we bring those relationships to our lives and work. It’s one of our biggest superpowers. Once I dug into my contacts and thought about my networks and circles of influence, it really made me realize that I actually have a lot of power to leverage.”20
Networks consist of everyone from employees to customers to media to fans and followers to suppliers and vendors to investors—every person a chef touches over the course of a day.
Chefs— especiall y so- cal led celebrity chefs— are the ones that most guests come to see or sample their dishes.
Most guests would love to meet the chef, visit the chef, and take a selfie. In-demand restaurants attract high-level guests, including mayors, entertainers, governors, and even presidents. Chefs and restaurants are also at the center of their community, both as active participants in fundraisers and unique events and as gathering places on Main Streets or downtown.
In addition to their individual networks, chefs are also able to tap into the connections and relationships of other chefs. It all adds up to the ability to influence culture, in new and powerful ways.
Working with others within your network helps present a unified message to policy makers and proves that the issue is important to others in your community. The more people you have repeating the same message, the bigger the chance of success. The more networked you are and the more you ask your community to join you, the more power you’re building to help shift policies, practices, and thinking on the issues you care about.
Asha Gomez, a chef and restaurateur from Atlanta, works extensively on global hunger and food insecurity issues. She uses her platform to raise awareness around global hunger and food insecurity—systemic problems that she first learned about when she adopted her son, Ethan, from an orphanage in India when he was four years old. Ethan was severely malnourished, and it took several years for Gomez to feed him back to health. During that time, she learned more about the issues affecting the global food supply and was frustrated by her own inability to influence change.
“I went through so much of my life wanting to make a difference but not knowing how to impact change, and
I’ve come to realize that my voice matters. I can affect change just by bringing awareness to certain issues near and dear to me, to my restaurants, to the people that I interact with, to the community that I live in, work in, and play in,” Gomez explained. “These conversations that we have around our dinner tables with friends and family and our guests that come to our restaurant create the change. I can have a real impact on ending global hunger, a problem that impacted my son, by using my voice and my connections. These conversations we can bring to the halls of Congress.”21
Direct Access to Policy Makers
Chefs, restaurant owners, and hospitality workers have greater access to their governors, members of Congress, and even the president of the United States than almost any other community leaders. If you ask a group of chefs and culinary professionals whether an elected official or candidate has visited their business, everyone raises their hand. When you ask how often those officials stop in, many respond that it is at least once a month and sometimes more often.
This interaction creates a special relationship between chefs and restaurant owners and can make it easier to reach out to an elected official or their staff about critical issues. A few years ago, Seattle chef and restaurateur Renee Erickson went to Washington, DC, to meet with members of Congress about the bill that regulates marine fisheries in US waters, the Magnuson-Stevens Act. The organization she was working with had told her that it was unable to
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PUBLISHED: July 2023
ISBN: 9781642832099
Inclusive Transportation
A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities
Veronica O. Davis
How do you change a system that was never designed to be equitable? In Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities, transportation expert Veronica O. Davis shines a light on the inequitable and often destructive practice of transportation planning and engineering. She calls for new thinking and more diverse leadership to create transportation networks that connect people to jobs, education, opportunities, and to each other.
Davis aims to disrupt the status quo of the transportation industry. She urges transportation professionals to reflect on past injustices and elevate current practice to do the hard work that results in more than an idea and a catchphrase.
Inclusive Transportation is a call to action and a practical approach to shaping communities based on principles of justice and equity.
Veronica O. Davis
Veronica O. Davis, PE, is the Director of Transportation & Drainage Operations, Houston Public Works. Veronica has nearly 20 years of experience in engineering and transportation planning. She co-founded Black Women Bike and was recognized as a Champion of Change by the
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Keywords: Black Women Bike, community input, congestion, connectivity, curriculum, diversity, empathy, equity, health outcomes, last-mile connections, leadership, mobility, neighborhood disinvestment, public engagement, road congestion, technology, traffic engineering, transportation infrastructure, transportation planning, vision
To Eliana, Owen, and Olivia. You are the next generation. May you continue the legacy.
Foreword
By tamika l. butler, esq.
For decades, Black planners, public health professionals, engineers, and the community stakeholders who we represent have been calling for racial equity in all facets of urban planning, allied fields, and Black life. Prior to 2020, our words and thoughts were greeted with applause, praise, and maybe a mention via social media or an academic citation. In 2020, the uneven impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the daily stories of racism in shared urban spaces such as bike lanes, parks, and sidewalks, and our common witness of George Floyd’s murder in a public street placed “racial equity” center stage for urban planning professionals. As the world protested the multiple unjust murders of Black people, the nation’s power structure offered appeasements. But was real change on the way? Was real action a possibility?
As Veronica O. Davis wrote this book throughout 2022, the pandemic continued, and still continues, to disproportionately impact Indigenous, Black, and Brown people. Add other identities and those disparities increase: people living with disabilities, people living in poverty, femme-identified and genderqueer people; the list could go on. The power structures that at first were willing to adapt in order to respond
to a deadly, highly transmissible virus have begun to reassert their prime directives—productivity and profit building.
National planning organizations and conferences have returned to organizing events that cater to their predominantly White, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, and privileged leadership and membership. Organizations that continue to tout equity, diversity, and inclusion are still hiring and voting in all-White leadership structures that fail to represent the diverse tapestry that is the backbone of the United States.
This book joins the chorus of the many Black professionals who have been asking their peers to engage in new ways of thinking, listening, and governing. Most important, it does so by offering concrete advice that planners and allied professionals can take to assess their own privilege, interrogate power, and actively shift those dynamics in their work. For many of us, 2020 was just another year of injustice. We know that the anti-racist future we believe in has not arrived. This lack of progress is due, in part, to the lack of action taken by those in positions of power. Too often, those in power with an ability to bring about change cite an inability to know where to begin. I hope those leaders, as well as scholars, students, and anyone interested in justice, read this manifesto for repairing divided communities. More than one hundred years after the Tulsa massacre (one of many acts of White annihilation of thriving Black spaces in cities), three years after George Floyd’s murder, and moments away from the next Black death, Veronica provides a practical, thoughtful, and empathetic step-by-step guide to anyone who cares about people, wants to build just communities, and hopes to serve the world. This book will, can, and should serve as a handbook or manual for people to refer to at every step of a process. With the humor, grace, and realness I have come to love and cherish in my friend, Veronica guides people through how to do transportation planning right.
Veronica is a determined, dynamic, daring doer and dreamer. I am also lucky to call her a dear friend, a coconspirator, a colleague, and
a sister. In the years I have learned and grown with Veronica, she has always been a leading voice in what inclusive transportation can do as we seek to repair and redress the harms done to our divided communities. Like all Black women practicing, teaching, and learning in different aspects of the planning and urban placemaking worlds, we have shared many conversations about the ways we experience and process shared fears for our families and our futures that were felt long before 2020, when many dared to finally confront the racial inequities built into this country’s systems, institutions, and built environment.
I feel changed by reading Veronica’s book. I hope you feel the same. Turn the page, get started on, or continue, your justice journey, and when you finish, make a commitment to do more than just talk about equity. The just future Veronica’s child and my children deserve is within reach. Like many leaders, Veronica will play a role in getting us there. You can play a role, too, or you can get out of the way.
Preface
What do we owe each other? Do we all have duties to society, or do we get to live and let live? Adhere to social contracts, or balance the needs of the greater good with our own?
To be completely honest, if you are paying attention to the tenor of the discussions around transportation in the United States, it might seem that people who live here are selfish and in a hurry. Perhaps not in all regards, but when it comes to getting from point A to point B, most of us come across as unwilling to endure any minor inconvenience for the country’s greater good. There is an unwillingness to abide by rules of the road, which breaks the social contract.
People with careers in transportation see this selfishness and hurriedness play out every single day. Traffic engineers install stoplights and people run them intentionally because heaven forbid they should be inconvenienced by having to sit at a red light for ninety seconds. People illegally block crosswalks with their parked cars because they will “just be a minute” while they run into a building to grab something “quickly.” Instead of pulling over on the side of the road or waiting until the next time they stop, drivers attempt to text while driving.
People drive over the speed limit because they need to get to their destination as quickly as possible. These me-first behaviors are often the precursors to crashes that lead to serious injuries and death. How do you plan and design safer roads when you know these attitudes and behaviors exist?
I am not anti-car, nor am I part of some secret lobby out to rid the world of cars or, as some journalists opine, a soldier in the war against cars. However, I do not think it is sustainable to live in an urban or suburban community where driving a car is your only option. And yet I see many people unwilling to acknowledge that car-centric transportation makes other options more dangerous and difficult to implement.
When I was in middle school, we played in the middle of the street. If a car came down the street, someone would yell “Car!” and we would scatter to the side of the road to let the car by. The driver would slow to a crawl just in case a wiggly kid darted into the street. This highlighted a mutual understanding and respect that we were sharing the same space. Fast-forward a handful of decades and children are struck and killed by drivers as they walk to school with friends, ride their bicycles, and even stand waiting at a bus stop.
We should all be willing to do whatever it takes to make our transportation system safe for children. One would think. But in my experience, I have seen the opposite. I have had many projects where people were not willing to deal with any inconvenience to make roads safer. Show them data that they will be delayed only one minute? Nope. They do not want to be delayed. Try to take away on-street parking? Hell hath no fury like a community that may lose parking.
As I think about how we can repair divided communities, I know it will require empathy, compassion, and willingness to accept minor inconveniences for the greater good. And people may even find they can still drive their cars, but life is better when people have options, adults
with disabilities and children can move around safely, and older adults can still visit their friends when driving becomes more difficult.
To Be Completely Honest . . .
There is a part of me that worries whether the transportation industry has the ability to change or even wants to change. The title of the book is about repairing divided communities. How do you change a system that was never designed to be equitable? How do you change the system that divided the communities in the first place? What happens if you try to move it in the opposite direction? What if it is like a pendulum, which moves in the opposite direction, one I would consider progress, but then swings back to where it was—or perhaps farther, resulting in more communities destroyed and lives lost?
There are pioneers who are the leaders in designing multi-passenger transportation and bicycle infrastructure. There are believers who look to examples of other countries that have made the commitment and investment to create cities that are walkable and bikeable. But there are still plenty among us who are perfectly fine with destroying a community to widen a highway or a roadway to “relieve congestion,” who believe that the ends justify the means. They are willing to sacrifice communities, mostly Black, Brown, low income, or all three, for what they see as the greater good or for moving other people and goods through the community.
That last group still holds power in many state departments of transportation, consultant companies, contracting companies, state capitols, and even Capitol Hill. Consultants and contractors see the dollar signs. Elected officials’ campaigns are funded by people with deep pockets, and the officials are in power to ensure companies continue to make money. To be fair to some state departments of transportation, they are beholden to the laws, regulations, and performance metrics created
by their state legislature or executive branch, depending on the state, which funnels massive amounts of funding toward car-centric projects. It is a complicated and long-term process to change that structure—it will take patience, even as people are killed needlessly and communities are razed. But the more people there are who understand what must change, and who work together to envision a transportation system that actually provides freedom for all and is safe and affordable, the more likely we will be to achieve it. I hope the ideas in the pages ahead will give you insight and support for the challenges you’ll face in your work to shift how people living in the United States think about transportation and for the planning, design, and implementation of the projects themselves.
To Be Completely Honest . . .
This book was harder to write than I expected. Between the time I started my outline and when I completed the final draft, I had a baby, sold the company I cofounded, and became an executive in a very large local government agency. Oh, and there was a global pandemic that upended our lives.
As my life changed in profound and unexpected ways—along with our entire world—I found myself struggling to find the right words to articulate my point. Some of the struggle was in finding the balance between nuance and making the book understandable to different readers. The other part was in understanding when I was dancing around an issue to avoid saying what needed to be said.
I am still learning that self-doubt is a lie that will always trap you where you are. It will make you feel small. Throughout this writing process, I had moments of self-doubt about being “the expert.” What makes someone an expert? Is there a magical ceremony where one officially becomes an expert? Does writing a book solidify one’s expertise?
Does someone need a doctorate? Do men ask themselves this question? I remember a conversation with colleagues whom I call my heart and soul trust where we questioned who gets to decide who’s the authority on a topic.
Being Black and a woman in a White- and man-dominated industry is enough to create doubt. My parents gave me the lecture most Black parents give their children: “You have to be twice as good to even be seen as an equal.” It is a lecture that propelled me to work hard in college and earn a double master’s degree from an Ivy League school. Because if I have two master’s, then no one can say they were given to me, because what school would give away two master’s? I even briefly started a doctoral program so that no one could say I did not deserve it. However, that lecture still sometimes makes me question whether what I am doing is good enough. Is my book twice as good—good enough to be seen as equal?
There were times when I wanted to call my editor and tell her I gave it my best shot and maybe this was not meant to be. We each have a choice, to listen to the voice that says we cannot do it or to ignore the voice and do it anyway.
And so, I continued typing. I continued because there is a younger generation who want a better future for themselves and the generations after them. I believe my professional and personal experiences provide another point of view and vision for the future of the industry. I continued to write because there are communities that have been harmed and continue to be harmed.
To Be Completely Honest . . .
As of the initial publishing of this book, I am the director of transportation and drainage operations for the City of Houston. I started this book well before submitting my résumé for the position, and the
book’s focus is on my life and professional experiences prior to being in Houston. However, as I continued to complete drafts, I had internal conflicts between Veronica the consultant/advocate/community journalist, who wants transportation leaders to be bold and to make hard decisions, and Veronica the decision-maker, who is balancing all the needs and demands of a city with a finite number of resources. And who, even more, frankly, wants to keep her job. I went from an observer to a decision-maker. Whether in Houston or wherever my career takes me next, I kept envisioning an irate citizen holding up my book with highlighted quotes. But that is ultimately the point, correct? To be better and to be accountable to the public, particularly in communities that have repeatedly been negatively impacted by the transportation system. There are learning opportunities for us all, and we must be willing to show up and have an honest conversation. I hope this book will be a starting point for many of those.
Bringing People and Planning Together
In the transportation industry, especially as people overuse the word “equity,” we recognize the need to engage the public and stakeholders. I have seen (and probably have created) process graphics that show how the community will be engaged throughout the planning process. Consultants’ two favorite phrases for public engagement are “early and often” and “continuously engaging throughout the process.” However, without fail, the planning process and public engagement process run parallel but do not do a good job of informing each other. By this, I mean there is a technical process focused on the elements that impact the conceptual design or the alternatives, and there is a public engagement process to get feedback, but it is not often clear how the public feedback shapes the final alternative.
Frankly, sometimes the disconnect is intentional. There will be an elaborate and creative engagement process, the feedback will be summarized to prepare an outreach summary or meet the requirements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but ultimately the agency has an objective and will continue to march toward that objective. At other times, the public engagement process is genuine, but the Naysayers are
the loudest voice at public meetings or the People in Power do not fully support the process, so the politics and the optics tend to drive the entire decision process.
Have you witnessed this type of disconnect in your transportation projects? If you happen to be an advocate reading this, do you get frustrated because it seems like the comments you provide fall into an abyss? Do you get fatigued from providing input while nothing seems to change?
Why Is There a Disconnect?
In my experience, there are four big reasons why there is a disconnect between the planning process and the public engagement process. (There are probably more.)
1. The engagement team is not included in the technical process.
2. The transportation team knows what it wants to do.
3. Planners and engineers are not trained in effective public engagement.
4. Governments are sometimes afraid of the public.
As you read the expanded discussions of these reasons, I hope that if some words strike you as something you may have experienced on a project, you will take time to reflect. Why was the process disconnected? What would you do differently if you could do the project again?
The Engagement Team Is Not Included in the Technical Process
I mentioned this in previous chapters, but it bears repeating because the engagement team is so often excluded. Changing this is one of the principal ways we can center people in transportation decisions. Usually,
the person or consulting firm leading engagement is not involved in the technical process. Generally, the prime consultant will bring on an outreach firm as a small business partner. It is one of the easiest parts of the project to subcontract to meet the women, minority, and disadvantaged enterprise percentages. Most outreach firms specialize in communications, marketing, meeting logistics, grassroots engagement, or all of these. Some small firms do both technical work and engagement but are assigned only to the engagement team.
Regardless of what the request for proposal says about the need for “robust” or “comprehensive” public engagement, in any project one of the first items cut during cost negotiations is either public engagement or time allotted for project management, which includes team meetings. To save the budget, the person leading public engagement is excluded from the project management and technical team meetings but is still expected to put together a public meeting to get feedback.
The disconnect is compounded because project managers often do not understand engagement, or it is not something that is a strength for them. Very few project managers have both strength in the technical components and ideas for how to engage the public. A public engagement lead who is not included in technical meetings is left to rely on the project manager to communicate guidance from the client in the public engagement process. We have all played “telephone” and understand how this puts clear communication at risk.
Additionally, a public engagement lead who is not part of the technical process is essentially planning meetings without knowing what type of feedback will be useful for the technical process. This can backfire by making the public feel their concerns are being ignored—and result in genuine missed opportunities to make the project serve the community better. An example is creating a public meeting that has engaging activities but does not result in feedback that is truly useful to the technical process.
The Transportation Team Knows What It Wants to Do
This is probably the hardest for government agencies and consultants to admit. Before community members and advocates go “Aha! I knew it,” understand that this is not always the case. However, in some projects, the city, county, or state government already knows what it wants to implement, and the team has to create a pretend process to get the public to draw the same conclusion. I know, this is probably the most shocking thing I have written. However, it happens. But before you go shaking your fist at some poor engineer who works for the city or its consultants, recall the stakeholder group People in Power (see chapter 4). That engineer or planner works for the city, and the city’s consultants are doing their best to deliver a project, as well as ensure they stay employed. Sometimes they toe the party line and parrot whatever the powers that be have said. Sometimes they disagree but use the opportunity to make the best of the situation.
Most of the time, the public can see this for what it is and will even publicly state that the government entity already knows what it wants to do. Savvy members of the public will submit Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get the documents or other information about the project.
It is not necessarily a bad thing that a government agency has an idea of what it wants to implement. Particularly when it comes to safety, there may be nonnegotiables, so public input will not change the project. If that is the case, the best thing to do is to be up-front with the public about what you are trying to achieve, why you are trying to achieve that goal, and what type of input you want from them.
For example, if you are trying to design and construct a sidewalk to provide a place for children to walk, bike, or use a wheelchair to get to school, the public involvement process will be less focused on
engagement and more informational. Members of the public may not want the sidewalk, but from a safety perspective (or in cities where laws require sidewalks), the project is nonnegotiable.
Planners and Engineers Are Not Trained in Effective Public Engagement
Another reason these processes might not synchronize is that engineers and even some planners are not taught how to interact with the community. Some planning schools may have a community development class in which students, with guidance, work on a project with a community. But the students are not taught how to structure a meeting, how to interact with the public, or, most important, how to incorporate that public feedback into the planning process. More emphasis on this aspect of the job is needed in courses because it rarely comes naturally to people drawn to engineering fields. And it is a skill that can be cultivated, not necessarily something you are born knowing how to do.
In my five years of studying civil engineering in undergraduate and graduate school, I did not have a single course or even lecture that discussed public outreach. Even though I had to take two English classes for my undergraduate degree, I never learned how to communicate with the public while in school. For my planning degree, I learned how to create maps, but I never learned how to create visuals to help the public understand the purpose of a project and what is being proposed.
Fortunately, this is slowly changing. Universities are doing more engagement with the transportation industry to know how to shape the curriculum so students will be better prepared for the workforce. This includes more conversations about public engagement. But as conversations become more fraught and, frankly, political, educators need to make sure their graduates are prepared for potentially difficult situations. Continued attacks on critical race theory and equity in higher
education curricula create uncertainty for some professors without tenure. What can they teach within the ever-changing rules?
Governments Are Sometimes Afraid of the Public
Finally, my personal favorite reason for dysfunction in transportation projects is that governments are sometimes afraid of the public. I have worked with governments up and down the East Coast, and there are some planners and engineers who fear the public. It is actually an interesting cycle to watch. The government entity did not listen to the community in the past, so every time it shows up for new community feedback, the community gets upset and brings up the issue from the past. The engineers or planners do not want to be yelled at by the public, so they create a process to minimize public engagement or concoct a convoluted faux-engagement process really designed to avoid getting yelled at. Then the community gets upset and sends emails or posts comments on the internet, which leads to engineers and planners being scared of the community. Rinse and repeat.
As an example, I had a project in a community that was very engaged and generally challenging for accomplishing projects. But in this case, they were generally supportive of the project, aside from some specific concerns about trees, which I communicated to the project team at the beginning of the project.
The engineers responsible for design and construction did not want to do public engagement because it was a vocal community. We ended up doing one open house meeting, with the engineering team avoiding talking to the community. Community members got upset because the engineers were not listening to them. These were not Naysayers doing everything in their power to torpedo the project. They had concerns that were relatively minor, related to trees. I had recommended to the project manager to promise to have a tree committee when it got to that
part of the project—simple and inexpensive. But the engineering team did not want to engage because the community had been difficult on other projects. In the end, the project was shelved because of “community controversy.”
Challenges with Current Analysis Methods
How to avoid some of these pitfalls? Be aware of history. History need not always go back to the founding of the community; sometimes it goes only as far back as the last promise to the community, which may have been within the past year. I have been in meetings where community members brought letters and emails, or name-dropped previous leaders who made a promise years ago and the community was still waiting on that promise. Not taking the time to understand the history of a place will leave you with a derailed community meeting and public engagement process. Think about it from the community’s perspective. You are asking for their input on a project when you failed to deliver on a previous promise. And it does not matter if it was literally you or not.
Governments forget because of staff attrition, but people in communities do not forget. Long-term residents have long memories, and new residents get the stories from the long-term residents. As part of documenting the existing conditions, interview residents who have been in the community for a while. They will be great sources of information about the history. Often, the existing condition includes how they remember the roadway of their younger days. It is like how my mom still can recall details of growing up before the state constructed the highway. And valuing this more will lead to focusing on how to bring together the project’s planning and design elements and the public engagement elements.
Linking Planning and Design with Public Engagement
I have tried to clearly emphasize that to be effective, the planning and design process and the public engagement process must go together. At the foundation, this requires governments to ensure there is adequate funding for public engagement, including provision of supportive services such as online engagement, babysitting, transportation, or a meal so people can participate in the public meeting. Procurement rules can be a barrier, but if you are able, try to pay people and organizations for their time and their ideas. But assuming all foundations exist, how can the processes go together?
Generally, any project starts with data collection, which informs the existing conditions. Once the existing conditions are known, the team develops alternatives. This can be done in several ways. Sometimes every possible alternative is identified and then a screening process is undertaken to reduce these to three to five via an alternatives analysis. Depending on the size of the project, a recommended alternative may move into design or an environmental process may identify the preferred alternative, which then moves into design. The more complicated the project, the more engagement and analysis are needed. Regardless, the high-level process is still generally the same.
So the questions become when to engage the public and how to use their input throughout the project. The “when” may be dictated by a regulatory process, so make sure to identify any mandated engagement timelines. For example, any project for which an environmental impact statement is required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has very specific touchpoints with the public and specific notice criteria. Agencies can and should go above and beyond, but make sure any engagement process includes what is legally required. If there is a lawsuit, which is very common with environmental impact statements,
if you missed any mandated public outreach, you did not follow the NEPA process.
I said it earlier, but it bears repeating. NEPA is a paper tiger. It is very hard to sue on what the agency decided as a preferred alternative. It is very easy to sue on the process to get to that decision, and public engagement is part of that process.
The “how” to use the public’s input requires time spent in reframing input from the public engagement into qualitative data. Generally, with the old way of thinking regarding public feedback, you would collect data, summarize the meeting, and move on. However, if you treat public input as qualitative data, it may change how you need to collect feedback and how best to analyze it. What follows is some guidance for making the raw feedback from the public into something useful.
Data Collection
No matter what the project is, you will need to collect data to start the project. That may mean going to the project location and physically collecting the data, or it may mean pulling information from previous studies and reports. Either way, at the beginning of the project, there will be a list of data you will need in order to prepare the existing conditions report. Included in that data should be the lived experience of the community. Yes, the lived experience of the community constitutes data.
How do you get information from the public if you have not yet held a public meeting? Even in Silently Suffering communities, data are available. The community has already told you the problem. The data include, but are not limited to, service requests submitted through 311 or a comparable system, emails to government and elected officials’ staffs, comments on previous studies, and comments posted on social media, including blogs. Also reach out to other agencies to see if they have any information from the public in the study area.
Invisible No More
Voices from Native America
Raymond Foxworth and Steve Dubb
For too long, Indigenous people in the United States have been stereotyped as vestiges of the past, obliged to remind others, “We are still here!” Yet today, Native leaders are at the center of social change, challenging philanthropic organizations that have historically excluded Native people, and fighting for economic and environmental justice.
Edited by Raymond Foxworth of the Henry Luce Foundation and Steve Dubb of The Nonprofit Quarterly, Invisible No More is a groundbreaking collection of stories by Native American leaders, many of them women, who are leading the way through cultural grounding and nation-building in the areas of community, environmental justice, and economic justice. While telling their stories, authors excavate the history and ongoing effects of genocide and colonialism, reminding readers how philanthropic wealth often stems from the theft of Native land and resources, as well as how major national parks such as Yosemite were “conserved” by forcibly expelling Native residents. At the same time, the authors detail ways that readers might imagine the world differently, presenting stories of Native community building that offer benefits for all.
Raymond Foxworth and Steve Dubb
Raymond Foxworth (Navajo) serves as program director at the Henry Luce Foundation. Previously, he served for over 15 years at First Nations Development Institute in various capacities, most recently as Vice President, where he oversaw national grant-making activities to Native nonprofits and tribal entities, fundraising activities, and all communications functions.
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Island Press’s mission is to provide the best ideas and information to those seeking to understand and protect the environment and create solutions to its complex problems. Click here to get our newsletter for the latest news on authors, events, and free book giveaways.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023935909
All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Generous support for the publication of this book was provided by the Surdna Foundation.
Chapter 13 An Indigenous Vision for Our Collective Future: Becoming Earth’s Stewards Again 176
Native Peoples Action
Chapter 14 Regeneration—from the Beginning 197
A-dae Romero Briones
Part IV Building Native Economies, Toward an Indigenous Economics 207
Chapter 15 Advancing Economic Sovereignty: Lifting Up Native Voices for Justice
Raymond Foxworth
Chapter 16 Moving beyond the Five C s of Lending: A New Model of Credit for Indian Country 221
Jaime Gloshay and Vanessa Roanhorse
Chapter 17 Rewriting the Rules: Putting Trust Lands to Work for Native American Benefit
Lakota Vogel
Chapter 18 Helping Native Business Owners Thrive: How to Build a Supportive Ecosystem
Heather Fleming
Chapter 19 Building Community through Finance: A Wisconsin Native CDFI’s Story
Fern Orie
Chapter 20 Radical Economics: Centering Indigenous Knowledge, Restoring the Circle
Vanessa Roanhorse
After word Building a House of Knowledge
Carly Bad Heart Bull
We Are Not Invisible!
I grew up in Ketchikan, Alaska. My neighborhood—Deermount, Park and Woodland—was not designated as an official Native village. This area south of Ketchikan Creek in the highly segregated town of Ketchikan differed in many ways from the traditional Native village of Saxman, which was just south of town. But, for all intents and purposes, my neighborhood was a Native village in that it was made up almost entirely of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian households from other Native villages across Alaska, including Hydaburg, Metlakatla, Craig, Kake, and Klawock, where my family was from.
Despite my cobbled-together Native village of aspiring middle-class Native households, much of the life in my neighborhood resembled that of other Native villages—smokehouses were found in most backyards, families argued and held grudges about past slights and injustices, fishing nets wintered in front yards, and the food traditions of hunting, fishing, and foraging carried on and supplemented the incomes and sustenance of almost every household.
Aside from joining my brother at the beach or along the creek fishing, my favorite food activity growing up was berry picking. For me, it was the sweet reward of blueberries, huckleberries, and Southeast Alaska’s favorite—salmonberries. But I was not the most accomplished berry picker. I mainly stayed on well-traveled streets and sidewalks and picked-over paths and backyard patches, and my yield at the end of hours would often only be a few handfuls of fruit.
And then one day, for some reason, I was up in the early morning, and I watched as a steady stream of Native grandmas and aunties walked past my house with their berry-picking cans. These cans were threepound coffee containers with tethers made of discarded nylon stockings, so they could be hung around their necks and free up both hands for picking. When these grandmas and aunties passed back by my house a few hours later, each and every one of them had two or three cans filled to the brim with salmonberries—enough for pies, multiple jars of jelly, and more. They had my attention.
The next weekend, with a newly constructed berry-picking can around my neck, I followed these experienced ladies to a large thicket of salmonberry bushes along the creek. Among the brambles were yearsold paths created by these grandmas and aunties, marking the way for others to follow.
I share this story because, as Native people, we all look to our grandmas and aunties—our ancestors and even our contemporaries—to point the way forward. We have a keen eye for knowledge and tradition and learning what can only come from experience. In a nutshell, or in this case a berry bucket, that is what this book is all about. It’s about capturing deep knowledge held by Native peoples.
Equally important, this book is about giving voice. Well, not actually “giving” voice, because voice is not mine to give. Nor does voice belong to the editors of this book or to First Nations Development Institute (First Nations). People, including Native people, own their own
voices. But sometimes those voices need amplification. And this book, Invisible No More: Voices from Native America, is an attempt to do just that—make the invisible visible—amplifying the voices and knowledge of Native peoples and Native practitioners.
I have spent a thirty-year career at First Nations championing the idea that Native people matter and Native knowledge matters—as much as and not less than others. And for more than four decades now, First Nations has focused on asset-based development for, with, and by Indian Country. We believe that this is incredibly important—because the appropriated use of American Indian assets in the United Stated has created one of the world’s wealthiest economies. This, of course, has had a negative impact on American Indian economies and communities. And it has exempted Native Americans from the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that are enjoyed by non-Native Americans.
I am constantly amazed that, two decades into a new century, we are still subjecting Native people to deliberate mistruths and falsehoods, rendering them invisible in American society. How is it that now, when information is more readily available than at any other time in history, we continue to be content in our ignorance of Native people and communities?
Ambivalence occurs when individuals hold contradictory feelings or opinions about someone (or some groups of people). Willful ignorance is simply the idea that, in the face of correct information, individuals tune out or dismiss truths, and instead rely on preexisting knowledge to nullify facts. People in Native America know that, at all levels of American society, there is both ambivalence and willful ignorance when it comes to learning accurate information about Native people and communities. This book’s authors hope to push back on the ambivalence and willful ignorance held by too many Americans, including many of the people who represent philanthropic institutions.
The authors featured in this book represent some of Indian Country’s
best thinkers. More importantly, each and every one of them are “boots on the ground” practitioners who have dedicated most of their professional lives to the betterment of Native communities. They have borne witness to and have been instrumental in the creation of incredibly creative solutions for not just Native communities, but communities more broadly. And they have accomplished this in an environment in which private philanthropic funders have done their best to ignore, underfund, and—through their inaction—deem Natives as not relevant. Although many of the authors in this collection toil in anonymity and are largely invisible outside of Indian Country, they all have been and continue to be “in it to win it” for Native communities and for making the lives of all Native peoples better. Their knowledge, both new and old, is worth lifting up. Their voices are worth amplifying. The benefit of their sharing reaches beyond the Native communities they serve, and they hold wisdom and offer solutions that benefit the world as a whole.
The authors in this volume challenge those who sit in the boardrooms of philanthropic institutions to dismantle and reimagine the way they do business, and to adopt a way that centers the voices of communities normally excluded from philanthropy. Moreover, the voices in this book offer new perspectives on the economic and environmental crises we are grappling with today. Globally, inequality has grown inexorably, and wealth has been further concentrated in the pockets of the wealthy. Moreover, critical resources needed to sustain human life, like water, are being depleted, as are forests and other natural ecosystems. Native people have been at the forefront of reimagining capitalist models of development, honoring the value of our nonhuman relatives, including land, animals, water, etc. Native people in the United States and across the globe have known that Western development models are not sustainable. The voices in this book speak to these crises and offer critical solutions, and these are the voices that we must elevate and listen to if we are going to create a more equitable, sustainable, and just world for us all.
The voices in this collection also offer a stark contrast to the predominant narratives about Natives people that romanticize the Indians of the past but ignore Native peoples of the present and future. This collection of essays offers a new narrative—one grounded in Native history and Native values. It is one that gives Native people and Native practitioners visibility, and one that suggests a strong call to action. The crises that individual authors speak to in this book are not crises created by them or the communities they come from. They are crises created by a Western society that has viewed land and the environment as theirs to exploit and wealth as theirs to hoard and use for power and the exploitation of workers and communities. Nonetheless, Native people continue to be optimistic and offer solutions to solve global problems. The question remains: Will Americans listen?
All of this is what we hope to give readers in Invisible No More: Voices from Native America. It is yet another gift from Native America to America itself. I hope you cherish it with the same intent as that with which the gift is given.
Michael Roberts Longmont, Colorado
Acknowledgments
This book is not just a partnership between the two of us as editors, but it is also the product of a multiyear collaboration and partnership between two organizations, First Nations Development Institute (First Nations) and Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ). The relationship began with an article authored by Ray (and edited by Steve) that was published in NPQ in 2018: “Busting Philanthropy’s Myths about Native Americans.” That theme was expanded the following year into a series of articles, organized by First Nations and published in NPQ. And that led in turn to three additional series of articles on environmental and economic justice work in Indian Country.
At First Nations, when we approached NPQ with the idea of an article series in 2018, we were surprised at the positive reception of the idea. The idea for the series grew out of many conversations with community leaders and allies in philanthropy. The biggest cheerleader was Hester Dillon, then at the NoVo Foundation. Originally, First Nations approached another philanthropic publication with the idea of an article series, and they wanted us to draft a larger memo to effectively convince
them of how these articles would fit with their so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. First Nations discussed this frustrating response with Hester and she stated emphatically that “if you have to convince them now that this is a good idea, they are not aligned with your goals and values.”
She was right. A few weeks later, First Nations pitched the idea to Ruth McCambridge and Steve Dubb at NPQ. They enthusiastically said, “Yes, this is a great idea!” The original series we pitched was to include as authors both funders and Native community leaders. Ruth at NPQ was the first to say that the beauty of this series is hearing from Native community leaders, not philanthropy. She, too, was right. At First Nations, we cannot adequately express our gratitude to Hester, Ruth, and Steve for their support and belief in this project and seeing the fundamental importance of raising Native voices in this sector.
Moreover, we also wish to thank Cassandra Heliczer, NPQ’s magazine editor extraordinaire. In 2020, Ruth convinced Ray to serve as a guest editor with Cassandra for an issue of the magazine. Chapters 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, and 14 were all originally published in the Nonprofit Quarterly print magazine, and they all reflect Cassandra’s editing hand.
The idea for organizing a collection of essays into a book emerged in early 2022. At the beginning of that year, Cyndi Suarez, who had become editor in chief at NPQ a year earlier, encouraged staff to submit proposals of material that might work as a book. Out of that conversation came the idea that maybe NPQ could work with First Nations to create the volume that became Invisible No More.
This is a first-of-its-kind book project—elevating the voices of Native community leaders doing amazing work in the Native nonprofit sector—so the authors who have contributed to the various series of articles deserve special recognition. When First Nations first reached out to many of the authors, they were surprised—initially reluctant, yet excited to share their voices, perspectives, and work. One of First
Nations’ early observations was that any reluctance that the authors expressed came from witnessing and experiencing the systemic exclusion of Native voices in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. But given our experience in working with the many brilliant thinkers and leaders across Native America, we have always known that Native leaders have a vision for the future of their work and their communities, and a vision to make the world a better place for the future of Indian Country. The leaders who contributed to this volume stepped outside their comfort zones to express their perspectives, frustrations, and ideas for work in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. Thank you for sharing your brilliance! This book only highlights a few of the brilliant minds in Indian Country; there are many more brilliant Native people doing critical work in their communities to advance Native life in the face of colonialism. We thank all these leaders for the work they continue to do! Both NPQ and First Nations want to also acknowledge others who deserve special recognition. At First Nations, we thank the late (and much beloved) Randal “Randy” Blauvelt and Amy Jakober, who helped provide input and edited many early versions of the essays that appear in this book. Mike Roberts, A-dae Romero Briones, Catherine Bryan, and Jackie Francke suggested some of the authors we might include. Also, of course, A-dae has been critical to this project. She has not only been a contributor but has also helped recruit writers for this book, specifically Monica Nuvamsa and Samuel Barr. Similarly, Allison Jones of Common Future played a similar role in recruiting Vanessa Roanhorse’s contribution in chapter 20. We also thank Joel Toner, publisher of NPQ, for his expertise, guidance, and encouragement in advancing this project. And we thank Craig George for allowing us to utilize his beautiful art for the cover of this book.
There were many times when it felt like the book might never get published, but at each step there were champions who helped keep the book on the path toward completion. Internally at NPQ, in addition to
Cyndi and Cassandra, a critical champion was NPQ’s former managing editor, Michelle Rada, who encouraged Steve to pursue the project. At one critical point, Sarah Wentzel-Fisher, who is executive director of the Quivira Coalition in New Mexico and was part of a fellowship cohort with Steve in 2018 and 2019, suggested a few ways for Steve to continue to pursue the project at a point when it was not clear that a publisher would be found.
While the idea for the book goes back to January 2022, it wasn’t until the following summer that we connected with Island Press acquisitions editor Erin Johnson, who was willing to take a chance on this curated collection. Erin believed in the book and helped move heaven and earth to make the book a reality. Thanks, too, of course, to the entire Island Press team that has backed this project.
Also helping along the way were our philanthropic supporters—the Surdna Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Claneil Foundation, the Nell Newman Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation—whose support enabled us to pay writers stipends and make the cost of publication affordable.
Last, but not least, we would like to express our thanks to Carly Bad Heart Bull, who wrote the afterword to this collection. As Carly writes near the end of her contribution, the authors “have shared these gifts with us. It is now up to us to go out and do something with them.” May it be so.
Introduction
Steve Dubb
They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own secret soul, and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.
— N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), House Made of Dawn1
At its heart, this volume lifts up a wide range of vital stories from Native American leaders and organizations. There are many reasons that Raymond Foxworth and I decided to organize this collection. One reason appears right there in the title: Invisible No More. It is long past time to end the invisibility of Native Americans and make Native American voices accessible to a broad popular audience.
This book also is a product of a much broader movement among many people from within the 574 federally recognized Indigenous nations (and the many more that remain unrecognized).2 In fact, the authors in this collection are among the leaders of a rising social, political, and cultural movement that has swept many Native communities. N. Scott Momaday’s writings, cited above, form part of a broader cultural
movement. The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in 1968, the same year that Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel was published.3 A year later, AIM activists began a nineteen-month occupation of Alcatraz Island, garnering national attention.4
The official federal policy regarding Native Americans in the 1950s and 1960s was known as “termination”—and it meant exactly what it sounds like it meant: federal government policy sought to terminate tribal nations and end Native sovereignty entirely. One tactic the federal government used was to offer free one-way tickets for Native Americans to move to “relocation cities” like Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. An estimated 100,000 people were moved in this way. This is one reason why two-thirds of Native Americans today live “off the rez” in urban areas.5
Native American organizing such as AIM forced an end to federal termination policy, which was legislatively reversed in 1975 when Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act.6 Additional policy gains followed. It is worth reflecting on how recent some of these victories are. It was in 1978 that the Indian Child Welfare Act and the Indian Religious Freedom Act were passed. The former was designed to keep Native American families together and is currently facing a Supreme Court case challenge.7 The latter is a potent reminder that until 1978 Native Americans on reservations lacked the legal right to openly perform sacred ceremonies.8
Subsequent policy wins include the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and the 1994 Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act. The latter established federal support for what is today a network of thirty-five tribal land-grant colleges with a combined student enrollment of 23,000; a recent study found that each dollar invested in a tribal college returns $5.20 in economic benefits to Native nations.9 As for gaming, a study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that gaming generated $28 billion in revenue by 2013, up from $100 million
in 1988, but cautions that “the accumulated economic and social deficits on reservations” far exceed gaming revenues.10 Indeed, as coeditor Raymond Foxworth has noted, not only is the distribution of gaming revenues among Native nations highly uneven, but the per capita gap in income between Native and non-Native Americans far exceeds—by a factor of ten or more—any conceivably sustainable annual profit-distribution scheme.11
In recent years, Native communities have also increasingly mobilized politically. On an international stage, this was evident at the internationally prominent pipeline protests at Standing Rock beginning in 2016.12 Mobilization also occurred at the ballot box, with Native voters playing a decisive role in swing states such as Arizona and Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election. Native American voter turnout in 2020 reached record highs and six Native Americans were elected to Congress, a record number and three times the Native congressional delegation that existed just two years earlier.13
Again, it is remarkable how recent all of this is. The first two Indigenous women elected to Congress, Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Sharice Davids (Ho Chunk), assumed their seats in January 2019. In 2021, Haaland left Congress to become secretary of the interior— the first Native American cabinet official in over two centuries of US history.14
Making the Invisible Visible
What is meant by invisibility? It is certainly no secret that North America—or Turtle Island, a common Indigenous name for the continent, particularly among the Algonquian and Iroquois nations15—was settled by Indigenous peoples many millennia before European settlers arrived. But mainstream (read White) US society has often refused to “see” this. Often, Native Americans have been treated as vestiges of the past, not living people today.
And even when looking at the past, the historical account is regularly distorted. The violence of genocide, including the seizure of an estimated 1.5 billion acres (over 2.3 million square miles) of land and the forcible relocation of people onto reservations, is downplayed, if not denied altogether.16 The so-called Indian boarding schools, which explicitly sought to separate Native children not just from their parents but their culture (“Kill the Indian, save the man” was the refrain of Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, founder of one of the most famous of these schools in Carlisle, Pennsylvania) are also typically ignored.17
Instead, often what passes for “history” are warmed-over myths, such as Thanksgiving narratives that offer, as Lower Brule Sioux member Jordan Daniel kindly puts it, a “very romanticized, whitewashed education,”18 or Hollywood Westerns that have regularly employed “the dual stereotype of the noble Indian and the bloodthirsty savage.”19
Meanwhile, millions of Native Americans today often remain unacknowledged. As a social studies teacher said to an Education Week reporter in a segment broadcast by PBS NewsHour a few years ago, “When you tell [students] that Native people are still here in America, they’re like, ‘Oh, we didn’t know that.’”20
Challenging Invisibility in Philanthropy
This invisibility has major consequences throughout US society. This volume does not purport to cover all aspects of this, but it does make a valuable contribution in showing how Native nonprofit institutions and Native nonprofit leaders are actively challenging that invisibility in the philanthropic world. Nationally, in the United States, in 2021 total philanthropic giving totaled $484.85 billion; in terms of assets, that year foundation assets exceeded $1.3 trillion.21 There are, in short, considerable resources that could make a significant difference if philanthropy adequately resourced the obvious leadership emerging from Native communities.
Unfortunately, far too many in the philanthropic world have failed to step up for Native communities. For example, a 2020 study produced by Native Americans in Philanthropy and Candid, a leading nonprofit sector research firm, noted that while 2.9 percent of Americans are Indigenous, between 2002 and 2016 only 0.4 percent of foundation grant dollars served Native Americans.22 A more recent survey conducted in the spring of 2021 by the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), found that—even though Native communities experienced greater levels of economic stress and the highest rates of infection and death from the COVID-19 pandemic23—only 11 percent of 256 surveyed foundations made significant funding commitments during 2020 and 2021 to Native-serving nonprofits.24 The CEP research team correspondingly titled the report that resulted from their survey Overlooked.
Moreover, if one looks at funding for not just “Native-serving” but also “Native-led” organizations, then the level of philanthropic support is even more limited. For instance, a 2018 report from First Nations Development Institute that examined grantmaking from 2006 to 2014 found that “the majority of grant dollars awarded annually in support of Native American causes are awarded to non-Native-controlled nonprofit organizations. ”25
Even when foundations do make grants, stereotypes often color what is and is not funded. One Native leader cited in the CEP report noted that a foundation program officer had told their group that “they couldn’t fund us because the participants in our program were successful emerging leaders. We interpreted that as, ‘They just want to fund drunk, starving Indians on the reservation or on skid row in the city. They’re not interested in what Native American leaders can contribute to the rest of society.’”26 Such examples are disturbingly common. As one contributor, Trisha Moquino (Pueblo of Cochiti), notes in this volume, “We often feel ashamed and traumatized for thinking that our community goals to heal and thrive on our own terms do not match nicely with the broader goals of philanthropy (or people in philanthropy).”
Hidden in Plain Sight
As the late baseball great Yogi Berra famously said, “You can observe a lot by watching.”27 Many in philanthropy and elsewhere may not be watching, but if they were to do so, they would observe a wide range of Native American solutions that carry considerable relevance not just for addressing local needs, but also global challenges. This speaks to one more critical motive behind the creation of this volume, which is to illustrate how Native individuals and organizations are leading dynamic movements for social, economic, and environmental justice.
Simply put, in a world facing mounting crises around economic inequality, the global climate emergency, and environmental degradation, many of the most innovative solutions to these challenges are being developed in Indigenous communities. Often these solutions derive from Indigenous value systems, cultural traditions, and an ethic of stewardship.
But these solutions—and the creativity that lies behind them—are also, in large part, the product of marginalization. While innovation is often depicted as emanating from high-tech firms, when it comes to far-reaching social change, more often than not innovation comes from people who have a lesser stake in the status quo and who are therefore less constrained by present-day myths. As Tarig Hilal, a British-born social entrepreneur working in Africa, observes, “Constraints drive innovation. Faced with the challenges of exclusion, people invent. The solutions that they create not only represent solutions to their own problems, but often have far wider applications.”28
As will be seen in the essays that follow, the authors in this volume are not academics. They are not just writing about solutions. They are instead writing about solutions that they themselves are implementing in their own communities. Reading this collection provides a window
into the rich world of cultural, social, environmental, and economic innovation that is spreading across Native America.
How This Collection Was Assembled
This collection results from a partnership that developed between First Nations Development Institute (First Nations), where Raymond was serving as vice president, and Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ), where I work as a senior editor. When we first connected, we discussed how NPQ, which hosts social justice conversations, might partner with First Nations to run a series of articles on the relationship between Indian Country and philanthropy.
At first, the idea was to ask philanthropic leaders to write about how their foundations were supporting grantmaking in Indian Country and highlight what others could learn from their experiences. But out of our conversations emerged a different approach; why not provide a forum for Native leaders to speak directly to philanthropy?
Of the authors in this volume, mine is the sole settler voice. And I grew up with the same myths that I write about here; for example, when I was six and seven, I participated in a YMCA-sponsored program known as “Indian Guides” that clumsily appropriated Native American culture (and has fortunately been discontinued).29
My first exposure to working in Indian Country involved my participation in a project known as the Learning/Action Lab for Community Wealth Building. This project, which I worked in between 2013 and 2016, was with the Democracy Collaborative, a former employer of mine. Our team sought to help Native communities to use employee ownership and social enterprise strategies to build and retain community wealth. Funded by the Northwest Area Foundation, we worked with two urban Native groups (in Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis, Minnesota) and three reservation-based groups. In the process, I saw
the cultural rebuilding that was occurring in real time, as many Native leaders, who were often the first in their generation to go to college, were building new worlds by combining contemporary practices with restored Indigenous cultural traditions.30
In short, my personal experience persuaded me that an approach that offered stories directly from Indian Country would generate stories worth reading and would resonate with NPQ’s readership. As it happens, the first series was so well received that First Nations and NPQ decided to co-produce three more series over the next two years—each tackling a different theme, which here are organized as the sections of this book.
The process was as follows: First, we would agree upon a common theme. Then, First Nations—mostly Raymond, but sometimes his colleague A-dae Romero Briones—identified the authors and topics and would help individual authors (or author teams) develop their stories. Then, after First Nations had completed its review, NPQ (often me— but sometimes my colleague Cassandra Heliczer) would work with the authors to edit and refine the articles for publication.
By early 2022, Raymond and I realized that the richness of the content merited the broader audience that this volume could attract. In putting together this collection, however, we asked authors to update and revise their contributions into the chapters that exist here. We have also, where appropriate, added new voices that complement these contributions. And in section introductions, we have added text to connect the articles with each other and the broader conversation.
Organization of the Work
We have organized the book into four sections. The first section, “Indigenous Perspectives on Philanthropy,” offers a series of seven contributions, organized into four chapters, that speak to the central problem of invisibility; highlight the importance of language recovery to cultural rebuilding; identify how philanthropy has often, whether intentionally
or not, undermined Native community building; and offer principles for building more trust-based, reciprocal relationships.
The next section, “Protecting the Environment” focuses on Native American environmental preservation efforts in a variety of locations. In this section, our authors write about Indigenous management techniques for caring for forests by using controlled fires; the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline, including analysis of the interconnection between environmental and gender justice; the effort to restore historical Hawaiian fishery management practices; Hopi attempts to maintain desert agriculture amid climate change; and a reconceptualization of the food system rooted in Cochiti Pueblo practices of land stewardship.
The third section, “Indigenous Perspectives on Environmental Justice,” builds on the second section, but with a more explicit focus on climate justice and the often-complicated relationship between the formal (often White-dominated) environmental movement and Indigenous groups. From Hawai‘i to Alaska to an island in Louisiana in which the Choctaw community has seen 98 percent of their island home disappear due to rising sea levels, the writers in this section offer critical insights on the connections among vision, culture, policy, and environmental justice.
In the final section of the book, “Building Native Economies: Toward an Indigenous Economics,” the authors recast and redefine what is meant by “economy.” The root words of economy (eco and nomos) mean “management of home (eco being the Greek root for “home” and nomos the Greek root for “management”).31 The authors here part from this broad notion of “economy” and offer their visions for an Indigenous economy that is rooted in justice that decolonizes Native communities and creates self-sustaining Indigenous economies.
The themes of the chapters in this section range from tackling the issue of financing development on trust lands to supporting Native business ownership to developing Native community finance to restructuring
entire lending models and even the entire economy to place notions of multigenerational thinking and regeneration at the center.
Let the Conversation Begin
In short, this book is animated by the belief that narratives rooted in Indigenous experience have much to contribute to a recalibration of the economy, the environment, and human relationships—both for Indigenous communities and beyond. We hope this collection speaks both to Native and non-Native audiences. It is, of course, impossible to reflect the true diversity of over 500 different Indigenous nations, but we hope that members of Native communities feel that they are “seen” in this volume. And we hope that non-Native readers “observe a lot by watching.”
A few final notes: In this book, we seek to challenge narratives about Native Americans that have been central to dehumanizing them. We hope that after reading this collection that the energy and vital role played by Native leaders and organizations in today’s social change movements, especially in the fields of environmental and economic justice, is obvious. And we hope that the publication of this volume is not a one-off, but instead will spark far greater interest and new platforms for Native communities, so many of whom are offering leading-edge thinking for how to build a sustainable world.
We also hope that this book is widely read not just by students of Native America, but policymakers and philanthropists as well. We know that tensions and hostility over land and natural resources have shaped relationships between the federal government and Native nations across the continent. We hope that the authors in this collection inspire a deepening conversation of what decolonization means and what decolonization requires. The reciprocal practices lifted up by many of the authors really do offer some paths forward—if the wisdom of the authors is heeded.
Lastly, this book also highlights Indigenous solutions that are key to solving some of the current global crises around inequality, climate change, and environmental degradation. Beyond the individual offerings of the authors, the call here is to move beyond the walls that separate culture, economy, and environment, as if these were distinct, disconnected spheres. Fundamentally, the call for stewardship, the call for righting the wrongs of colonization and for supporting Indigenous sovereignty, and the call for sustainable environmental practices, are really calls to all readers to recognize that interconnected nature of the world we live in—and to act accordingly.
Notes
1. N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York, NY: Harper Row, 1968).
2. Bureau of Indian Affairs, “Indian Entities Recognized by and Eligible to Receive Services from the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs,” Federal Register, January 29, 2021, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01 /29/2021-01606/indian-entities-recognized-by-and-eligible-to-receive -services-from-the-united-states-bureau-of.
3. Gale Family Library, “American Indian Movement,” Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN, September 6, 2022, https://libguides.mnhs.org/aim; The Pulitzer Prizes, “The 1969 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction,” Columbia University, New York, NY, n.d., https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/n-scott -momaday.
4. Loretta Graceffo, “The Spirit of the Indigenous Occupation of Alcatraz Lives On, 50 Years Later,” Truthout, November 20, 2019, https://truthout.org/arti cles/the-spirit-of-the-indigenous-occupation-of-alcatraz-lives-on-50-years -later.
5. Max Nestarak, “Uprooted: The 1950s Plan to Erase Indian Country,” APM Reports, Minnesota Public Radio, Minneapolis, MN, November 1, 2019, https:// www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/11/01/uprooted-the-1950s-plan -to-erase-indian-country.
6. National Congress of American Indians, “Seventy Years of NCAI: From Imminent Threat to Self-Determination,” NCAI, Washington, DC, n.d., https:// www.ncai.org/about-ncai/mission-history/seventy-years-of-ncai#1970.
7. Eva Lopez, “‘Keep Our Families Together’: A Law That Protects Native
Families Is at Risk,” American Civil Liberties Union, New York, NY, November 21, 2022, https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/icwa-a-law-that -protects-native-families-is-at-risk.
8. Dennis Zotigh, “Native Perspectives on the 40th Anniversary of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 30, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-american-indian /2018/11/30/native-perspectives-american-indian-religious-freedom-act.
9. Bradley Shreve, “Joe McDonald on the Passage of the 1994 Land-Grant Act,” Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education 30, no. 3 (spring 2019), https://tribalcollegejournal.org/joe-mcdonald-on-the-passage-of-the -1994-land-grant-act/; Genevieve K. Croft, “1994 Land-Grant Universities: Background and Selected Issues,” In Focus, Congressional Research Service, Washington, DC, January 4, 2022, https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IF12009.pdf; Marcella Bombardieri and Dina M. Horwedel, “For Native Americans, Tribal Colleges Tackle the ‘Present-Day Work of Our Ancestors,’” Center for American Progress, Washington, DC, November 18, 2022.
10. Randall K. Q. Akee, Katherine A. Spilde, and Jonathan B. Taylor, “The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and Its Effects on American Indian Economic Development,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29, no. 3 (summer 2015): 185–208, quote on p. 199, https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.29.3.185.
11. Raymond Foxworth, “Busting Philanthropy’s Myths about Native Americans,” NPQ, August 27, 2018, https://nonprofitquarterly.org/busting-myths -native-americans.
12. Alexis Celeste Bunten, “Indigenous Resistance: The Big Picture behind Pipeline Protests,” Cultural Survival, March 3, 2017, https://www.culturalsurvival .or g/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/indigenous-resistance-big -picture-behind-pipeline-protests.
13. Erica Belfi, “Native Americans Elected to U.S. Congress,” Cultural Survival, November 23, 2020, https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/historic-number -native-americans-elected-us-congress.
14. Sofia Jarrin, “Indian Country Begins to Witness Real Signs of Justice,” NPQ, March 17, 2021, https://nonprofitquarterly.org/indian-country-begins-to-wit ness-real-signs-of-justice/.
15. Amanda Robinson, “Turtle Island,” updated by Michelle Filice. In Historica Canada, The Canadian Encyclopedia, Toronto, November 6, 2018, https:// www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/turtle-island.
16. Claudio Saunt, “The Invasion of America,” Aeon, January 7, 2015, https:// aeon.co/essays/how-were-1-5-billion-acres-of-land-so-rapidly-stolen.
17. Steve Dubb, “Recalling the Violence of the ‘Indian School,’ 200 Years after Its Founding,” NPQ, March 7, 2019, https://nonprofitquarterly.org/recalling-the -violence-of-the-indian-school-200-years-after-its-founding.
18. Samantha Chery, “These Native Americans focus on family amid Thanksgiving’s dark history,” Washington Post, November 19, 2022, https://www .washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/11/19/thanksgiving-native-americans.
19. Martin Berny, “The Hollywood Indian Stereotype: The Cinematic Othering and Assimilation of Native Americans at the Turn of the 20th Century,” Angles, October 2020, https://journals.openedition.org/angles/331.
20. Education Week and PBS Newshour, “How Teachers Are Debunking Some of the Myths of Thanksgiving,” PBS NewsHour, November 20, 2018, https:// www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-teachers-are-debunking-some-of-the -myths-of-thanksgiving.
21. National Philanthropic Trust, The 2022 DAF Report (Jenkintown, PA: NPT, 2022), https://www.nptrust.org/reports/daf-report/.
22. Native Americans in Philanthropy, “Native Americans Are 2.9% of U.S. Population but Receive 0.4% of Philanthropic Dollars,” November 17, 2020, https://nativephilanthropy.org/2020/11/17/native-americans-are-2-of-u-s -population-but-receive-0-4-of-philanthropic-dollars.
23. Raymond Foxworth, “Philanthropy’s Role in Reinforcing Settler Colonialism,” Center for Effective Philanthropy, Cambridge, MA, 2022, https://cep .org/philanthropys-role-in-reinforcing-settler-colonialism.
24. Ellie Buteau, Hannah Martin, and Katarina Malmgren, Overlooked (Part Two): Foundation Support for Native American Leaders and Communities, Center for Effective Philanthropy, Cambridge, MA, 2021, http://cep.org/wp-content /uploads/2021/07/CEP_Overlooked_Native_American.pdf.
25. Raymond Foxworth and Benjamin Marks, Growing Inequity: Large Foundation Giving to Native American Organizations and Causes, 2006–2014 (Longmont, CO: First Nations Development Institute, 2018), 2, https://www.firstnations .org/wp -content/uploads/publication-attachments/Growing%20_Inequity _%28WEB%29.pdf.
26. Ellie Buteau, “Funders Remain MIA for Many in Asian and Native American Communities,” NPQ, February 15, 2022, https://nonprofitquarterly.org /funders-remain-mia-for-many-in-asian-and-native-american-communities.
27. Carrie Fox, “You Can Observe a Lot by Watching,” Mission Partners, Rockville, MD, January 26, 2022, https://mission.partners/theintersection/you -can-observe-a-lot-by-watching.
28. Tarig Hilal, “Innovating from the Margins,” Medium, April 24, 2019, https://
medium.com/swlh/innovating-from-the-margins-1390057e6ee. For Hilal’s biographical details, see his LinkedIn page at: https://www.linkedin.com/in /tarighilal.
29. John Keilman, “Indian Guides, Princesses Must Drop Indian Theme or Leave YMCA,” Chicago Tribune, September 19, 2015, https://www.chicagotribune .com/suburbs/la-grange/ct-ymca-indian-princess-met-20150918-story.html.
30. Regarding the project, see: Stephanie Gutierrez, An Indigenous Approach to Community Wealth Building: A Lakota Translation, The Democracy Collaborative, Washington, DC, November 2018, https://base.socioeco.org/docs/com munitywealthbuildingalakotatranslation-final-web.pdf.
31. Adrienne Maree Brown, “Murmurations: Building a Compassionate Economics,” Yes! Magazine, February 17, 2022, https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion /2022/02/17/murmurations-building-a-compassionate-economics.
BRUSH,
Paperback | $40.00
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PUBLISHED: November 2023
ISBN: 9781642832655
People, Planet, Design
A Practical Guide to Realizing Architecture’s Potential
Corey Squire
In the US, design choices made by the typical architecture firm employee each year can reduce emissions by about 300 times that of an average American. What if great design were defined by its ability to cool the planet, heal communities, enhance ecological functioning, and advance justice?
In People, Planet, Design, architect Corey Squire builds the case, provides the data, and lays out the practical tools for human-centered architecture. This approach integrates beauty and delight with an awareness of every design choice’s impact. Outcome-focused with a deep dive into practical strategies, the book showcases ten building systems that embody design excellence.
Essential reading for architects who want to transform what the profession means, People, Planet, Design pioneers a new vision and sets readers up with clear guidance for implementation.
Corey Squire
Corey Squire is an architect and nationally recognized expert in sustainable design.
Working as both a sustainability leader within architecture practices and a sustainable design consultant through his firm, Dept. of Sustainability, Corey has empowered multiple award-winning design firms to achieve highperformance projects across their portfolios. Corey lectures nationally on a range of
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People, Planet, Design
A Practical Guide to Realizing Architecture’s Potential
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, ƒ⁄⁄⁄ M Street, NW, Suite ŒŠ⁄-B, Washington, DC ƒ⁄⁄‹Ž-‹‹ıł.
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All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.
Chapter 7: Information, Resources, and KnowledgeıƒŽ
Part III: Design
Chapter Š: Scale
Chapter ł: Windows
Chapter ı⁄: Air Quality and Quantity
Chapter ıı: The Roof
Chapter ıƒ: Structure
Chapter ı‹: Electricity
Chapter ıŒ:Interior Finishes
Chapter ı¡: The Beneÿts of Trees
Contents
Chapter ıŽ: Access
Chapter ı 7: User Behavior
Notes
Suggested Reading and Resources
About the Author and Illustrator
Foreword
By Z Smith, FAIA, PhD, LEED Fellow, WELL AP
This book is for all those who believe that the purpose of buildings is to provide shelter, comfort, and delight for those who spend time in them, while promoting better communities and a world worth living in. It provides designers with a collection of tools, concepts, practices, and inspiration that empowers. And it’s a lot of fun.
Nearly a century ago, Le Corbusier asserted that “a house is a machine for living in.” Much of building design and construction seems to follow this mechanistic view of buildings as assemblages of components and systems working like clockwork to provide a neutral, characterless environment—ino¬ensive temperature, humidity, light, and sound levels no matter what the conditions outside. Meanwhile, architectural education, and the designs receiving praise and awards, seem disconnected from these goals and constraints, instead focusing on whatever it takes to be visually stunning.
Instead, this book makes the case for a human-centered architecture that integrates beauty and delight with comfort and an awareness of the impact of every design choice on the people who will use the building, the community, and the planet.
And it couldn’t come at a more crucial time.
Most buildings today are so unpleasant to be in that when people are asked to close their eyes and envision themselves where they are happiest, remarkably few envision somewhere inside a building. The indoors are sti´ing us, sometimes even killing us. We are now emerging from what was, we now realize, a pandemic of the indoors—where the airborne spread could have been reduced by better ÿltration, increased outdoor air intake, or just opening the damned windows. Even during “normal” times, buildings expose occupants to materials linked to negative health and productivity impacts—materials made from xi
chemicals produced at plants next door to poor and minority communities su¬ering from elevated rates of cancer and lung disease.
Meanwhile, the construction and operation of buildings is responsible for Œ⁄ percent of climate-changing carbon emissions. There are fewer than ‹ million architects in a world of nearly Š billion people, so this means architects have outsized leverage. In the United States, the design choices made by the typical architecture ÿrm employee each year can reduce emissions by an amount equal to ‹⁄⁄ times that produced by an average American.
The transformation will be made easier by the inexorable yet still astonishing transformation to clean energy. Buildings can help accelerate this transition, not just through mundane technology substitutions— heat pumps for combustion—but by unlocking the power of the most sophisticated building management system ever seen: the occupants of the buildings themselves.
In fact, simple technological substitution could result in a world just as inequitable and alienated as our world today—where the residents of solar-powered gated communities make their long commutes alone in their electric cars. The world is going to be remade, so why not address the two great challenges of our age—climate and equity—in an integrated, coherent way?
The transition from today’s destructive ways of living to something better has often been framed as self-denial: “What are you willing to give up?” Instead, this book asks, “What would you be willing to gain?” Would you be willing to have buildings be more joyful, more beautiful, more comfortable? Would you be willing to pay less for utilities? Would you be willing to spend time in buildings that helped you move more and be healthier, in communities where everything you need is close by, where everyone felt welcome?
So how do we get there?
Amory Lovins remarked, “Some say, ‘Technology is the answer.’ But what was the question?” This suggests we should focus ÿrst on the outcomes we want—“Hot showers and cold beer”—and then deploy technology with a light, elegant touch to reach those outcomes. For example, while a lighting standard might call for a horizontal illuminance of ¡⁄ foot-candles (implicitly throughout a space), we might
focus ÿrst on what drove this goal—“I want to be able to comfortably read something printed on paper”—and ask how best to meet that need, knowing that di¬erent people will have di¬erent requirements to meet that goal.
This book provides a compendium of processes for successful outcomes in architectural practice from both a process and a technology perspective but always starts by asking us to be clear about what we’re trying to use technology to achieve. It posits that what we mean by buildings is really a system of physical components and people, that what we ask buildings to do needs to start with culture, and that what we expect buildings to do is culturally determined, often based on cultural norms on the part of building owners and design professionals. It reminds us that we would do well to question the assumptions that have led to how we build today and how we might build and live instead.
When we focus on the desired outcomes—that buildings shelter us from the elements without disconnecting us from the world, that buildings provide the quality of air, light, and views we now know to be essential to health, productivity, and joy—we can move beyond the checklist mentality that has captured much of the design community.
Yet designing beyond the checklist does not mean designing without measurement. “What we need,” observed architect Clark Brockman, “is compelling imagery supported by righteous data.” This is the concept behind the AIA’s Framework for Design Excellence that the author and illustrator of this book did so much to advance. The Framework organizes how we approach and evaluate design along ten measures, from health, equity, and community to energy and water, inviting a pairing of imagery with metrics but prizing the integration of these approaches into a single coherent whole above all, with an approach to design that acknowledges that buildings can learn from their occupants and that observations of how structures and occupants work together (or don’t!) can be fed forward into designs informed by what has been learned.
The approach to thinking about buildings embodied in the Framework also suggests a better way to think about the practice of architecture. Because the author has worked both as a member of sta¬
Foreword
within award-winning practices and as a consultant to many others, this book o¬ers an essential perspective with practical advice to designers who seek to transform their own practices.
After starting with theory—an examination of what architecture is for and how we might center human experience in design—and moving through techniques to organize architectural practice toward achieving these clearer goals—this book takes a fresh look at the building components that architects deploy in design and how they can be deployed coherently in service of human-centered, climate-aware, and equitable design.
standing in the way is traditional practice. A collection of accepted norms, subpar codes, entrenched supply chains, and moneyed interests is working hand in hand to deliver a built environment that nobody actually wants to live in. The weight of traditional practice can feel all encompassing and is often enough to crush best intentions and redirect an architect’s best e¬orts toward more of the same, transforming design from an aspirational endeavor for making the world a better place into a struggle for incremental improvement.
Traditional practice manifests in two distinct ways. The ÿrst is the lowest common denominator of code minimum, budget constraints, or e¬orts to maximize short-term return on investment. In this case, the signiÿcant design decisions have already been made on a spreadsheet, and assumptions of what’s good, what’s acceptable, and what’s possible resist questioning. The other expression of traditional practice is through form making. This is the idea that design’s role is to create something visually stunning rather than meaningful or consequential. The image is held up as the ideal rather than real impact on real people.
Of course, architectural design doesn’t have to be this way. Creating beautiful buildings that positively a¬ect the world doesn’t have to be a ÿght where one side wins and the other loses. Design excellence is an alternative to traditional practice. This is the idea that design can and should seek a higher bar for impact and outcomes. Looking good or delivering for investors represents only a tiny portion of architecture’s full potential. What if, in addition, great design was deÿned by its ability to cool the planet, heal communities, enhance ecological functioning, and advance justice? A holistic interpretation of design excellence is the paradigm shift that allows architecture to reach its full potential. But to accomplish this, we’ll ÿrst need to deal with traditional practice. Rather than charge head on against deeply established norms and customs, the better path is to seek out the leverage points.
After years of working to advance sustainability goals within a practice, I became frustrated with the day-to-day ÿght for the things that everyone already wanted. Trying to address the challenge of higher performance from the other end of the spectrum, I served on the American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Committee on the Environment (COTE), where I co-authored the AIA’s Framework for
Design Excellence. This was an attempt to redeÿne the meaning of design, to shift the goal of architecture toward outcomes and impacts, and to broaden the circle of concern beyond individual property lines. With the widespread adoption and use of the Framework, it’s clear that the architecture profession is ready to move beyond traditional practice. What still needs to be worked out is the practical path to get there.
With my sustainable design experience spanning from the level of a project to the level of the institute, I left practice and founded a consulting ÿrm called Dept. of Sustainability. The goal was to help architecture ÿrms achieve high-performance outcomes for health, climate, and equity without the ÿght or frustration. I knew it must be possible. After all, so many practitioners are talking about carbon reduction and social equity, signing pledges and commitments, and using the Framework for Design Excellence to guide their work. Through my practice, I saw glimpses of what the profession has the potential to be: small actions that resulted in big impact, design work driven by deep human caring, and new ideas presented in a way that changed the perspective of everyone at the table. Guided by these moments as inspiration, my consulting work, culminating in this book, is an attempt to answer the question of how architects can achieve great outcomes in the face of traditional practice. To succeed, we’ll need to imagine a better future, understand what it takes to get there, and then e¬ectively deliver it.
The book is divided into three parts, each essential for advancing the planet-saving potential of architectural design. Part ı, “Theory,” explores the history of sustainable design and proposes new ways of conceiving architecture’s purpose. This section also outlines what architecture can achieve, what’s standing in the way, and how to communicate through existing barriers. Part II, “Practice,” describes the individual elements that make up a high-performance practice. These are the small facets of culture and process that can lead to an environment where high-performing buildings emerge on their own or otherwise create the friction that results in subpar design and ongoing frustration. Finally, part III, “Design,” provides a plan of action. These chapters, organized by building system, highlight the areas that can
lead to the greatest impact and zero in on the design strategies that will result in healthy, equitable, and beautiful high-performance buildings. A few themes are evident throughout these sections. The ÿrst is a focus on culture and an encouragement to always question the prevailing wisdom. Often, what seems practical or necessary is not a universal truth but a re´ection of cultural norms. It’s useful to frequently step back and consider the broader context. Reliance on best practices is another theme, especially as they relate to the balance between time and accuracy. Too often, the desire for greater accuracy becomes the enemy and time is wasted homing in on an answer beyond the point of it mattering. Buildings should generally run east to west, but optimizing to the degree will never be a worthwhile endeavor. Any e¬ort that improves design needs to be considered against the time it takes to accomplish. Pareto’s equilibrium, commonly known as the Š⁄–ƒ⁄ rule—that the ÿrst ƒ⁄ percent of the e¬ort can achieve Š⁄ percent of the impact—is an e¬ective way to evaluate e¬ort against outcomes. In addition, it’s important to recognize that what’s interesting and what’s important might not be the same. We’re often overly drawn to things we can see, leaving so many important but invisible outcomes, such as acoustics, air quality, supply chains, and preparation for future hazards, on the table. Finally, so much comes down to the power of creativity and the opportunity to have fun. Historically, sustainability has too often taken the form of rigid rules or a rigorous checklist, prioritizing austerity over opportunity. In contrast, setting the right goals and then creating a space for creative problem solving will always result in a better process and product.
It’s important to add a note on the word sustainability. Although this is technically a book about sustainable design, that phrase can be limiting. As much as possible, I avoid using sustainable or sustainable design in favor of design, good design, or design excellence. A holistic vision of design is what this book and this movement are about, as opposed to creating a subset of the architecture profession for those who love trees or get a thrill out of calculating an energy use intensity. When I was in architecture school, a professor of mine thought that sustainability was a trend, like Brutalism, from which we will wake up and return to true Design, the wastefulness and antihuman outcomes
that resulted in great magazine photography. Instead of being a trend, it’s better to think of sustainability as a constraint, a physical manifestation of reality, that is more analogous to gravity than it is to Art Nouveau. In the past, architects could be forgiven for not understanding the negative impacts that derive from certain forms, materials, or strategies. The same could have been said for egress pre–building codes or access pre–Americans with Disabilities Act. Today this is no longer the case. Sustainable design was useful for building awareness of environmental issues, but its usefulness as a subset of design has come to an end. Today there is just design: good design that addresses relevant issues and bad design that turns a blind eye.
After working with dozens of ÿrms and years of thinking through the question of what leads to better design, in the end, a lot comes down to earnestness. Earnestness cannot be created, but where it exists, which is almost everywhere in design professions, it can be nurtured. The right environment can harness earnest human caring and direct that energy into excellent design work. The intention of this book is to help create that environment. The world needs beautiful, equitable, high-performance buildings. My hope is that this book will identify leverage points to make it happen.
Portland, Oregon January ƒ⁄ƒ‹
Acknowledgments
So many people contributed to the ideas in this book, and I’m grateful for all the conversations with friends and colleagues on sustainability and architecture that informed my thinking. I’d like to o¬er a particular thanks to the following:
Helena Zambrano, who developed the ideas in this book with me over more than a decade of daily conversations about sustainability, architecture, and life. None of it would have been possible without her.
Z Smith, who helped develop my personal and professional conÿdence that good ideas can change the world and encouraged me to share them.
Marsha Maytum, with whom I developed the quixotic idea that the deÿnition of good design could be shifted to encompass sustainability. Her conÿdence that this idea will succeed in transforming the architecture profession has been a daily inspiration.
Kristof Irwin, who reminded me to always focus on the human dimensions of design decisions. He’s the only engineer I know who begins decision discussions with a reminder of our common human limbic systems.
Tate Walker, who traveled the country with me to spread the word on design excellence, which provided so many opportunities for digging deep into the most e¬ective sustainable design strategies and the challenges to getting them implemented.
Fran Moskowitz, who read every draft, for raising me and encouraging me to follow a lifelong passion for a sustainable world.
In addition, countless others helped inform my worldview on sustainable design, by providing insights into speciÿc topics covered in the book, collaborating with me on various projects of the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment, or inspiring me with a unique thought before I ever set pen to paper. I’d like to thank Aaron Bush, Adam Heisserer, Amy Running, Andrea Love, Angela Brooks, Anne Hicks Harney, Anne Schopf, Bill Leddy, Billie Faircloth,
Betsy del Monte, Carl Elefante, Dan Hart, Gunnar Hubbard, Henry Siegel, Jake Dunn, Jonathan Feldman, Julie Hiromoto, Larry Strain, Mary Ann Lazarus, Michelle Amt, Mike Manzi, Nadav Malin, Noah Marble, Phaedra Svec, Robert Hoang, Scott Mooney, Susan Ubbelohde, Thuy Le, Torrey Carleton, Varun Kohli, Victor Olgyay, Vikram Sami, and Vivian Loftness.
I’d also like to thank Kira Gould for encouraging me to actually start writing and Heather Boyer and the whole team at Island Press for seeing potential in my idea for this book and helping me make it happen.
Finally, I want to thank the principals at Bora Architecture and Interiors, Amy Donohue, Brad Demby, Chris Linn, Jeanie Lai, John O’Toole, Michael Tingley, and Stefee Knudsen, for giving me the most generous gift, time to write. xxii Acknowledgments
Part I
Theory
Chapter
Form and Function
The important thing about architecture is that it relates to everything. Buildings serve as a backdrop for our lives, not just as a neutral stage set but as active players in the project of human progress. Architecture is how society tells its story. While art might seek an ideal, the built environment demonstrates reality, telling the story of a civilization in its totality by signaling what’s important, who has value, and how a society functions. For as long as buildings have been around, they have leveraged available technology to provide for people’s needs while embodying the values and aspirations of the cultures that designed and built them. By the beginning of the twentyÿrst century, however, the interests and passions of the architectural profession had diverged from the interests of the public. New buildings that seemed disconnected from everyday human concerns and did not address society’s needs swung at but missed the spirit of the day while undermining and miscommunicating architecture’s potential.
No single cause is entirely responsible for this schism, but cheap energy coupled with technological optimism helped disconnect architectural design from the concerns of those who use or inhabit build-
ings. As a long string of inventions including air conditioning, electric lighting, synthetic materials, and even window ÿlm promised to solve the problems that were traditionally addressed by design, the public came to see technology as a magic bullet. At the same time, design awards and industry magazines focused on image over impact, creating bad incentives and leading architecture to become bogged down by insigniÿcant details or meaningless aims. All the while, as society faced ever-larger questions and crises, spanning from climate change to income inequality, architecture was not seen as part of the solution. From the general public’s perspective, architecture exists in a realm completely separate from most people’s everyday lives. Exposure to architecture in the press and media tends to cover public works more focused on impressing other architects than serving the public good.
Often the angle is spectacular new forms, as was the case with the World Trade Center Metro Hub by Santiago Calatrava. Otherwise, the angle is sensational, with claims about how the city of the future will be ÀDprinted or connected with driverless cars, even though these hyped “innovations” do not address any actual problem that society is facing. Beyond the top-line stories of extravagance, the way that the public most frequently engages with architecture is through styles. Most people can identify a Tudor or a Colonial, and to many, architecture is a collection of ornamental features that distinguish a Georgian from a Craftsman from a Greek Revival. The result is that the public discourse on architecture is no deeper than a building’s exterior cladding.
In early ƒ⁄ƒ⁄, when the Trump administration proposed an executive order mandating new federal buildings be designed to appear Classical, the pushback from the media and political class was entirely through the lens of style. To a casual bystander, it would seem that the inclusion or lack of ´uted columns is what determines the quality of a building and the idea that buildings could serve a more signiÿcant civic role never came up. “Modernist architecture is ugly and based on the egos of elitist architects” was the political right’s cartoon argument in favor of the resolution. The response from the left typically pointed out that only fascist societies legally mandate a particular artistic expression. Below the surface, both sides of the political divide seemed to agree that buildings are blank canvases and what matters is their outward appearance. Few thought to propose that federal buildings could be mandated to generate value for the occupants or community through outcomes such as a healthy work environment or support for local habitat, all while remaining column-capital-neutral. The fact that everyone who partook in this conversation missed this point—that buildings are functional objects with the potential to do good—is the result of architecture’s long slide into the wilderness, the loss of the profession’s ability to recognize and communicate its relevance.
The situation is only minimally better within the architecture community, where the discussions around design are di¬erent but too often similarly misplaced. Here, esoteric concerns such as “transparency” or “dynamism” tend to crowd out real-world outcomes such as comfort or
People, Planet, Design
pollution. Many architects readily accept excessive glare and thermal discomfort for the sake of conceptual transparency through the use of unnecessarily large expanses of glass. Rather than this Faustian bargain being called out by peers as a harmful design ´aw, many subpar projects are lauded. Their openness is admired from afar via photographs, and harmful designs are recognized with awards by those who never occupied the space adjacent to the western facade on a summer afternoon.
An example is the San Francisco Federal Building, completed in 2007, an ambitious project with energy reduction, health, and productivity goals that didn’t apply any strategies that would lead to the architect’s stated outcomes. Continuous south-facing glazing with no solar protection other than a perforated scrim resulted in near-continuous glare at the southern workstations, among other less-than-ideal outcomes. Another example is Chicago’s Aqua Tower, completed in ƒ⁄⁄ł. The building’s stunning geometric form glows like a radiator in the winter night as heat escapes through the thermal bridge at every ´oor slab. In this case, excess energy use, and thus unnecessary air pollution, was accepted for the sake of an interesting shape. It is said that when the design team ÿrst imagined this expressive form, they assumed that thermal breaks in the slab between indoors and outdoors would let them reduce the negative impacts inherent in this form, but when time came to cut costs, the thermal breaks were deleted and the form lived on. In both this case and that of the San Francisco Federal Building, the architect decided to prioritize formal expression without the strategies necessary to make it work for people.
Although the Aqua Tower and San Francisco Federal Building both missed opportunities to demonstrate architecture’s potential for positive impact by choosing image over outcomes, the height of irresponsibility might be the Parco della Musica by Renzo Piano Architects, a beautiful performing art center in Rome completed in ƒ⁄⁄ƒ. To pay homage to the traditional materials of the ancient city, the project was conceived as a composition of thin red bricks, travertine ´ooring, and hammered lead (lead!) roofs to cover the three performance spaces. The poetry of the material palette and the project’s deference to the historic context is the stu¬ of great architectural theory, but the roof is literally toxic. Rain, which is naturally slightly acidic, leaches mate-
rial from those panels and washes lead into nearby soil and waterways, where it accumulates. In ƒ⁄ıł, another building with a lead roof, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, caught ÿre, with the resulting smoke plume littering the city center’s parks and playgrounds with toxic ash. We can’t fault the tenth-century Parisians for their material selection because they didn’t yet understand the full health implications of various metals, but for an architect practicing in the twenty-ÿrst century to place “material honesty” over human health is an indication of how adrift some corners of the profession had become. The Romans also used lead for wine goblets and plumbing, but there would have been an appropriate level of concern if the Parco’s concession stand served chianti in a leaded chalice.
By elevating concepts such as “transparency,” “dynamic form,” or “material honesty” to the status of accepted value, architects devote energy and resources toward achieving outcomes that in the end either don’t matter or can cause unnecessary harm.
In the interwar period, artist Marcel Duchamp railed against the concept of “retinal art,” which he deÿned as “art produced purely for the eyes.” By the twenty-ÿrst century, the idea of architectural design being purely retinal has become an accepted fact in some corners of the industry. The opposite of retinal art is art that engages the mind, and this idea led to the Dada, Modern, and Contemporary movements. The resulting work was profound, but a movement in the art world is inherently limited in real-world impact because of its small scale and minimal interaction with the population. Architecture is di¬erent. Its scale and ubiquity lead to a much greater impact, both positive and negative. The opposite of retinal architecture is architecture that engages the eyes and mind but also the heart, the lungs, the forests, and the atmosphere. This is the architecture that can rise to the moment and reconnect design with the outcomes that matter most.
The Built Environment’s Inherent Relevance
Before design can begin to address big problems, it’s necessary to ÿrst establish the degree to which architecture is a relevant force in people’s day-to-day lives. This claim of relevancy is not at all evident when
viewed through the lens of “architecture as style” or “architecture as poetry” but crystal clear when the lens through which we view architectural design shifts toward outcomes. Architecture’s relevance is based on three key features: ubiquity, scale, and, most signiÿcantly, impact. Architecture, in one form or another, is everywhere, comprising our entire physical environment. North Americans spend over ł⁄ percent of their lives in buildings, with most of the remaining ı⁄ percent in either a car or designed outdoor spaces.1 With the possible exception of being far o¬ in a remote part of the natural world, most people move through their lives entirely in spaces that were intentionally designed. In addition, architecture exists on an enormous scale unmatched by practically any other human endeavor. The material resources, economic capital, and brain power needed to design and construct the built environment are enormous. The construction sector accounts for ı‹ percent of global gross domestic product and 7 percent of the global workforce, with buildings responsible for ‹Ž percent of the world’s ÿnal energy use and ‹ł percent of carbon emissions.2,3 Above all, architecture’s relevance derives from its impact. Based on its scale, intensity, and reach, it’s easy to see how decisions made with the pen can be mightier than those made with the backhoe. After all, it’s the pen that controls the backhoe as well as the light coming through windows, the impurities in the air, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. When we look at design through the lens of its real impact on people’s lives, it’s clear that architecture is not only relevant but deeply impactful.
Each morning, we wake up in a space that was designed, a bedroom, and based on the room’s properties, we might feel rested or groggy, ready to face the day or already looking for the ÿrst opportunity to doze o¬. The quality and quantity of light, the attenuation of sound, and the purity of the air are just a few of the environmental conditions that result from someone’s design decisions. All of these factors affect sleep, which then a¬ects our mood, relationships, ambitions, and health. With these compounding impacts in mind, the bedroom can be elevated conceptually from a place that holds a bed to a space that holds deep potential to foster human thriving.
During our waking hours, the built environment continues to a¬ect
The full impacts of architecture, however, are not contained by a building’s four walls. Repercussions of design decisions will ripple outwards in both time and space. A simple decision about decking material can revitalize a local industry or lead to deforestation of the Amazon thousands of miles away. A decision about insulation can result in carbon sequestration or exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions, a¬ecting the lives of people who have yet to be born. When aggregated, small impacts from individual actions can lead to global crises, many of which the world is facing today. Alternatively, the small-scale and large-scale impacts of great design can lead to the solutions.
“Architects don’t need to seek relevance, only seize it” was the rallying cry of Carl Elefante, ƒ⁄ıŠ president of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) who emphasized architecture’s potential to address global issues, such as climate change, as an opportunity for the profes-
sion to reclaim a seat at the table of public leadership. Elefante’s insight was that many architects were initially attracted to the profession with the goal of building a better world, but at some point the direct connection between day-to-day practice and real-world impacts became blurred. Building design has reached in many di¬erent directions in a search for relevance, when in reality the answer was right in front of us all along. The planet needs saving, and design carries planet-saving potential. Based on the zeitgeist of today, great design can be achieved only by the projects that move in that direction. A new vision of design excellence is how architecture can seize relevance—ÿrst conceptually, by shifting mindsets about the purpose of architecture, and then practically by doing the work that heals the world.
The Spirit of the Day
Great design is not a static concept but a re´ection of the priorities of a given context. A building must always keep the rain out, mediate the climate, and provide security for the inhabitants, and successful works of architecture have been serving these purposes for millennia. For a building to be considered excellent, however, meeting these primary objectives has never been enough. At di¬erent times and in di¬erent places, there is always a higher objective for a project to aspire to. This is the realm of design excellence, the intersection between providing for basic needs and advancing on the priorities of the day. The buildings that are most celebrated do not all look a certain way, as they would if great design were a matter of appearance. A work by Francesco Borromini and a work by Le Corbusier have very little in common, yet both architects designed buildings that are widely considered examples of great architecture. Both were hugely talented, but neither architect would be likely to ÿnd their work accepted to the same degree today. It’s not that the fundamental purpose of a building has changed or that we see physical forms any di¬erently but that the zeitgeist has shifted. These great buildings of the past were striving to achieve a vision that’s no longer relevant.
At the height of the Italian Renaissance, elaborate ornamental architecture was used by the Catholic Church to represent Heaven on
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Earth. Achieving passage to the afterlife was a primary objective of that culture, and the most celebrated buildings were the ones that came the closest to achieving it. Borromini’s church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane is an example of design excellence in that era. Complex forms of domes and co¬ers intersect in a way that’s awe-inspiring, pushing the limits of technology to create increasingly extravagant visions of paradise. A few centuries later, great architecture no longer reached for the heavens because interest in the afterlife was pushed aside by other concerns. To some in the early twentieth century, buildings became a vehicle to usher in modernity. “A house is a machine for living” was a mantra of Le Corbusier as he saw technology and industry transform planes, trains, and automobiles. New materials such as reinforced concrete and sheet glass allowed for new architectural forms and the development of an architectural ideal to align with the mass production spirit of the day. Leveraging the curtain wall and the piloti to elevate buildings above their historic constraints, the rational forms and pure geometry of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye demonstrated design excellence in the era of heavy industry.
A few decades later, the Lever House, a glass tower designed by Skidmore, Owlings, and Merrill, took these ideas one step further. Built in the international style after the end of World War II, the project represents design excellence in the era of technological optimism. The ´oor-to-ceiling glass, identical on all four sides, demonstrated the dominance of technology over nature. Minor concerns, such as heating or the location of the sun, could now be solved with energy or fancy new equipment. Architecture was freed from constraints such as site or climate to pursue a pure, sleek, geometric vision of the future. “Same building, heat it in Oslo, cool it in Bangkok” is how William McDonough caricatured the movement.
Simultaneously, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, many autocratic regimes feared dissent and empowerment of the people, and thus buildings that were celebrated by these societies were designed for control. In this context, great architecture was represented by oppressive housing blocks that preserved the political system and imposing civic buildings that brought glory to the state.
The turn of the twenty-ÿrst century brought new computer-based
geometric forms that got out ahead of purpose and reason, leading to a Cambrian explosion of sweeping formal expression. The more curves the better, and the laws of gravity were designed to be broken. Design excellence in the era of computational possibilities became a race toward the absurd.
This progression leads right up to the present day, where the problems are real, mostly of our making, and gathering at our doorstep. Architecture is in a unique position to address society’s diverse challenges, and just as in times past, great design will be deÿned by the issues of the day. In the twenty-ÿrst century, these are the heat waves, wildÿres, plagues, inequality, habitat loss, loneliness, and many more calamities that society is increasingly confronted with.
In the era of climate change, design excellence can represent a vision of architecture that addresses big problems. It’s an approach that elevates people to the center of design decisions and dissolves the site line as the boundary of the architects’ considerations. As the world faces mounting challenges, it’s become increasingly clear that design has complex, far-reaching consequences. Through mindfulness and intention, however, the power of design can be harnessed as a force for good. And it should be. Design can be deployed against wild weather and rising tides, income inequality, and every other impediment to human thriving. Architects can rethink the purpose of their craft and resume their role as civic leaders. Architects can demonstrate design as a process for building the world that people want to live in. As we face the challenges of the twenty-ÿrst century, architecture can reclaim relevance by proposing the solutions.
Sustainability and Design
To many architects, sustainability represented the path out of the wilderness. The negative environmental impacts of common building practices were well understood, and organizations such as the AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) and the US Green Building Council (USGBC) were founded in the early ıłł⁄s to advocate for architecture that lessened their environmental impacts. COTE, a knowledge community of architects, developed an awards program,
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the COTE Top Ten, that evaluated projects against ten measures of sustainable design, recognizing handsome, high-performing buildings with design awards. The COTE Top Ten recipients served as an early example of design’s potential to solve real-world problems. Around the same time, the USGBC launched the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, which popularized and in many ways deÿned sustainable architecture. The rating system began to transform some market norms, particularly volatile organic compound levels in paints and sealants, and made sustainable design a household name.
As the sustainable design movement matured, the emergence of Architecture ƒ⁄‹⁄ was a major milestone, and AIA’s adoption of its ƒ⁄‹⁄ Commitment represented an important boost for the idea that architecture’s relevance derives from its ability to solve problems. Focusing on energy, because its negative impacts were well understood and it’s easy to measure and track, the program asked architecture ÿrms to commit to achieving a net-zero energy portfolio by the year ƒ⁄‹⁄. Firms that accept the challenge, ı,ı⁄⁄ and counting, must develop a Sustainability Action Plan and then each year report the aggregate energy reduction across their portfolio. First launched in ƒ⁄⁄Š with a ¡⁄ percent reduction target, the plan was to step down by ı⁄ percent every ÿve years until all signatories achieve an average ı⁄⁄ percent energy reduction by ƒ⁄‹⁄. The success of the program was threefold. First, from an education standpoint, the concept of benchmarking and the language of measurement (e.g., energy use intensity, net-zero) entered the architect’s lexicon. Second, the focus on energy modeling helped advance the idea that some important aspects of architecture cannot be seen. Finally, the program helped solidify the idea that design comes with responsibilities. Initially, most ÿrms that reported their performance achieved nothing close to the committed goal, but that wasn’t the point. Suddenly many architects were measuring impacts and paying attention. By promoting the program, the AIA took a strong stance toward rethinking the purpose of architecture, even if initially it was focused only on energy conservation.
Building on the ƒ⁄‹⁄ Commitment’s momentum, ƒ⁄ıŠ updates to the architect’s code of professional ethics formalized the architect’s
responsibility for the outcomes of design. Although the existing ethical code made it clear that members of the profession are not allowed to lie, cheat, or steal, it turned out that architects had no formal moral responsibility for the consequences of design decisions, not even a Hippocratic-like commitment to do no harm. Among other topics, the new standards around environmental equity and justice state that “members make reasonable e¬orts to advise their clients and employers of their obligations to the environment, including: access to clean air, water, sunlight and energy for all; sustainable production, extraction, transportation and consumption practices; a built environment that equitably supports human health and well-being and is resistant to climate change; and restoring degraded or depleted natural resources.” Although it’s unlikely to happen, technically, not having this conversation could cost an architect their license.
The combination of these two initiatives began bringing new ideas about the role and purpose of architecture to the surface. Inspired by ƒ⁄‹⁄ Commitment reporting, energy use metrics began appearing in submissions for architectural design awards, sending the message that factors beyond appearance represent important qualities of design.
As impactful as these initiatives were, the label of sustainability stood in the way of universal adoption. Sustainable architecture carries baggage from movements going back to the 1970s, where, to many, sustainability seemed irreconcilable with design. There were the earth ships that celebrated eccentricity over e¬ective strategies; the emergence of sick building syndrome, caused in part by prioritizing energy conservation without thinking through the potential consequences for human health; and later, the popular LEED rating system, which prioritized rigid checklists over creative problem solving. Even as sustainable design gained reach and prominence due to increasing awareness of looming crises, the idea that “sustainable” buildings look a certain way or that “sustainability” will add cost were accepted as fact among advocates and detractors alike. The myth that sustainability equated to spending more money on a less attractive product took hold as camps were formed between those who prioritize design and those who prioritize sustainability. The one thing that every architect seems to agree on is that sustainable design is a good thing, but probably not
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for this project. As long as architecture’s relevance remains tied up in a movement that’s widely understood to be counter to good design, its reach will be limited to those who act from a place of altruism.
When we dig a bit deeper, two things become clear. The ÿrst is that the assumed altruism of sustainable design is not altruism at all but higher-quality buildings that beneÿt the client in addition to the community and planet. The second is that without the baggage of the past—the cartoon “green buildings” that sport awkward features or a process prescribed by a checklist—the tension between design and performance disappears. Although there are clear examples of what sustainable design does not look like, there is no limitation, other than the designer’s imagination, on how high-performance design can appear. Daylight, passive strategies to deliver thermal comfort, and resource conservation have been fundamental to architectural design for thousands of years before being rebranded as “sustainable design features” and have resulted in as many beautiful buildings as forgettable ones. For the architecture profession to take seriously its planet-saving potential, the perceived incompatibility of design and performance needs to come to an end.
This is where the COTE Top Ten winners can show a way forward, showcasing the successful integration of performance and design. Unlike participants in other programs that recognize projects for aligning to narrow criteria such as appearance or energy performance, the COTE Top Ten winners need to cover it all, achieving high performance through beautiful design. These are projects where form expresses function and where images and metrics are held in equal standing. “Performing beautifully” is how these projects are often described, and during the ÿrst few decades of the program, a body of work consisting of hundreds of beautiful, responsible, and multifunctional projects emerged. These projects demonstrate that great works of architecture can do good from a social and environmental standpoint and that doing good results in great works of architecture.
In the last decade, an idea emerged that the COTE Top Ten framework could be broadened to not just deÿne excellence in sustainability for a single awards program but to redeÿne the very meaning of good design for an architectural profession in search of relevance. Citizen
architects submitted a proposal to the AIA’s board and membership to adopt the COTE Top Ten framework as new formal deÿnition of good design, and when the resolution came up for a vote at the ƒ⁄ıł AIA National Convention in Las Vegas, an overwhelming majority of the membership voted to adopt the COTE Top Ten measures as the AIA’s new Framework for Design Excellence.
Although it will take years to fully realize, a conceptual shift in design thinking is well under way. Sustainability is not a subset of design but a collection of core considerations that good design is to address in a meaningful and impactful way. As more and more projects demonstrate the value and opportunities of aligning form with function, the false choice between performance and design will continue to melt away. What might be emerging is a new paradigm for design excellence in the era of climate change.
Design
To better deÿne design excellence, it makes sense to step back and consider the idea of design, a concept that su¬ers from a multiplicity of meanings. Design can be the process of reinventing an everyday object with improved qualities, such as the Nest thermostat, or a strategy for encouraging users to see the world in a new way, such as the Philippe Starck lemon juicer.4 Design can support human health through safety interventions, promote wellness (e.g., circadian lighting on some modern jetliners), or conserve energy through the aerodynamic contours of a performance car. The purpose of design can be to wow, to serve, to improve, or to reconsider.
As architects, what are we talking about when we talk about design? To some, design is about creating evocative visual forms, while to others it’s about solving real-world problems. What often comes to mind is the concept of “Design with a capital D,” that is, creating a form or composition that is so well curated or articulated that it elicits an emotional response. This is the realm of the artist, a ÿeld that is often coupled with architecture but stands apart because of one major di¬erence: function. Design in the world of art is pure form. It’s unburdened by function and thus free to provoke without
People, Planet, Design
consequences. This is why civilization holds art in such high esteem. Art challenges us, makes us question our preconceptions, and stands apart from many real-world constraints. Great art can play with our emotions. An hour spent contemplating Monet’s Water Lilies would be very di¬erent from an hour spent contemplating Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. These are both great works of art, yet one provides the viewer with a peaceful experience and the other o¬ers something signiÿcantly more intense. Architecture doesn’t work like this because of the depth and reach of its real impacts on the physical world. After either of these experiences with great works of art, we go home, where we’re immersed in the real-world consequences of design.
The union of form and function, form that follows function, and Louis Sullivan’s architectural maxim, “Form ever follows function,” are useful ways of thinking about architectural design. In ıŠłŽ when Sullivan wrote the article making this point, architecture had been a manifestation of form following function since the times of Vitruvius.5 This was more by necessity than by choice because before electricity, building geometry that responded to context was the only way a building could function. If occupants needed to see, there had to be
windows. Ironically, this tradition was about to come to an end. At the time of Sullivan’s quote, the use of electric lighting in buildings was becoming widespread, with the e¬ect of divorcing a building’s form from its ability to provide the occupants with light. This led to deeper ´oor plates and lower ceilings, two characteristics that diminish the quality of an architectural space by driving people to the interior and limiting connection with the outdoors.
Air conditioning came next, with the e¬ect of divorcing a building’s facade from its ability to provide comfort. Rather than using geometry to keep the heat of the sun out, architects could now rely on readilyavailable energy. The result was expansive glass curtain walls, which still (mostly) kept the rain out but brought glare, thermal asymmetry, and high energy use along for the ride. New advances in technology seemed limitless, and since electricity would cover the functional aspects of a building, architects were free to focus purely on form. This pattern continued through most of the twentieth century, with each technological improvement driving a wider wedge between form and function. The bigger the rift became, the more the quality of the architectural space was diminished, yet on the surface, function appeared to remain the same. Since the outcomes of architectural strategies are interconnected, changing a design response to one variable will result in unintended consequences in others. A single design strategy might beneÿt multiple outcomes, and if it’s replaced with a strategy that beneÿts only one outcome, what was previously taken for granted would now go unaddressed.
Air conditioning, which relies on energy, seemed more freeing than
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natural ventilation, which imposes spatial constraints on the design. The spaces that use air conditioning might be just as comfortable as the spaces that relied on natural ventilation, but while one problem was solved, another was created. In this case, an unintended consequence of overreliance on mechanical heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems led to high energy use and low air quality, a fact that many came to understand during the COVID-ıł pandemic.
Plastics and other synthetic building materials arrived on the construction scene in the middle of the twentieth century, with a similar impact to electric lights and air conditioning. Spray foam insulation, vinyl ´ooring, construction adhesives, and many other new products o¬ered chemicals as the solutions to problems that had traditionally been addressed through design. With each new product, the architect was further freed from earthly constraints while function became more and more dependent on technology. In the case of synthetic building materials, the unintended consequence is poison in our homes and the environment.
Between the time of Sullivan’s quote and the close of the twentieth century, the practice of architecture had all but lost daylight, resulting in a disconnect with nature; passive strategies, resulting in a lack of resilience; and traditional construction methods, resulting in environmental toxins. All the while, it seems as though buildings retained the same level of “function.” Behind all these technological innovations was cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels. What was cheap and easy for some made the planet more toxic for others. In the words of Philip Johnson,“Don’t build a glass house if you’re worried about saving money on heating.”6 Taking his own advice, Johnson famously used his glass house mostly as a pavilion for parties while actually living in a brick house nearby, with much more restrained glazing.
With the worst impulses of the international style ÿnally behind us, current trends are beginning to once again unite form and function. The public’s increasing awareness of global climate crises, a cultural embrace of health and wellness, and deepening concern for correcting social inequities have put pressure on architecture to respond. At the same time, popular products, from the iPhone to the Tesla, demonstrate that the perceived trade-o¬ between form and function need not
exist. As the hundred-year schism comes to a close, architects are faced with a much more complex and interconnected world than Vitruvius or Sullivan. Today’s decision-making landscape is scattered with landmines, and as the above examples demonstrate, bad outcomes can seem perfectly functional when considered at surface level. In the past, we thought of function as serving a particular use or purpose. The function of a jacket is warmth, the function of a house is shelter. To fully understand the function of an object or a design in the twenty-ÿrst century, it’s become necessary to broaden the deÿnition and look further into space and time.
The traditional concept of function references an object at a single point in time. This is function of the ÿrst order. An example is an electric light bulb. Need light to see? Just turn it on and you have it. It’s perfectly useful at the time and place where light is needed. Another example of a ÿrst-order function is a window. The window can also provide light in a particular time and place, as long as the light is needed during the day. A table to enjoy a meal, a bicycle to travel, and a roof to keep the rain out are all examples of traditional ÿrst-order function.
Second-order function adds an overlay of time and accounts for some of the less obvious or immediate impacts of a design. Looking at the aggregate impacts of the two lighting strategies over a ten-year period, it’s easy to see how the window can be more functional than the light bulb. The operational costs for the light bulb add up over those years to some amount that someone will need to pay. The bulb will burn out and need to be replaced. Conversely, the window provides light for free. Beyond ÿnancial considerations, the light that the window provides is of higher quality, and its color automatically changes in accordance with our natural rhythms over the course of a day. This is not something that will be felt on day one, but the di¬erence between working day in and day out under natural light versus artiÿcial light results in measurable health impacts over a period of time. Supporting health is a second-order function of the windows that is not o¬ered by a space lit solely with electric light. Other examples include strategies that enhance indoor environmental quality as well as durability, longevity, and resilience.
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Third-order function adds an additional overlay of both space and time. These are the long-term, far-reaching impacts of design decisions, the ones that come back to get you and everyone else. Third-order function broadens the sphere of considerations to include the beneÿts or harm felt by people far removed from the design at hand, such as those who extract or manufacture building materials, live near power plants, depend on natural resources, or inhabit a warming planet. Ipê is a durable, attractive tropical hardwood that’s sometimes used as a decking material because of its ÿrst- and second-order function. Looking at the full upstream impacts of the choice to use ipê, it’s clear that deforestation of the Amazon is not a functional outcome for those who call the rainforest home. In addition, the long-term global impacts of deforestation might eventually make their way back to the sunbathers on the ipê deck, either through the e¬ects of climate change or the general downgrading of global ecological services. Ipê and other tropical species probably fail the test of third-order function and thus fall short of a holistic interpretation of good design.
Considering third-order function is a tall order. Even the abovementioned window contains atmosphere-warming embodied carbon. Can any design strategy provide function to all people in all places at all times? This was much simpler before synthetic materials and global supply chains. Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond probably didn’t fan the ´ames of global catastrophes, but it was unlikely to do much good either. An occupational hazard of designing within the complexity of the modern age is the potential for far-reaching, unforeseen consequences. The opportunity, however, is the ability to magnify positive impacts. Rather than choosing ipê for the deck, the designer could choose a new product that provides the same ÿrst- and second-order function but is from a small local company that’s working to revitalize the town’s economy. Simple actions can aggregate into global good.
Applying this broad deÿnition of function to architecture can expand the idea of form in exciting ways. Form that follows function is the goal of design, just as it was for Sullivan and Vitruvius, but because function can now encompass so much more depth, the formal responses can be equally substantial. Design excellence takes the con-
cept one step further. Rather than merely follow function, form can express and enhance function. A single material choice, when skillfully applied, can represent the junction of present-day and future needs. Sustainably harvested wood used as structure or interior ÿnish can comfort with its biophilic properties, cool the atmosphere through carbon storage, and ensure healthy forests for future generations. A single shade structure can conserve energy, block glare, direct views, shed water, and eventually be deconstructed and reused for a di¬erent purpose. The opportunity is for the occupants to gradually understand the ever-evolving function of each design decision so that the project educates as it nurtures and gracefully adapts to confront anticipated challenges.
The aggregate of multifunctional, expressive design strategies can develop into a lexicon of design excellence in the era of climate change. As more and more projects formally and functionally align to form a new architectural paradigm, the conversation will shift from what a building looks like, to what a building does, to what a building can be.
Hardcover | $29.00 | 248 pages
PUBLISHED: March 2024
ISBN: 9781642832693
Austin Frerick
arons is the story of seven titans of the food industry, their rise to power, and the consequences for workers, eaters, and democracy itself. Readers will meet a secretive German family that took over the global coffee industry in less than a decade, relying on wealth traced back to the Third Reich to gobble up countless independent roasters. They will visit the Disneyland of agriculture, where school children ride trams through mechanized warehouses filled with tens of thousands of cows that never see the light of day. And they will learn that in the food business, crime really does pay—especially when you can bribe and then double-cross the president of Brazil. Barons paints a stark portrait of corporate consolidation, but it also shows that a fair, healthy, and prosperous food industry is possible—if we take back power from the barons who have robbed us of it.
Austin Frerick
Austin Frerick is an expert on agricultural and antitrust policy.
He worked at the Open Markets Institute, the U.S. Department of Treasury, and the Congressional Research Service
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Barons
Barons
MONEY, POWER, AND THE CORRUPTION OF AMERICA’S FOOD INDUSTRY
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023945763
All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book builds on the following publications:
• Austin Frerick, “Big Meat, Small Towns: The Meatpacking Industry’s Shift to Rural America and the Reemergence of Company Towns” (Grinnell College thesis, May 2012)
• Charlie Mitchell and Austin Frerick, “The Hog Barons,” Vox and Food & Environment Reporting Network, April 19, 2021
• Austin Frerick and Charlie Mitchell, “Multinational Meat Farms Could Be Making Us Sick,” American Conservative, April 21, 2020
• Austin Frerick, “The Outsourcing of America’s Food,” American Conservative, June 2, 2021
• Austin Frerick, “Rise of Majority-Minority Districts in Rural Iowa: How Changes in Meatpacking Impacted Rural Schooling” (Grinnell College thesis, August 2011)
• Austin Frerick, “ To Revive Rural America, We Must Fix Our Broken Food System,” American Conservative, February 27, 2019
Keywords: agricultural checkoffs; antitrust; Joesley Batista; Wesley Batista; Robert Bork; Louis Brandeis; CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation); Cargill; commodity crops; company towns; confinement shed; contract farming; corporate consolidation; dairy farmers; Driscoll’s; ethanol; family farm; Farm Bill; food system; Iowa; Iowa Select Farms; JAB Holding Company; JBS; Jeff and Deb Hansen; local food; locally owned; Mike and Sue McCloskey; monopoly; obesity; offshore produce; regional food supply chains; J. Miles Reiter; Garland Reiter; Robinson-Patman Act; sharecropping; slaughterhouse workers; small business; sustainable agriculture; USDA; Tom Vilsack; Walmart; Sam Walton
I dedicate this book to my husband, Daniel Honberg.
Foreword
Adam Smith didn’t like monopolies. The great theorist and champion of capitalism believed that free markets were essential for the creation of an ideal society, one that would be guided by “a liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.”1 His most influential book, The Wealth of Nations (1776), offered a savage critique of mercantilism and “the wretched spirit of monopoly”that guided economic policies during the eighteenth century.2 The book was partly inspired by the predatory behavior of the East India Company, which dominated Great Britain’s colonial trade. While celebrating entrepreneurial risk-taking, Smith warned that merchants and manufacturers were “an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public.”3 They would always try to limit competition, gain excessive profits, and “levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens.”4 Any new laws or government regulations proposed by merchants and manufacturers should be regarded with suspicion—and never adopted without careful scrutiny, Smith argued. Unchecked market power was antithetical to individual rights and “a system of natural liberty.”5
The Founding Fathers of the United States shared Adam Smith’s views of monopoly power. The Boston Tea Party, a pivotal event in the years leading to the American Revolution, was provoked not only by the tax policies of the British government but also by the monopoly on tea imports granted to the East India Company. Years later, Thomas Jefferson’s principal critique of the Constitution of the United States was that it lacked a “bill of rights” guaranteeing basic freedoms. “By a declaration of rights I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspension of the habeas corpus, no standing armies,” Jefferson wrote to a friend. “These are fetters against doing evil which no honest government should decline.”6 When the Bill of Rights was finally adopted, it didn’t include a restriction on monopolies. But economic freedom was widely assumed to be an absolute necessity. In a letter to Jefferson, the rationale for that freedom was made clear by James Madison: “Monopolies are sacrifices of the many to the few.”7
Roughly two hundred fifty years later, almost every sector of the American economy is dominated by a handful of corporations. Ever since the administration of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the rhetoric of the free market has been cleverly used to thwart government oversight of corporate power, block antitrust enforcement—and eliminate free markets. When four firms control 40 percent or more of a market for products or services, true competition no longer exists. Instead you have monopolies, monopsonies (too few buyers), and oligopolies (too few sellers). Today, three firms control 61 percent of the American market for eyeglasses and contact lenses, three firms control 67 percent of the drugstore market, four firms control 76 percent of the market for air travel, and on and on. From birth until death, Americans must now confront markets that are anything but free. Two firms now control 64 percent of the market for disposable diapers—and two firms control 82 percent of the market for coffins.
Unchecked market power allows corporations to charge unfair prices, stifle innovation, set the prices paid to independent producers, break labor unions, and cut wages. It is the central driving force of inequality. During the past three decades, adjusted for inflation, the annual compensation of American workers has increased by about 18 percent—and the annual compensation of chief executive officers at the largest American corporations has increased by about 1,300 percent. In 1978, the compensation of the average CEO was about 30 times larger than that of the typical worker. By 2020, it was about 350 times larger. Meanwhile, the inflation-adjusted value of the federal minimum wage has declined from $12.54 to $7.50 since the early 1970s. As a result, the poorest workers in the United States have had their wages cut by about 40 percent.
All of these trends have come together to transform the most important sector of the American economy: the food system. And that is why Barons is such an urgently important book. The way in which the United States produces and distributes its food has a profound effect on worker rights, animal welfare, air quality, water quality, the landscape, rural communities, public health, international trade, and the global climate. Even the DNA of sentient creatures is now owned, manipulated, and sold to American farmers by a handful of corporations. Four companies control 66 percent of hog genetics; three companies control 95 percent of broiler chicken genetics; two companies control 99 percent of turkey genetics.
Austin Frerick is an ideal author to tell this story. He possesses a deep understanding of antitrust policy and agricultural economics. He has learned the names and faces behind these supposedly rational and impartial corporations. More important, he has a personal stake in the outcome. He’s seen firsthand the impact of our industrial food system upon his home state of Iowa. He’s witnessed the hollowing out of rural towns in the Midwest, the sickening pollution from factory farms, the
inchoate anger and political extremism that stem from growing inequality. He knows that nothing less than our democracy is now at stake.
More than a century ago, when monopoly power posed similar threats to American society, Henry Demarest Lloyd warned about the danger in his classic book Wealth against Commonwealth (1894). “Monopoly cannot be content with controlling its own business,” Lloyd wrote.8 “Its lobbyists force the nomination of judges who will construe the laws as Power desires, and of senators who will get passed such laws as it wants for its judges to construe. . . . The press, too, must be controlled by Power.” 9 Barons is a work in that great tradition of muckraking, an effort to expose corruption and misrule. I share Frerick’s belief that the system we have now was not inevitable, that a better one is still possible, that the battle against unchecked corporate power is still worth fighting and can be won, that you could hardly find a set of ideals more relevant today, more necessary, more deserving of being finally lived and fulfilled than “equality, liberty, and justice.”
Eric Schlosser
August 22, 2023
Introduction
When I was young, my family and I would visit relatives in a corner of northeast Iowa known as the Driftless region. As we drove through green rolling hills, I’d stare out the window at pastures dotted with dairy cows and hogs. Corn was common, of course, but so were apple orchards and other crops. The landscape was alive.
I still go up to the Driftless; my parents park their camper up there to this day. But the land is now brown and barren, except during the few months of the year when corn and soybeans grow. These two commodities have spread like a prairie fire, and the apples and other crops that used to be grown all over the state are now sourced from well beyond its borders.
The road to the Driftless used to pass through vibrant small towns, but they’ve since been bypassed by multimillion-dollar highways that were built only so these commodities can leave the state a few minutes quicker. The local businesses have closed, replaced by national chains on the outskirts of town. A state that was once referred to as the “Middle Land”—both because of its geographic location right in the heart of the continental United States and because of its moderate politics and
strong middle class—is now defined by its reactionary political landscape and decaying towns.
The most jarring change is that the animals have disappeared from view. At some point, they started vanishing: first pigs, then cows. The red barns that used to house them sit abandoned or have been knocked down to plant more corn or beans. But even though you no longer see them, the hogs aren’t gone. When you get a few miles outside town, you begin to sense—first smell, then see—clusters of massive windowless sheds. You would never guess that each one of them holds almost 2,500 pigs, until the thick stench of manure wafts in your direction. At this point, the countryside is so industrial that it no longer feels like countryside at all.
I initially set out to write this book as a way to figure out why my home state has changed so dramatically since my childhood. Agriculture is to Iowa what motion pictures are to Hollywood, the cornerstone of the state’s economy and the root of its identity. The state is blessed with some of the world’s best soil: “black gold,” which, coupled with consistently good rainfall, makes for ideal farming conditions. I wanted to understand how this blessing has, over the past forty years, turned into a curse.
But as I dug into that question, it became clear to me that these impacts go far beyond the state’s borders. Researching and writing this book has taken me across the country, from the Pajaro Valley in California to the remnants of the Grand Kankakee Marsh in Indiana and from the deserts of New Mexico to the booming towns of Northwest Arkansas. Though it’s an American story at its heart, it’s one that involves places as far-flung as Mexico, Germany, and Brazil.
The same forces that devastated my home state were unleashed by a series of fundamental changes to the American food system that have had profound consequences across the country and beyond. A set of legal and policy changes driven by a radical laissez-faire ideology
has resulted in a dramatic concentration of power in the American food industry.
This book is about how that transformation occurred and what it has meant for workers, families, and communities. I decided to tell this story through the rise of a series of powerful actors in the industry who have benefited from, and in some cases helped bring about, this shift. I refer to these people as “barons” to hearken back to Gilded Age robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan because I believe that we are living in a parallel moment when a few titans have the power to shape industries.
Although monopolies are common across the economy, there are few sectors more consolidated than the American food system. The following profiles of seven food industry barons show how each one built an empire by taking advantage of deregulation to amass extreme wealth at the expense of everyone else.
I start the book close to my home in Iowa, where a couple named Jeff and Deb Hansen have built an empire of hog confinements in the face of public opposition by capturing the state’s government. This relatively new model of production tends to destroy surrounding communities and environments, which is a big reason why 61 percent of Iowa’s rivers and streams and 67 percent of its lakes and reservoirs do not meet basic water quality standards.
I then profile the Cargill-MacMillan family, the owners of Cargill, the largest private company in America. The fortunes of the family mirror the history of the American Farm Bill. In particular, Cargill has benefited from a new approach to the Farm Bill that functions to subsidize corn and soy above almost everything else, which has dramatically reshaped our diets.
In the third chapter, I spotlight the mysterious Reimanns, a reclusive German family with historical ties to the Third Reich. The Reimann family, through a venture called JAB Holding Company, first entered
the coffee industry in 2012 but now trails only Nestlé in the global market. The family accumulated this power through an aggressive acquisition spree that may have been permitted only because of a shift in antitrust and competition policy.
From there, I move to Northwest Indiana, where Mike and Sue McCloskey run a massive dairy operation that pumps more than four million school milk cartons’ worth of milk per day. The rise of their empire, which came at a time when many family dairy farms were being run out of business, illustrates the importance of powerful agricultural entities called “checkoffs” that were established to help family farmers but now seemingly undermine them.
I then head west and dive into the rise of Driscoll’s, the berry company built by the brothers J. Miles and Garland Reiter. Although their operation now employs over one hundred thousand people across every continent except Antarctica and the name has become synonymous with berries in American grocery stores, Driscoll’s itself doesn’t actually grow any berries. Rather, the company has accrued power through a production model that abdicates responsibility for labor and environmental issues by outsourcing the farming of its berries to independent contractors and, increasingly, out of the country entirely.
Next, I tell the story of Joesley and Wesley Batista. Their company, JBS Foods, butchers almost enough meat daily to give a four-ounce portion to every citizen of Australia, Canada, Poland, Spain, and Italy combined. Although they rose to power by skirting the law, they’ve faced minimal repercussions for their actions. Their ability to grow unchecked has come at the expense of workers, who often toil in conditions that give the slaughterhouses in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle a run for their money.
And finally, I dig into the Walton family and Walmart’s grocery business. You might think you know all about Walmart’s power, but the story frequently told about the company and its impacts is just the tip of
the iceberg. Although it sells a bit of everything in its physical stores and online, Walmart is, at its core, a grocery company. In fact, it dominates the American grocery market so thoroughly that it has about the same market share as the number two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight grocery store companies combined. As Walmart has grown, its power has compounded, reshaping not just the grocery industry but the entire food system.
The purpose of this book isn’t to gawk at these barons or to suggest that they are uniquely responsible for the corruption of the American food system. In fact, I have a whole series of “B-side barons” that unfortunately just missed the cut but could have been included to illustrate many of the same points.
Rather, I want to use the barons to facilitate an honest conversation about what we eat and how it gets to our plate. In that way, this book is less about the specific barons themselves than it is about the conditions that facilitated their rise to power. I hope these stories give you a better sense of how the American food system was corrupted and why it matters for all of us.
Our food system may not get a lot of attention in political debates, but it has a profound impact on who we are and the way we live. Millions of Americans work in the food industry—as waiters, cooks, grocery store clerks, and cashiers; as farmers and farmworkers; as beer salesmen and small business owners and slaughterhouse workers.
In fact, the food system accounts for more than one-tenth of all jobs in the United States, and agriculture is one piece of a bigger puzzle: only 12 percent of food workers are farmers.1 These jobs have traditionally been one of the most direct pathways to the middle class. Generations of Americans, including many immigrants, have looked to the sector as a launching pad for upward mobility.
Whether you work in the food system or not, it unquestionably affects your life, often in unseen ways. The food we consume and the
way it is produced has enormous implications for our health and our environment. It affects the strength of our cities and towns, the cleanliness of our air and our water, and, in the face of global climate change, the livability of our planet.
On a more fundamental level, everyone eats. Food is incredibly important to our sense of identity and culture. It has a way of bringing people together and building community. As Anthony Bourdain once put it, “Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.”2 Local businesses in the food industry are an integral part of what makes a place a place.
As I wrote this book, it became clear to me how much the food system has influenced me and my family. I grew up helping my grandpa farm his plot and working with my mom in her bakery. My dad spent his entire career working in the food system, first as a beer truck driver and then at a corn processing plant. I’ve seen firsthand what the concentration of power in the American food system means for Iowa and for my hometown, Cedar Rapids. These experiences, and the institutions around me, shaped how I view food and local businesses.
But this story isn’t specific to me; it could be told about any state and thousands of cities and towns across the country. I hope that reading this book will lead you to take a step back and realize just how much the corruption of the American food system has affected your family and community.
And though the issues raised here might seem overwhelming, I find them invigorating because history provides a road map for how to deal with unchecked concentrated power. In writing this book, I’ve had the honor of meeting so many people who are fighting to build a better food system. I’m confident that a bipartisan coalition can be mobilized to usher in what Alice Waters calls a “delicious revolution.”
But to do so, we must first understand how we arrived where we are today. One point that’s clear from the stories of these barons and from the history of the American food system is that power does not disperse organically. We have an opportunity to turn the corner and build a more balanced food system, but only if we challenge power directly.
The Hog Barons
Julie Duhn remembers her first time kayaking mostly for its aftermath. When Duhn retired from her office job, she decided to start experimenting with the sport at Pine Lake State Park, near her home in Eldorado, Iowa. The collection of campgrounds and trails rings two small lakes that trickle into the Iowa River and is surrounded by rolling farmland. It was a hot afternoon in mid-August, just a few weeks after her first outing, when Duhn’s arms began to itch, then grow red and raw. She consulted a doctor, who, after learning about her kayaking trip, blamed the rash on the lake water.
Indeed, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources has considered Pine Lake unsafe for human contact since 2012. It keeps a sign posted on the beach to discourage visitors from wading in. The problem is an overgrowth of algae, which feed on the phosphorus that continually flows into the lake from nearby farm fields spread with fertilizer and manure. A state report concluded that one clear contributor is the waste produced by the ten thousand hogs in the lake’s watershed.1
Iowa has long been known for hog farming and was once dotted with idyllic barns to house the animals. But today, most of the state’s hogs
spend their lives in massive metal sheds known as “confinements”: warehouses that allow operators to breed thousands of pigs in one building. The sheds are long and thin, with huge exhaust fans on either end, and each group of buildings includes several silos for storing feed, as well as a dumpster to dispose of the roughly 10 percent of hogs that don’t survive until slaughtering time.2 After being weaned in these industrial facilities, the pigs are transferred to a finishing operation to fatten up and then to the slaughterhouse. These two trips in a packed semitrailer are the only times the pigs will see daylight.
Jeff Hansen and his wife, Deb, built an empire out of these confinement sheds. The Hansens’ company, Iowa Select Farms, employs more than 7,400 people, including contractors, and brings about five million pigs to market annually.3 As the owners of Iowa’s largest hog operation, the Hansens have constructed hundreds of confinement sheds in more than fifty of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties.4
The sheds have provoked controversy in Iowa ever since operators such as the Hansens began to build them during the 1990s. Many rural communities, including people such as Julie Duhn, have campaigned fiercely against them, citing damage to health, livelihoods, property values, the environment, and the farm economy.5 Although their efforts have yielded small victories, they have lost the war.
The state’s hog industry, led by the Hansens, has cultivated close relationships with state politicians on both sides of the aisle to roll back regulations. Even as California has passed animal welfare laws and North Carolina has tightened its permitting program for confinement operations, the hog industry in Iowa goes almost unchecked. Today, Iowa raises about one-third of the nation’s hogs, about as many as the second-, third-, and fourth-ranking states combined.6
Since Iowa Select was founded in 1992, the state’s pig population has increased by more than 50 percent while the number of hog farms has declined by over 80 percent. Over the past thirty years, twenty-six
thousand Iowa farms quit the long-standing tradition of raising pigs.7 As confinements replaced farms, rural communities have continued to hollow out.
Pigs in Iowa now outnumber human residents by a ratio of more than seven to one, and they produce a volume of manure equivalent to the waste of nearly eighty-four million people, more than the populations of California, Texas, and Illinois combined.8 One expert estimated that each confinement facility produces “the same amount of waste as a city of 90,000 to 150,000 people,” spread over only 640 acres with no sewage system.9
The environment simply cannot handle so much pig shit. In theory, this manure, when spread on nearby crop fields, is a useful fertilizer. But residents and scientists alike point to evidence that this “Mt. Everest of waste,” as one University of Iowa water researcher described it, is frequently mismanaged.10 It filters through soil to underground pipes that discharge directly into rivers, and when manure is overapplied, rain and snowmelt can quickly channel it into waterways.
As a result, as confinement operations have come to dominate pork production, they’ve degraded Iowa’s water quality. Watersheds that are dense with livestock have a higher nutrient overload. Most summers, the state closes two-thirds of its state park beaches to swimming for a week or more, citing the health risk of toxins or bacteria.11
Closer to the confinements, many rural residents say they’ve been plagued—and others pushed out—by the stench, the flies, and the health hazards that accompany the facilities. “We know what hog manure smells like, but this is like a sewer,” one retired farmer who lived next to an industrial hog facility told the Washington Post. 12
The Hansens likely can’t see—or smell—any hog buildings from their seven-thousand-square-foot mansion, which is nestled inside a gated community in suburban Des Moines.13 Their view is dominated by the golf course at the exclusive Glen Oaks Country Club, which
abuts their backyard. In 2020, the Hansens’ company jet recorded over two hundred flights, including several trips to Naples, Florida, where until recently they owned multiple homes on the coast.14
When Americans think about farmers, they probably don’t have jetsetting millionaires such as Jeff and Deb Hansen in mind. But businesses like theirs are increasingly the norm in farm country: huge, regional-scale corporations owned by just one or a few families who use their political connections to overpower both local democracy and local businesses.15
Iowa Select became a behemoth as the result of decades of deregulation that allowed power to concentrate in our food system. And it’s not just smelly. It’s a sad story of the corporate capture of my home state.
Metal Shed Farmer
Jeff and Deb Hansen grew up in Iowa Falls as typical farm kids. They graduated from the local high school in 1976 and soon married. Both went straight to work: Jeff helped on his father’s farm while Deb worked in a local farm insurance office.16
During the Hansens’ childhoods, Iowa’s rich soils supported a constellation of diversified single-family operations. Farmers grew corn and soybeans, but many also raised a flock of chickens, milked a small dairy herd, or grazed beef on pasture. As with many long-term investment portfolios, diversity was a farm family’s lifeline.
Many family farmers considered pigs to be a cornerstone of their farms. Farmers raised a variety of breeds in barns and in pens. Although many farmers kept hogs in every stage of the life cycle, others specialized in “farrowing”—breeding sows and raising the litters—or buying “feeder” pigs, fattening them to maturity, and then auctioning them at the sale barns spread in a grid across the Iowa countryside. These competitive markets ensured a fair price for farmers.
It was likely at just such a sale barn that newlywed Jeff Hansen bought
his first three sows, which he kept in a converted barn on his father’s property.17 As the herd grew, the couple found the work grueling, particularly Deb, who had quit her office job to manage the pigs. To lighten her load, the Hansens purchased labor-saving equipment such as “elevated farrowing crates with steel slats, a feed pan and automatic waterers,” according to National Hog Farmer, a trade magazine.18 Quickly grasping the potential of mechanized livestock equipment, Jeff Hansen founded his own business to build confinement systems.
Animal warehouses had already transformed the poultry industry in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, and the model soon spread to other sectors and regions.19 They were first extensively used with hogs in the late 1980s in North Carolina, where a state legislator deregulated the industry for his personal benefit.20 Dairy followed shortly thereafter, starting in California.21
A consistent theme in this warehouse animal model is that one state moves first, triggering others to follow suit. After confinements were deregulated in North Carolina, Iowa followed closely behind, desperate not to lose its status as the nation’s top pork producer. As the race to the bottom sped up, the US Department of Agriculture failed to stop it.
Big meatpackers, which purchase and slaughter pigs and package pork, were enthusiastic about the shift to this model. The meatpackers prefer to buy from confinement operations through production contracts because they offer a steady stream of pigs in predictable sizes that are ready for slaughter on a precise schedule. The model is vastly more profitable than buying from a patchwork of independent growers, who sell pigs of various breeds and sizes at local auctions. Today, two-thirds of Iowa hogs are grown on contract with big meatpackers.22 Consequently, the sale barns that dotted the Iowa countryside slowly closed, and so did the competitive market for selling hogs.
Meanwhile, trade agreements that cut tariffs and sidelined import restrictions in places such as Asia and Mexico swung open the doors of
a world market for livestock products, particularly eggs and pork. Wall Street took notice; outside investors played a critical role in financing the expansion of confinement operations in Iowa.23
Hardin County, where the Hansens were raised, was the perfect place to take advantage of this hog boom. Although nearly 90 percent of Iowa’s land area is devoted to agriculture, its north-central region, smoothed by glaciers, has the flattest, richest cropland, which means it can accommodate copious amounts of manure and produce huge quantities of cheap feed.24 The region also has abundant groundwater (hogs are thirsty).25
“At that point, there were two things I knew for sure,” Jeff Hansen told National Hog Farmer. “Iowa was best suited to build an integrated pork production system and, second, I knew I could figure out how to do it.”26 The Hansens carved out a niche by building the confinement sheds that would take over Iowa’s hog industry. By the early 1990s, they were bringing in $90 million per year assembling these confinements, known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs for short.27
But after steadily expanding their confinement-building business, the Hansens decided they could also make money by raising their own hogs. In 1992, Jeff Hansen incorporated a new company, Iowa Select Farms, signed a contract with a meatpacker, and launched operations with a herd of 10,000 sows. During its first four years, Iowa Select more than quintupled its herd to 62,000 sows, enough to rate among the top ten largest pork producers in the country.28 By 1999, with 96,000 sows, it was selling 1.7 million pigs per year.29 Today, Iowa Select Farms is the fourth-largest hog producer in the country.30
Dirty Water
As Iowa Select built its empire, the impacts of its warehouses on the environment and surrounding communities quickly became apparent.
On a very basic level, the stench produced by confinements can be overwhelming. Within the sheds, powerful exhaust fans are necessary to constantly suck out poisonous gases rising from the manure lagoons. If the fans are shut off, the hogs die within hours. This is exactly what happened during the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted slaughterhouse operations and Iowa Select needed to quickly kill hundreds of thousands of animals.31
In Iowa, confinements are often as close as a quarter mile from homes, schools, and businesses. In interviews and in years of news coverage, Iowans living near confinements have complained about air quality too poor for their kids to play outside; about clouds of flies attracted to the giant manure pits and lagoons; about the exploding population of rats infesting homes, drawn by the vast stocks of animal feed; and about vultures that snatch carcasses from animal warehouse dumpsters and then drop pig parts in backyards.32
Scientists have also documented negative health effects among people who live near confinements. One study of North Carolina residents who lived within a few miles of clustered confinements found that they had a lower life expectancy and higher rates of infant deaths, asthma, kidney disease, tuberculosis, and blood poisoning than those who lived farther away.33 Dangerous levels of ammonia, which causes burning in the eyes and respiratory tract as well as chronic lung disease, have been measured in the air near massive hog sites in Iowa since the early 2000s.34 Communities near hog operations also report higher rates of headaches, sore throats, runny noses, coughs, and diarrhea than comparable areas without hog confinements. A 2012 study found higher rates of neurobehavioral and pulmonary impairment in people living within 1.9 miles of a massive hog facility and manure lagoon in Ohio than in a control group in Tennessee.35
As of 2023, the US Environmental Protection Agency still hadn’t even estimated airborne emissions from confinements in order to
regulate them under the Clean Air Act, despite numerous instances of workers falling into manure pits and dying from the fumes.36 Confinement applications sometimes promise to plant tree barriers to reduce air pollution, but the trees take several years to mature enough to be effective, if they are ever planted at all.37
The confinements have also caused economic devastation in surrounding communities. It’s no secret that rural American economies have struggled for decades with high poverty rates and anemic job growth.38 Confinement operators argue that the jobs they bring are beneficial to rural areas. Iowa Select might point to a 2017 study that it commissioned from Dermot Hayes, an Iowa State University economist with a long record of supporting agribusiness (and of business transactions with Jeff and Deb Hansen).39 In the study, Hayes credited the company with “reversing economic decline” in rural communities where it built giant sow barns.
Yet economists such as Hayes often fail to disclose their corporate funding and support. Kate Conlow, an attorney and former journalist, has documented how extensive this problem is among economists working in agriculture. Although many universities have disclosure policies, Conlow noted that they are hardly ever enforced.40 This failure warps the public debate.
Meanwhile, a different economist at Iowa State found that the overall economy in these communities continues to degrade in spite of all the jobs that Iowa Select claims to provide. Rather than stemming the decline, “they’re actually one of the key mechanisms for driving people out of rural areas, despite the claims to the contrary.”41
Even putting aside their economic impact, jobs at confinements are tough. Employees at sow farms monitor food, water, and ventilation; castrate, euthanize, artificially inseminate, and perform pregnancy checks on the animals; remove dead hogs; power-wash facilities to
remove manure; and wean litters. One former Iowa Select driver told the Guardian in 2019 that he earned $23,000 per year working twelvehour days with no overtime pay.42 As Julie Duhn put it, “Is a job with Iowa Select what you want for your kids?” Given how difficult and poorly paid these jobs are, it’s no surprise that Iowa Select has employed undocumented workers.43
Moreover, this production model depends on liberal use of antibiotics.44 Overuse of these drugs is contributing to antibiotic resistance, not just in pigs but also among humans.45 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States now has a death every fifteen minutes from an antibiotic-resistant infection.46 In response, public health officials have been ringing the alarm bell and calling for less use of these drugs in hogs.
But in Iowa, the most obvious impact of the confinements has been on the state’s water. In a confinement facility, hog manure drops through a slatted floor and collects in a deep pool below. In some instances, that pool runs through a pipe to a manure pond or lagoon that holds the overflow. This waste can find its way into the watershed, adding to the pollution caused by fertilizer runoff. Gordon Garrison, a farmer in northwestern Iowa, told the Guardian that nitrate levels in the water on his property nearly doubled after a corporation built a shed housing up to 8,800 pigs in a neighboring field.47
Bob Havens, now in his seventies, learned to swim in Pine Lake and built his house near the lake twenty years ago. Now, he said, in the summertime, “the lake turns into this slimy green sludge” and billows of foam course through local culverts. Both are signs of a dangerous nutrient imbalance. As a result, Havens lamented, “you [can’t] even canoe through it, let alone fish.” Havens sees the pollution as a matter of equity. “A lot of folks in Hardin County can’t afford a three-week vacation in the Bahamas,” but they used to have Pine Lake for excellent
swimming, fishing, and boating. Now, he said ruefully, “they just can’t do it.”48
The problem is bad enough during normal times, particularly with older facilities, but it can become a crisis in the wake of the sorts of natural disasters that are becoming more common as the planet heats up. After recent catastrophic flooding in western Iowa, for example, some livestock lagoons spilled over into nearby creeks, a process that can cause environmental devastation and threaten human health and well-being.49 North Carolina faced a similar issue when more than fifty livestock lagoons overflowed in the wake of Hurricane Florence, according to NPR reporting at the time.50 A recent report noted a large expansion of industrial animal facilities in Iowa’s hundred-year floodplains even in the face of these risks.51
These two intertwined factors—overapplication of synthetic fertilizers, mostly to grow industrial animal feed, and pig waste from corporate farms—have created a water crisis in Iowa. To make water safe for human consumption, the Des Moines Water Works pays as much as $10,000 per day to treat it.52 This problem isn’t limited to Iowa. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that Americans pay almost $1.7 billion per year, mainly through higher water bills, to deal with this pollution.53 The cost can be overwhelming for communities, particularly smaller ones with lower budgets and poorer populations.
But even cities such as Des Moines can barely keep up. The Raccoon River runs past cropland and corporate hog operations in northern Iowa and meanders east to Des Moines, where it provides five hundred thousand people in and around Iowa’s largest city with drinking water. Of course, it likely carries much of the pollution with it, including from the manure produced by the Hansens’ hog operations. In 2015, Des Moines experienced 177 days of high nitrate levels.54 In response, it sought to spend $80 million on a new nitrate removal facility to handle its growing needs.55
Neutering the Backlash
As confinement buildings and their manure ponds spread across the Iowa countryside during the 1990s, a passionate rural backlash emerged, sparking a prolonged battle over the future of farming in Iowa. Protesters packed gymnasiums and crowded hallways in the statehouse. Coalitions of family farmers threatened by this new model, environmentalists, and neighboring residents and communities held rallies—one demonstration drew 1,000 supporters in a small town with a population of only 2,700—and lobbied legislators to enact a state moratorium on new confinement construction.56
The pushback against confinements came from all directions. Rightwing commentator Pat Buchanan even made opposition to confinements a key part of his 1996 presidential campaign in Iowa. “Farmers talk about it everywhere I go,” he told the Los Angeles Times after the Iowa caucuses. “Whenever I bring it up, the audience explodes.”57 Buchanan’s surprising close-second finish in the Republican Iowa caucuses—to Kansas senator Bob Dole—elevated him from protest candidate to legitimate contender.58
Although most big corporate animal warehouse networks operate in multiple states, the Hansens staked their entire operation on Iowa. But you’d be hard-pressed to say they were welcomed.59 The fierce debate over confinements made the front page of the Des Moines Register year after year in the mid-1990s.60 National newspapers frequently covered the story.61 Even the Hansens’ home county proposed a moratorium on new confinements.62
The Hansens and other industry leaders likely knew that this opposition posed an existential threat to their booming businesses. Regulations and restrictions against expansion were already being put in place in North Carolina, the state that had first deregulated the industry and kicked off the hog boom. Although Iowa’s cheap corn remained
attractive, its lax regulatory standards were—and remain—the Hog Barons’ essential requirement for success.
It’s easy to see why communities across the state revolted—and many continue to revolt—against the confinements.63 In fact, a recent poll found that nearly two-thirds of respondents favored a moratorium on new corporate hog facilities.64 But despite the popular resistance to animal warehouses, legislators faced pressure from business leaders to invite in even more of them. Agricultural economists sympathetic to large operators such as the Hansens argued that if the state were friendlier to hog operations, the growth potential would be enormous.65
In the summer of 1993, a report called “Project 21” was presented to the Des Moines business leaders who had commissioned it. The 111-page paper, authored by a Virginia-based consulting firm, chided Iowa’s politicians and business leaders for “complacency” with the state’s relative economic health and its low rate of unemployment. The report concluded that Iowa needed to do more to boost growth, which meant that the family farm needed to die. “Although it is politically popular to defend and protect the concept of family farms,” the report proclaimed, “legislation limiting corporate investment is economic folly.”66
The sentiment touched a nerve. “We’re really tired of this type of nonsense,” a leading organizer for an anti-confinement group called Prairiefire told the Des Moines Register in response to the plan. “And if they want a fight in the Legislature, we’ll show them a fight they’d never imagined.” One Iowa farmer asked, “Why are they trying to promote something that will both hurt the environment and sell our young people into lives of indentured servitude?”67
Forced to address the heated controversy, confinement operations marshaled their political power to fend off regulation. In 1994, the newly formed Iowa Pork Alliance enlisted Robert Ray, a Republican
former governor, to remind Iowans of hogs’ economic importance in statewide television ads.68 Iowa Select Farms, for its part, emphasized repeatedly in the press that any efforts to stifle the growth of hog confinements would send production and jobs out of state.69 Iowa Select and its employees also donated $41,000 to the campaign of Terry Branstad, the state’s Republican governor at the time, and hired his former chief of staff, Doug Gross, as a lobbyist.70 Branstad even appeared in an Iowa Select television promotion that year.71
The cozy relationship seemed to pay off. In 1995, Branstad signed a law that would prove to be pivotal for the Hansens, neutering local democracy to clear the way for his industry’s development. The law, known as H.F. 519, offered token protections to neighbors of confinements: new buildings had to be sited at least a quarter mile from residences, and owners had to write plans—which had to be approved by the state—for disposing of their manure.
But the law also handed animal warehouse operators a huge victory by stripping counties of their long-standing authority to deny construction permits to confinement operators. Jeff Hansen described the law as a “fair compromise” and judged it sufficient to keep the Hansens’ business in the state. “We’re going to keep growing in Iowa,” he told the Des Moines Register. 72
The issue later became a prominent topic in the 2002 governor’s race between Doug Gross, the Iowa Select lobbyist, and Democrat Tom Vilsack. While campaigning, Vilsack—who would later serve as secretary of agriculture for Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden—derided Gross as a champion of corporate hog lots. But as state senator, Vilsack had voted for H.F. 519.
Vilsack ended up winning the race. His second term, from 2002 through 2006, coincided with the largest confinement-building boom in Iowa’s history.73
The Sacrifice State
After her rash cleared up—it took a month of topical treatments—Julie Duhn started attending meetings of the county board of supervisors and organizing people to oppose permits for proposed hog buildings. It frustrated and hurt Duhn to know that she could never take her grandkids swimming at Pine Lake. In all her activism, though, Duhn thinks she managed to stop only one confinement from being built. After a zealous campaign in 2017 and 2018 over a particular confinement, Iowa Select Farms withdrew its application.74
When Julie Duhn joined the fight against animal warehouses in 2016, activists and politicians had been campaigning—unsuccessfully—against them for more than twenty years. In Iowa, because of H.F. 519, counties have virtually no policy avenue for blocking confinements as long as the facilities meet the state’s requirements.
Meanwhile, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources rubberstamps permits for medium and large animal warehouses and levies only paltry fines for manure spills. The department’s leadership is appointed by the state’s governor. A recent state audit report determined that the Iowa DNR was “mismanaging a multimillion-dollar fund set up to help oversee Iowa livestock farms and their manure,” but nothing has come of it.75
The department is also so critically underfunded that rigorous enforcement of management plans is all but impossible.76 Implementation of state-sanctioned “best management practices” to reduce manure runoff is voluntary, and such efforts have not stopped the problem from worsening. In fact, 61 percent of Iowa’s rivers and streams and 67 percent of its lakes and reservoirs do not meet basic water quality standards, according to a 2020 assessment by the Iowa DNR.77
In January 2018, Thomas Burkhead learned that Iowa Select Farms had applied for a permit to build its largest-ever sow complex a mile from
his family’s farm near Rockwell City, in Calhoun County. The proposal was for a hog mother ship: a three-shed breeding complex covering an area larger than four football fields and housing 7,498 pigs—5,200 of them gestating sows. Combined, the manure pits underlying the sheds would hold enough waste to fill three Olympic-size swimming pools.
Once weaned, the offspring of the sows would need to be fattened, and that meant even more confinements would soon need to be built. Calhoun County already had more than 150 facilities housing north of three hundred thousand pigs, and residents say the smell of their manure was already making the area unlivable. “There are a lot of days where I don’t go outside, because it stinks enough to make you vomit,” Burkhead said. “I mean, it will knock you on your knees.”78
Burkhead launched into action. He rallied neighbors and community groups to fend off the industrial hog building. Although Burkhead figured they had almost no chance, the opponents persisted, eventually finding a mistake in Iowa Select’s application. The group rallied people to a special supervisor’s meeting and convinced the board to decline to recommend the proposal to the Iowa DNR. But the agency kicked the proposal to the Environmental Protection Commission, an oversight board appointed by the state’s governor, which waved the company’s application through.
With regulatory action blocked, activists have resorted to leaning on public scandal to shame companies into withdrawal. They create Facebook pages, write op-eds and letters to local officials and newspapers, crowd hearings held by county supervisors, and testify for hours. Anything to chip away at animal warehouse operators’ standing with political leadership.
Bill Stowe, chief executive officer and general manager of the Des Moines Water Works, understood the need for drastic action. He had been warning elected officials for years that nitrate levels in the Raccoon River were getting dangerously high.79 In response to waterway pollution
concerns, the State of Iowa created a toothless plan called the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, which did not address the core issue. The plan had no specific goals, no deadlines, and no consequences for failure to address the issue. And consequently, the problem only got worse. Between 2003 and 2019, average pollution levels doubled across the state.80
The state’s inaction forced Bill Stowe and the Des Moines Water Works to take matters into their own hands. In March 2015, the Des Moines Water Works filed a lawsuit against government entities called drainage districts in northern Iowa for their failure to control nitrate pollution in the Raccoon River.81 “Iowa has become a sacrifice state,” Stowe told reporters. “We and our land are collateral damage for [Big Ag].”82
Stowe faced immense opposition for taking such a drastic step. Rather than agreeing to regulate the pollution, the defendant counties dug in, incurring legal costs estimated at more than $1 million. Republican governor Terry Branstad called the lawsuit the equivalent of “declar[ing] war on rural Iowa.” Republicans in the state legislature even proposed dismantling the Des Moines Water Works.83
But the truth of the matter was a lot more complicated than a war between rural and urban Iowa. Folks in rural Iowa—people like Julie Dohn and Thomas Burkhead—are just as threatened by water pollution as their counterparts in Des Moines. In fact, a 2018 national water quality study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that “violation incidence in rural areas is substantially higher than in urbanized areas.”84
Besides, Branstad’s solution to the problem involved raiding a fund that was established to finance new school construction with a sales tax.85 This money would have been particularly meaningful for rural Iowa, which was in desperate need of an update to its decaying education infrastructure.
Polling by the Des Moines Register showed that over 60 percent of Iowans agreed with the Des Moines Water Works, including significant majorities of residents of small towns.86 Another poll found that 73 percent of voters in the state supported limits on manure pollution runoff.87 As Art Cullen, a local newspaperman, put it, “Anyone with eyes and a nose knows in his gut that Iowa has the dirtiest surface water in America.”88
The Des Moines Water Works’ court fight quickly became bitter. The agency indicated that it would settle the case if the parties agreed to higher water quality standards, but the counties swore off any settlement talks.89
At first, it was not entirely clear where the counties got the money to pay their massive legal bills, estimated to be upward of $1.4 million.90 But an investigation conducted by the Storm Lake Times eventually revealed that the case was being financed by a secret fund created by the Agribusiness Association of Iowa.91 As it typically does, Big Ag filtered money to the counties through front groups. When a newspaper and a local advocate for transparency sought to make the funding public, the counties fought them tooth and nail.92
Perhaps fearing that the lawsuit would lead to water quality regulations that would cut into its profits, the industry quickly mobilized to fight it. In addition to contributing to the defense fund, industry and its allies created another dark money group called the Iowa Partnership for Clean Water, which ran attack ads against the Des Moines Water Works, according to reporting by the Des Moines Register. 93 It’s unknown whether Jeff and Deb Hansen contributed to this effort because membership of both the Iowa Partnership for Clean Water and the Agribusiness Association of Iowa is kept secret.
The lawsuit brought by Bill Stowe and the Des Moines Water Works was ultimately dismissed. But even though it wasn’t successful, Stowe’s
efforts brought the issue and the corruption surrounding it into the light of day.
Bill Stowe passed away from pancreatic cancer in April 2019.94 Not long before Stowe died, Art Cullen wrote a column in the Des Moines Register honoring him for accelerating “a conversation that had been taking place in quiet corners. . . . It took courage for him to challenge the chemical cabal that controls Iowa agriculture and politics.” Art continued, “Not everyone would have had the steel.”95
Sadly, Iowa’s water crisis has not improved since Stowe spoke truth to power. In fact, the state has only added more confinement buildings. Every year since 2018, Iowa politicians, cheered on by activists, have introduced a bill in the state’s legislature to halt animal warehouse expansions, and they’ve worked with Democratic senator Cory Booker of New Jersey to introduce a bill in the US Senate that includes a longterm phaseout of large animal warehouses nationwide. But so far, neither has had enough votes to pass.96
Coming up on its thirtieth anniversary, Iowa Select Farms is still expanding, along with the rest of the hog industry in Iowa.97 The state is now home to at least thirteen thousand confinements, and applications for new ones hit the Iowa Department of Natural Resources at a steady clip.98
In the face of opposition, the Hansens have employed a number of tactics to maintain control over the political levers in the state. The Deb and Jeff Hansen Foundation has a long and well-publicized history of charitable giving. It donates thousands of pork chops to food banks, gives vouchers for hams to dozens of schools, and organizes Operation Christmas Meal, a series of drive-through pork handouts. It then posts photos of smiling employees, occasionally joined by a governor or US senator, on social media.99
It’s not unusual for a sitting governor to attend a charity gala thrown by the Hansens. The 2016 spring gala for the Deb and Jeff Hansen
Foundation was a glittering event, packed with smiling faces and powerful personalities. Iowa’s governor at the time, Terry Branstad, was in attendance, as was the president of Iowa State University.100 The university, following a $2 million Hansen family donation, had dedicated the Jeff and Deb Hansen Agriculture Student Learning Center less than two years earlier.101
In 2019, Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, contributed a tour of the state capitol and the governor’s mansion, led by Reynolds herself, to the gala’s auction. Iowa Select Farms requested her presence at the gala the day after Reynolds won election, likely aided by the Hansens’ six-figure campaign contribution.102
The Hansen family’s charitable efforts have seemingly solidified its power. During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Governor Reynolds fought to keep packing plants open, prioritizing the interests of confinement operators such as the Hansens, who stood to lose millions as these sheds became overloaded with marketready animals.103
And in July 2020, when Iowa Select’s administrative headquarters in suburban Des Moines had an outbreak scare, the company reached out directly to the governor’s office, which sent a rapid-response team to test thirty-two office employees.104 Although Reynolds argued that the state offered testing to dozens of other businesses, the governor’s rapid allocation of testing resources to political donors such as the Hansens stirred controversy, prompting an investigation from the state auditor.
In December 2020, Governor Reynolds spent a frigid day handing out Iowa Select pork packages at an Operation Christmas Meal drivethrough event in Osceola, Iowa. But the Hansens weren’t there to help. Their jet had landed a few days earlier in sunny Naples, Florida.105
Paperback | $35.00
312 pages
PUBLISHED: April 2024
ISBN: 9781642833386
Making Climate Tech Work
Policies that Drive Innovation
Alon Tal
Climate tech is critical for averting planetary chaos. Half the greenhouse gas reductions required to reach “net-zero” climate targets in 2050 will need to come from technologies that have not yet been invented.
Making Climate Tech Work is an insightful analysis of how smart government policies can make those technologies a reality. Which approaches can lead us to a sustainable economy, and which are likely to fall short? Learn how Denmark became a wind energy superpower, Germany incentivized renewables, Australia phased out incandescent bulbs, and why carbon taxes have failed around the world–but could be designed for success. Alon Tal expertly distills each policy’s benefits and drawbacks, along with related ethical questions and public perceptions. The result is an essential primer for anyone interested in accelerating climate tech solutions.
Alon Tal
Alon Tal’s career has been a balance between academia, politics, and public interest advocacy. He is presently a visiting professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and outgoing chair of the Department of Public Policy at Tel Aviv University. Tal has published hundreds of academic and
popular articles and written/edited some eleven books on topics involving sustainability. Between 2021 and 2022 Tal was a member of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament where he chaired the country’s first subcommittee on Environment and Climate. He also served on Israel’s national delegation to the COP27 climate conference.
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Keywords: Carbon contracts; Carbon taxes; Conference of the Parties (COP); Decarbonization; Electric vehicles; Emission trading systems; Emissions reduction; Energy efficiency; Feed-in tariff; Inflation Reduction Act (IRA); Innovation; Just transition; Mitigation; Net zero; Net-metering; Nudges; Public policy; Public procurement; Renewable energy; Research and development; Social cost of carbon; Solar power; Sustainable development; United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; Wind energy
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preface
The origins of this book can be traced back to several events. Quite unexpectedly, during the lockdown days of 2020, I found myself cc’d in a forty-person forum with vaunted academics from universities around the world. These were serious people who think seriously about sustainability. How I was included in such a storied group of scholars remains a mystery. Nonetheless, I was happy to be a fly on the computer screens of such auspicious experts.
The conversations meandered among many of the pressing ecological issues of our time. A common concern was the perils of climate change. As the dialogue drifted in the direction of platitudes regarding the importance of increasing global awareness about the severity of global warming, Bill Rees weighed in.
For those still working on their environmental literacy, University of British Columbia researcher William Rees is something of an ecological superstar. Perhaps chief among many professional distinctions is his research with a gifted graduate student, Mathis Wackernagel, to develop the theory and methods for measuring ecological footprints. Their approach continues to provide an accessible and rigorous measure for characterizing the Earth’s carrying capacity.
Professor Rees’s candor immediately brought the conversation down to earth. He observed that it was highly unlikely that the climate crisis would be solved by educational and consciousness-raising initiatives. To paraphrase his point, Rees explained to the participants that there probably was no group of individuals on the planet who better understood the adverse effects of global warming on the planet than the present company. But then he asked rhetorically, “How many of you have ever voluntarily passed up an international flight for an important visit because of the associated emissions?”
He clarified that he was not trying to be sanctimonious. Indeed, Rees acknowledged that he, too, is given to rationalizing periodic carbon-intensive individual trips for some “greater good.” His point was that if such an illustrious assemblage of climate mavens and sustainability authorities are disinclined to make meaningful sacrifices in their own mobility to save the planet, then what could realistically be expected from the general public?
The argument resonated strongly with me. Like any well-meaning environmentalist, I rarely experience a day that is not punctuated by various acts of ecological inconsistency or even hypocrisy. I, too, have long harbored a nagging realization that if humanity does not figure out how to fuel commercial airlines with hydrogen or some very low-carbon alternative, visions of a carbon-neutral emissions equilibrium will remain elusive. I was also well aware that the innovation required to achieve a rapid transformation in aviation fuel would not happen by itself. It will only emerge in response to a clear set of market signals and policy prescriptions that keep scientists, engineers, and airlines engaged.
For a long time I have seen the gap grow larger between where the world needs to be in reducing our collective emissions and where we actually are. The old fossil fuel economy tarries, even though, with every passing day, the risk of nonlinear climate cacophony increases. There are many reasons for this. When I served as chair of the Environment, Climate, and Health subcommittee of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, it was easy to see them up close, and the motivation for this book began to fully coalesce.
To start with, disingenuous disinformation campaigns, financed by the “merchants of doubt” from the fossil fuel industry, have for decades sought to undermine the legitimacy of climate science. Tragically, they have been highly effective. Those interests have not disappeared and continue to pose political challenges to decarbonization progress and future sustainability around the world. In addition to the usual bureaucratic obstacles associated with developing expensive, disruptive, and even radical technologies, climate tech companies must also overcome extremely powerful old-economy adversaries who are not interested in becoming obsolete and irrelevant in the new low-carbon world. For instance, the auto industry in Germany is often blamed for the government’s failure to enact effective climate policies for the transport sector, while the fossil fuel industry is accused of sabotaging Japanese support for key decarbonizing targets.
Less insidious, but no less formidable, are obstacles created by well-meaning government officials, committed to formal procedures and safeguards, who do not always understand the importance of flexibility and speedy decision-making when approving critical decarbonizing technology. This a common phenomenon: the US Environmental Protection Agency faces criticism for its sluggishness in approving carbon-capture injection wells. There are companies willing to pay a green premium for low-carbon cement but face inflexible regulations around the chemistry of cement composition. Novel ingredients used in plant-based or cultured meat products can trigger the red flag of food safety regulations, leading to massive delays. Researchers seeking a permit to test a new renewable energy
application or energy storage project must navigate the many hurdles associated with land-use planning. In short, legitimate safeguards designed to protect the environment cannot distinguish between projects whose delay is detrimental to environmental interests and those that need to be streamlined.
As chair of the Climate Subcommittee in the Israeli parliament, I visited many promising climate tech companies around the country, from the cultured meat and milk research laboratories of Aleph Farms and Remilk to experimental agrovoltaic systems in grape vineyards and UBQ’s “alchemy-like” pilot plant, which creates thermoplastics from unsorted household waste that would otherwise be sent to landfills. These companies tend to be the lucky ones; while domestic incentives and local climate tech policies may be inadequate to give them the economies of scale they need at home in Israel, they will ultimately find a place in the European climate ecosystems. There, I believe they will flourish and emerge as important decarbonization endeavors.
By way of contrast, there are hundreds—possibly thousands—of equally promising, yet less fortunate climate tech startups around the world. Many have extraordinary ideas but will end up fading away or going bankrupt before their unique technologies can make a contribution to the collective global mitigation effort. Better public policies would give them a much better chance to succeed.
In recent years, there have been signs that things are starting to change and move in a sustainable direction. The correct policies, however, could make things happen much, much faster. And the world desperately needs to move faster.
Failure to expedite promising climate tech opportunities is not simply a case of overzealous planning commissions’ protecting agricultural fields from turbines and solar farms. Rather, it reflects a general lack of urgency in many governments’ perceptions about the planet’s climate future—the kind of urgency that compels governments to produce game-changing military technologies in wartime.
It is this very lack of urgency, this complacency, that leads to a shortage of funding for research and development at critical junctures in a startup company’s development. What policy support there is might appear as anemic government tax credits, interminable permitting processes, or unsustainable procurement preferences, all of which make anxious investors uncomfortable about financing a creative climate tech startup. Climate complacency can also have a more sinister explanation—the political influence still enjoyed by the old fossil fuel economy.
Ultimately, I believe that the big picture comes down to this: climate policy first and foremost must promote mitigation and adaptation. But catalyzing innovation, to ensure that decarbonization technologies will be waiting for us when
we reach the next stage on this “net zero”—or, ultimately, “net negative”—journey, must also become a paramount objective. Notwithstanding an abundance of lip service about emission commitments, carbon neutrality by 2050, and intergenerational justice, public policies far too often are simply obtuse, oblivious to the full technological transition we need to restore the planet’s climatic stability.
Yale University law professors Zachary Liscow and Quentin Karpilow have proposed that the UN Climate Change convention be amended so that countries are required to submit two separate action plans (that is, nationally determined contributions, or NDCs): the first, like present procedures, would describe intended national efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions; the second would detail strategies to accelerate “cleantech innovation,” including the anticipated initiatives of the local private sector. This is not a bad idea. Presumably, it would force governments to pay closer attention to the challenges faced by their respective climate tech industries and how governments might help through decarbonization interventions. At the very least, it would serve to promote a “clearer understanding of countries’ contributions to the global cleantech knowledge stock.” 1
Initially, the imperative of promoting policies that remove obstacles and speed up climate tech development was not easy for me to internalize. As a lifelong environmental advocate, academic, and politician, I had always been quite content as a pro-regulation zealot: if tough rules designed to control an environmental challenge are not solving the problem, then it probably just requires tougher regulations. The climate crisis suggests that this approach does not always make sense. Instead, I was surprised to find myself berating government officials for being too stringent and inflexible in permitting or approving agrovoltaic project applications. If we are to dramatically reduce greenhouse emissions, we need to enact policies that simultaneously reduce our carbon footprint and nourish technological innovation.
Global warming constitutes a unique environmental challenge, a challenge unlike any other humanity has ever encountered. There are many reasons why it can be classified as a “wicked policy problem.” The underlying social and scientific complexity means that there is no single, certain solution. Automatic support for draconian environmental regulations that delay climate tech deployment needs to be reconsidered because “the climate conundrum” really is different. The first thing that makes it different is that it simply won’t wait. Dangerous thresholds will get crossed. As we push policies to rapidly reduce emissions, we must make sure not to push away the very innovations that might enable us to move toward carbon neutrality and climate stability.
Given limited resources, how should the government help? When asked, most climate tech entrepreneurs shrug their shoulders and say, “We’d be thrilled if the government would just get out of our way.” But I believe that we, as a society, need to do more than simply stand aside and embrace some laissez faire, libertarian fantasy. History is replete with technological transformations and associated achievements that were only made possible by government intervention. Ambitious technology policies and proactive government engagement put a man on the moon and the Internet in our homes. We will not get to net zero without them.
The truth is that countries have been adopting policies that support decarbonization technologies for decades, and climate tech is responding. But the greatest challenges remain ahead. The International Energy Agency estimates that some 50 percent of future carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will need to come from technologies that are in the demonstration or prototype stages today. What can be done to shepherd them forward?
After considerable searching, I was surprised to find no comprehensive, accessible, and systematic review of policies that seek to mitigate climate change and to help climate tech entrepreneurs cross the proverbial “valley of death” through which they must pass to reach a marketable product. Nor is there a book that evaluates how disparate public policies can empower corporations to race ahead to develop and scale sustainable, low-carbon products. There is, of course, a surfeit of excellent publications about climate change. But no satisfying playbook exists describing the kinds of government programs that have begun to effectively cut emissions while bolstering climate tech ecosystems.
Such an evaluation requires a very different way of thinking about the role of government than the usual environmental policy manifesto. It seemed like a good idea to try a different path—to consider new approaches and hear new perspectives. Stanford’s Graduate School of Business turned out to be an ideal place to undertake such a journey. I had written two previous books while on sabbaticals at this magnificent university. The chapters flowed quite naturally in the familiar embrace of the university’s iconic conservation biology group. I was very much within my comfort zone as an environmental activist. But the climate crisis forces us all to change. Eventually, it was time to move on. Given the influential role that the business school has assumed at Stanford’s new Doerr School of Sustainability, it made sense to join their team. And thus a new course in public policy and climate innovation was offered—and this book was born.
The book follows the progression of my Stanford course’s classes and content fairly closely; it begins in chapter 1 with a cursory review of technology policy in general and the implications for the climate crisis in particular. Do we really
want government intervention in the rough-and-tumble of climate tech startups? What do theory and empirical research teach us about nurturing innovation? In what ways is climate innovation different from innovation in other sectors, where governments seek to expedite technological breakthroughs? In chapter 2, we consider what sort of obligations countries take on pursuant to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and how international agreements influence domestic innovation policies.
As one looks around the world, it is possible to identify a rich suite of alreadyimplemented policy alternatives that are supposed to support innovation and scale new climate technologies. Among the more common interventions are funding for research and development; carbon taxes and emissions trading (along with other economic subsidies); renewable portfolio standards, tax credits, feed-in tariffs, and carbon contracts for difference; technology-forcing prescriptions; government procurement programs and more gentle government nudges. They need to be compared. Which ones seem to work? What problems have they encountered in the real world? How can failed policies be fixed? And which alternatives make the most sense as we scramble to reduce discharges of greenhouse gases and galvanize a transition to a new economy?
The bulk of this book, chapters 3–8, considers how existing climate policies have fared, not just in reducing emissions but also in catalyzing technological innovation. My conclusions are taken from the vast academic climate-policy literature published in recent years, along with dozens of interviews of practitioners and observers in countries around the world. Many important lessons emerge from truly diverse international experiences. Rather than just muddling forward, there are numerous possible paths and priorities that need to be considered. The stakes are too high for us not to pick the best ones.
The final two chapters address two issues that are sometimes overlooked in discussions about climate tech, each of which reflects the growing recognition that climate justice, both domestically and at the international level, needs to inform public policy. The first issue concerns disruption, the phenomenon of workers losing their livelihoods in a changing economy. Of course, history is filled with Cassandras who offer dire predictions about the downsides of technological transformation and its many innocent victims. When automobiles and direct telephone dialing were first introduced, disaster scenarios were predicted for stable hands and switchboard operators. Yes, many people found themselves out of a job. But many more ultimately found a new and more prosperous niche in an expanding economy.
Similarly, it does not take a prophet to predict that the transition to a lowcarbon economy will disrupt many people’s lives. Indeed, there are already clear
“losers.” And many more will be left behind. If humanity reaches its carbon aspirations, then in less than thirty years there will probably be very few dairy farmers, coal miners, taxi drivers, or auto mechanics left. Climate advocates are quick to highlight the new professions and opportunities that a clean-energy transition will create. But it is still important for a compassionate, responsible society to support displaced workers through alternative employment programs and other measures to ensure a “just transition.” Policy can help provide solutions for the many people who, through no fault of their own, are left without a livelihood.
The second chapter concerning climate justice tackles the “inconvenient truth” that the poorest places on earth, whose inhabitants have contributed the least greenhouse gasses, suffer disproportionately from the adverse impacts of climate change. This needs to be addressed in policies supporting adaptation projects. At the same time, it is absolutely essential to consider how policies can scale renewable technologies in developing economies. The United Nations projects that by the end of the century there will be four billion people living in Africa. That’s a twenty-fold increase since 1950, when there were 220 million Africans. To stabilize greenhouse gasses in the earth’s atmosphere, developing countries must be part of the solution. As countries begin imposing border taxes on goods with large carbon footprints, the Global South will need to be part of the transition if it is to fully participate in international markets. International leaders pursuing net-zero strategies have to do a better job of helping to deploy renewables and other climate technologies in the developing nations.
Unfortunately, environmental entrepreneurs tend to ignore developing economies because of their low market potential. That is one of the reasons that the air and water there are oftentimes so polluted. Climate tech must be different. Like most folks, I believe that it is high time we take the next giant stride forward in eliminating extreme poverty. But even those who do not believe in international development aid can understand that our atmospheric commons require that no country be left behind.
This book was written in an academic setting. But it is intended to address real-world problems—perhaps the most pressing global problem of them all. The different chapters can serve as a guide of sorts to scores of elected officials, civil servants, academics, business leaders, engineers, and activists in the trenches who are fully engaged in promoting policies to address the climate crisis. To support the many stories told, statistics shown, and arguments made, the book compensates for brevity with intensive documentation and footnotes. It reflects much of what I have learned from the most recent round of climate policies. What works? And what does not?
We are indeed living in perilous times, times that cry out for action. One third of Pakistan was underwater in 2022, leaving millions of homes fully submerged and tens of millions of lives ruined after unprecedented flooding. In 2023, thousands died in another apocalyptic, climate-triggered deluge, this time in Libya. Lytton, British Columbia, witnessed an unimaginable 49.6°C temperature in 2021 before burning to the ground. A single blaze, the Dixie Fire, just one of the 7,000 plus annual conflagrations that are now the new normal in California, decimated one million acres of forest. But that’s only a fourteenth the destruction that occurred in Australia when massive bush fires raged out of control for months. As I write this, devastating fires raging across Canada and Greece have displaced thousands and sent suffocating smoke and particulates to faraway lands, closing airports and creating health hazards.
Siberia is sizzling again this summer, with very disturbing implications for the permafrost. UN experts estimate that the majority of the 60 million people displaced internally this year became refugees due to climate change. The oceans steadily rise, threatening the very existence of island nations like the Maldives or large swaths of low-lying countries like Bangladesh. The Micronesian island of Kiribati is only the first country whose citizens will have to move due to the rising sea.
The present carnage and chaos are but a trailer for the nightmare we can expect if the world fails to act boldly. It is truly difficult to believe that such a turbulent reality is real. As author Jonathan Safran Foer writes, we know the mounting climate disasters to be true. But at the same time, we are unable to believe them. It is simply too hard to wrap our minds around the implications of such a climatically violent future and what we must do to stop it. Nevertheless, the time has long been up for confining our efforts to education and explanations. Climate-driven catastrophes are affecting lives in virtually every corner of the world already. They share one disconcerting common denominator: the crisis is just getting started. If we fail to act, things will get much worse. The climate crisis demands far more effective public policies to reduce our emissions and stimulate climate innovation.
The good news is that if we do act, things can and will get better. If we muster the political will, there are already proven policies that can expedite many of the changes so urgently needed. If we design these policies to incentivize and harness human ingenuity, scientists and engineers can reduce—and ultimately eliminate—our collective carbon footprint. In order to transform carbon-neutrality objectives from wistful lip service to a new way of living on the planet, humanity must live by a new set of rules, and we must innovate. This won’t happen by itself. But if governments intervene effectively, it can be done. This book describes how.
Chapter 1
Tech Policy and the Climate Crisis
It was another oppressively sultry August day in Washington, DC, but the atmosphere in the White House was nothing short of jubilant. A last-minute compromise between the renegade Democratic West Virginia senator, Joe Manchin, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer delivered the deciding hand in the 51–50 vote in favor of what President Joe Biden called “the most significant US climate legislation ever.”1 Models suggested that the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) would reduce the country’s 2030 carbon footprint by 40 percent relative to 2005: a quantum leap in the direction of a “net-zero” emissions future. No matter that Manchin had insisted on framing the new statute as an antiinflation measure and not one targeting the scourge of climate change. Everyone understood that the heart of the bill was an unprecedented $369-billion allocation for deploying climate tech and developing low-carbon technologies. The law’s disparate tax credits for incentivizing decarbonization are likely to reach far higher sums.
America’s return to climate leadership was a great relief for the growing number of people around the world alarmed that global warming was irreversibly damaging the Earth and threatening the future of civilization. The IRA offered validation for those who had long held the belief that the climate crisis could only be solved by rapidly decarbonizing the planet’s economy. Such a
dramatic transition would not happen without a massive investment in climate tech. The former vice president, Nobel peace laureate, and climate prophetin-chief, Al Gore, tweeted about “a historic turning point”: “It represents the single largest investment in climate solutions and climate justice in US history. Decades of tireless work by climate advocates across the country led to this moment.”2 Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, waxed optimistic: “Progress doesn’t happen all at once, but it does happen—and this is what it looks like.”3
At the same time, there was no shortage of critics who did not buy the underlying assumption of President Biden’s visionary climate strategy. The Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank, expressed the umbrage of many opponents:
These subsidies could shift trillions of dollars of investment away from conventional energy sources and into green energy pipe dreams. This shift would leave our economy smaller, less dynamic, and less innovative, and will trap millions in poverty. . . . Do you like your natural gas stove or fireplace? Well, this bill is part of a broader effort to make these appliances relics of the past. It creates tax credits to have homes run on “clean energy” and for the purchase of “clean vehicles.” If American consumers demand those types of products and features, that’s one thing. The creation of this tax credit is a recognition that Americans don’t desire the products and, therefore, Washington politicians must induce Americans to “do the right thing.”4
A year later the debate still raged. Republican lawmakers proposed legislation to cancel the IRA before it had a chance to become fully operational.5 Some politicians still assailed its policies as disgraceful handouts that subsidize elitist technologies for the wealthy.6 Many American allies, from South Korea to Europe, were furious with the crass protectionism and preferential treatment that the new American climate strategy afforded the local climate tech industry,7 claiming the policies threatened to set off a clean-energy “arms race.”8 Climate activists fretted that the IRA’s support for decarbonization was “too little, too late,”9 or simply wondered whether any government was capable of accelerating climate innovation fast enough.
The controversies beg two fundamental questions: First, should governments be in the “technology policy” business in the first place? And second, is technology policy an effective way for governments to reduce carbon emissions and confront the climate crisis? If the answers to these questions were not
unequivocally affirmative, this book would be very short. Nonetheless, before diving into the clear imperative for government support for technological advancement in general, and decarbonization technologies in particular, it is worthwhile to consider some of the critics’ common arguments.
There is no shortage of naysayers who attack the very notion of a systematic, vigorous technology policy, choreographed by a central government as illadvised and wasteful. They have their reasons: for starters, they challenge the blind assumption that societal investment via government funded research in the private sector will ultimately pay for itself. Governments do not face the pressures to quickly produce favorable economic results that venture capitalists and banks do. This means that public funds may well be invested in ventures that will be less efficient and less profitable than their competitors that can already show lucrative “bottom lines” sufficiently appealing to attract investors. According to this view, government involvement in promoting technologies undermines the rough-and-tumble of free-market competition and assumes that taxpayers’ money is less valuable than market-rate capital.
Ideologically, technology policy is anathema for capitalism’s true believers. To them, flouting the natural “fair fight” of the free-market undermines the cherished survival-of-the-fittest dynamic on which a healthy economy is based. As they see it, unfettered competition has always been the best guarantor of optimal resource allocation, sound economic decisions, and technological progress. According to this view, the only legitimate role that governments should assume in supporting innovation is ensuring that markets remain open, transparent, and competitive in order to allow “the best technology to win.” In the course of human events, market distortions may occur for any number of reasons. But governments should try to minimize them, not perpetuate or exacerbate them through policy that promotes certain technologies. Making the advancement of innovation an integral component of public policy leads to swollen bureaucracies, with all the institutional ambition and hubris that inevitably spawn partiality and wasteful economic decisions.
Another argument against technology policy goes like this: In today’s global economy, progress depends on the removal of barriers and the free exchange of ideas. In a post-Covid world where an increasingly high percentage of researchers and developers work remotely, the notion of a country devoting resources to gain a national economic advantage through a particular technological advancement or domination of a manufacturing sector is simply no longer appropriate. A truly global economy requires an open, creative, transboundary, and ultimately unobstructed competitive process.
Competence is another source of objections: critics argue that governments are not designed—and indeed lack the capacity—to pick technological “winners and losers.” While many talented officials may harbor delusions that they can shape the outcomes of technology development, or that strategic investments in good ideas invariably lead to prosperity, the record suggests otherwise. The technological stagnation that characterized the centralized Communist economies of the past are a reminder of the perils of bureaucratic overreach. Especially in free-market economies, a ponderous government hand at the steering wheel, guiding technological strategy, is unlikely to lead to favorable outcomes.
In the context of climate tech, the case of Solyndra offers a case in point: this Fremont, California–based company offered tubular solar panels that were supposed to be uniquely appropriate for large, low-sloping roofs. Their cylindrical systems were made from copper indium gallium selenide, which the company argued would be more efficient than conventional crystalline silicon. In 2009, as part of the renewable energy boost at the heart of the Obama Administration’s economic stimulus plan, the government cosigned $535 million in loans for the company. There was no shortage of warning signs: the founding CEO had left the company; market analysts were wary; Dun & Bradstreet’s credit appraisal of the company was a very diffident “Fair.”10 And of course, China was subsidizing its solar manufacturing so much that competing was practically impossible.11 But the government was on a mission, intent on making a significant financial commitment to renewable energy. Disaster did not take long. Two years later, Solyndra filed for bankruptcy.12
The Solyndra debacle raises the political problem of “sunk costs” and bureaucratic momentum. Civil service culture and institutional exigencies don’t allow officials to admit when they make mistakes in their use of taxpayers’ money. Time after time, governments throw “good money after bad” at projects: from dams and supersonic jets to nuclear plants and synthetic fuels. Conversely, long investment horizons don’t jibe well with election cycles: shifting political winds in democratic societies inevitably truncate funding and lead to the collapse of long-term projects.
There are also legitimate concerns about the unintended consequence of crowding out private financial markets. Taxpayer dollars are precious and public coffers limited, making government budgeting a zero-sum game. Tax-funded programs to advance new technologies (when the same innovation might have enjoyed support from the private sector) may come at the expense of underwriting other important civic or social initiatives. Venture capital (VC) will never be able to compete with the government in assuming risks of unproven technologies, taking on long-term investments, or absorbing the losses when an R&D venture
goes south. Investors may play it safe and simply opt out, whereas in the absence of government investment, some might have been very willing to step up to the plate and finance a risky new technology.
Technology policy is also disparaged by critics for spawning corruption and favoritism. No bureaucrat is born fully dispassionate and unbiased. Very gifted, persuasive, and well-connected people are paid large sums of money to influence public spending decisions. Even if no money is passed under or over the table, far too often enticements, whether political or material, inform government decisions—generally, not for the better. Even if one holds a less cynical view about the way lobbyists operate, access to decision-makers will never be created equal.
Opponents of government involvement in directing technological development invariably offer “empirical proof” to support their position. American conservative think tanks are particularly good at finding examples of confident bureaucrats wasting unseemly sums of public money to promote technologies that, in retrospect, were always duds. Take the time the city of San Francisco spent over $20,000 on a trash can.13 And there is the $400,000 self-cleaning toilet for the Washington Metro that never really worked.14 NASA’s exotic inventions for life in space are living proof that the government is not always a paragon of savvy technology development. Should it really cost $125,000 to develop a 3D “pizza printer” that might be used on Mars fifteen years in the future?15 And of course, the veil of secrecy behind military technologies hides the most grotesque waste of public resources for new weapons system. Consider the $1.7 trillion dollars spent since 1995 on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet, which is still not ready to fly.16
So go the main objections of technology policy detractors. They may make for good rhetoric. But this jaundiced perspective about government involvement in technological innovation has never had much traction historically. In recent years it has enjoyed less and less influence and is largely dismissed as demagoguery. There are good reasons for this.
The Innovation Imperative
Technology development has been an important part of government activity around the world from time immemorial. Indeed, public commitment to support promising technologies is neither radical nor new. It was America’s good fortune that Alexander Hamilton emerged as the dominant voice in economic matters in the formative days of the United States. As early as 1791, Hamilton was outspoken about the need for the government to cast aside laissez faire
orthodoxy for a range of policies—from tariffs to procurement contracts.17 In Hamilton’s hyperactive mind, government intervention was essential to foster industry in the nascent national economy and make the United States competitive with Europe.
The American government began to allocate funds for technological advancements in weaponry almost from the get-go, starting with the establishment of its Army Corp of Engineers in 1802.18 Years later, Congress established the Office of Science and Technology Policy in its Department of Industry and Commerce to make sure that the president has the best possible guidance on advances in science and technology in civilian matters. This office continues in its mission to “advance health, prosperity, security, environmental quality, and justice for all Americans.”19 On average, the US government spends more than $70 billion a year to fund scientific research and nurture innovative technology. Of course, this is hardly an American phenomenon. A sustained institutional commitment to supporting technological development has been part of national economic strategies in Japan, Israel, and South Korea, as well as across the European Union from Germany and Ireland to Denmark and Sweden—to name just a few. Apparently, these programs enjoy sufficient demonstratable successes to prevail over libertarian skeptics.20
Investment of public funds in technological advancement is sound public policy. There are three central justifications for sustained government commitment to technological innovation:
• the critical role of governments in ensuring economic prosperity;
• the responsibility of government to provide public goods; and
• market failures and the need for government intervention to overcome “externalities”—the negative side effects of commercial activity that are not reflected in the cost of products and services.
Economic Prosperity
Economies are driven by four factors that affect the production of goods: natural resources, physical capital, human capital, and technological innovation.21 Improving these “inputs” leads to higher GDP and greater total prosperity. It should therefore not be surprising that governments take an active role in nurturing all four factors. There is a broad societal consensus that allocating tax dollars toward the sustainable development of land, water, and minerals (natural resources), infrastructure (physical capital), and education (human capital) is an
appropriate use of public funds. Innovation is no different. Insofar as technological innovation generates economic activity, and economic activity generates social prosperity, investments in expanding a society’s technological tool kit is a sound, if not obligatory, use of public funds.
National agencies and programs with a mandate for proactive technology patronage make sense as the relentless velocity of change grows ever swifter, making it imperative for businesses to run ever faster in order to stay in the global game. Even large, seemingly well-managed corporations are not always sufficiently nimble to remain competitive. The decline of Nokia, once the world’s preeminent cell phone company, is instructive. By 2010, the Finnish company’s market share had begun to hemorrhage as Apple and Samsung came to dominate the smartphone market.22 There are several reasons for its economic implosion, but chief among them was Nokia’s inability to stay apace of the rapidly evolving technologies in the cell phone industry.23
While much is made of the global nature of today’s economy, there are other forces at play. In a post-Covid world, many countries are wary of becoming too dependent on international markets and are beginning to hedge their bets with homegrown alternatives. Governments are looking to repatriate supply chains and localize innovation. In most economies, this will not happen without policy interventions.
Similarly, if a national government is expected to help sustain its country’s competitive advantage, it must ensure that its industries constantly innovate.24 Wise policy, for instance, played a key but often underappreciated role in supporting the technology advances that led to the rise of the “Asian Tigers”—the booming economies of South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—in the second half of the twentieth century.25
Regardless of a nation’s particular circumstances, innovation remains one of the most reliable indicators of economic and societal health. Indeed, there are few universal truths as salient as the need to evolve and adapt. Evolution theory was predicated on the axiom that it is “not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” This is as true for economies as it is for biodiversity. From Charles Darwin to Jared Diamond, the lesson is plain: Adapt or die.
Providing Public Goods and National Security
National defense is a classic example of a public good because all citizens benefit from it: there really is no way to exclude “non-payers” and prevent “free riders”
from enjoying military protection. The same holds true for law enforcement, highways, education, or clean air. Sadly, in a world that favors “the strong,” a country’s survival is often more a function of military might than economic agility. That’s why, historically, the lion’s share of government spending on technological innovation goes to ensuring national security. Indeed, the United States spends some $773 billion dollars annually on its defense budget,26 with a large portion directed to applied scientific research and innovative military technologies.
Aside from providing security, military investments can also yield extraordinary technological advances with applications to civilian life. Afterall, the Internet, nuclear energy, speech recognition software, autonomous vehicles, LED lighting, magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs), and even freeze-dried foods all started as military projects. But even without side benefits to society, the imperative of keeping citizens safe will always drive government investment in R&D.
Addressing Market Failures
The invisible hand of the market does many things well, but it cannot guarantee that the economy will benefit society as whole. For example, knowledge is essentially a public good. Typically, for an inventor to be remunerated for her work, her breakthrough cannot be kept a secret. For most scientists to succeed, their research findings also must be made public. This in turn can create a virtuous cycle or spillover effect, in which other researchers build on a new discovery to create additional innovations. The public surely benefits from this dynamic, but the inventor, or the company that invested in the research, may not. As a result, research to develop a critical technology may be underfunded, producing a less than optimal social outcome.27
There are many instances when it becomes the government’s responsibility to intervene in order to correct market failures. “Orphan drugs” constitute a classic example. In many cases, narrow market analysis leads pharmaceutical companies to abandon development of a drug that could cure serious but rare diseases. Typically, this happens when fewer than 200,000 people are affected. That’s why the US Congress passed the1983 Orphan Drug Act, guaranteeing the pharmaceutical industry sufficient financial benefits to develop innovative medical solutions in such cases.28 In retrospect, due to this compassionate and rational policy, some 600 orphan medicines for rare diseases have come to market during the past forty years.29 Because the government stepped in when the market wasn’t working, millions of people around the world were given the gift of life.
Much of environmental protection policy is predicated on the notion that economists have a hard time ascertaining the full social cost of polluting activities. The truth is that environmental assets in most transactions are undervalued. This is the case for clean air, healthy oceans, safe drinking water, quiet, uncontaminated land, biodegradable products, and endangered species. As a result, no one is willing to pay for the technologies that should be developed to prevent adverse environmental outcomes—even though the collective societal benefits from doing so greatly outweigh any associated expense.
In cases of market failure, there is a compelling public interest in government involvement to promote a technological solution. And so it was that myriad unaddressed environmental problems gave rise to interventions that spawned key technologies, including biowaste treatment developed by the UK government under its Landfill Directive;30 new German biodiesel production;31 wastewater treatment technologies in France;32 and advanced oxidation processes for treating contaminated ground and surface water, developed by the US federal government in its hazardous waste remediation Superfund program.33 The damages associated with the climate crisis are orders of magnitude higher. In 2006, London School of Economics professor Nicholas Stern estimated that the total costs of climate change would soon reach 5 percent of annual global gross domestic product; as conditions worsen, the global costs might reach an unimaginable 20 percent of GDP. 34 No subsequent report has changed the persuasive economic rationale for investing in climate tech.
The public has come to rely on the government to ensure that society develops the technology it needs to remain competitive economically and to defend itself. It also expects it to address the many market failures that lead to abandonment of essential technologies. Support for scientific and technological advancement constitutes a critical government function and should be fully reflected in the global strategy to address the climate crisis.
Why Climate Tech Policy Is Different
Promotion of climate tech has many characteristics in common with other efforts to advance technology, but it also has inherently unique dynamics. What then makes climate technology different from other areas of economic development? Climate tech has four unique traits, any one of which justifies particularly creative and aggressive policies for stimulating innovation: externalities, extended development horizons, high costs of early experimentation, and urgency.
Externalities
Climate tech’s sluggish initial performance in the late twentieth century constitutes a classic case of “market failure”—when the value of a business venture to society is far higher than its current commercial value, and governments do not intervene. This is a function of externalities, or the “costs and benefits that are not captured in market prices.”35 This divergence is particularly pronounced when it comes to climate tech, which means that sustainable technologies may not be funded by private capital, even when there are powerful societal benefits that justify investment. For example, for years developing photovoltaics and storage made sense ecologically—and economically—in countries importing fossil fuels, but it never happened. Like so many other climate-mitigation challenges, without a price on the greenhouse gases released to the atmosphere, climate tech development will never be sufficiently monetized and will always be undervalued.
It is worth remembering that society has no problem penalizing firms that produce negative externalities. The “polluter pays” principal is axiomatic across the world as the basis for civil and criminal penalties in environmental legislation.36 By the same token, subsidies are appropriate when technologies create positive externalities—like the collective benefit gleaned from transitioning to renewable electricity, energy storage, cultured protein, carbon removal, or lowcarbon cement.
There are economic formalists who a priori oppose any imposed “internalization of externalities” because they see it as a violation of free-market capitalism. But almost without exception, modern governments accept the notion that the “invisible hand of the market” frequently does not produce optimal results. It is well to quote the late Herman Daily, the World Bank economist turned University of Maryland professor, who quipped, “If the survival of humanity is external to your model, you probably need a new model.” Policies that prioritize support for climate tech are also an antidote to the many years of subsidies lavished on the fossil fuel industry with its negative externalities38—and an expression of the positive externalities associated with technologies that mitigate climate change.
Extended Development Horizons
Unlike conventional high tech, where developing an app or cyber security software can reach the market in a matter of a year, climate technology takes time. Climate tech is often tightly linked to infrastructure—and infrastructure planning and construction are protracted processes. The problem is that venture capital
funds generally are set to run for no more than ten years—and usually far less.39 At that point, any remaining funds are liquidated, and financiers remunerated. Climate tech entrepreneurs require more “patient investors.”40 While politicians operate according to short time horizons, government bureaucracies staffed by career civil servants have the ability to take a long-term view.
“Green hydrogen”—that is, hydrogen produced by the electrolysis of water using renewable electricity—offers a good example of just how long this proverbial “valley of death” can be for firms that seek to develop meaningful climate tech innovation. H2Pro is a promising Israeli green hydrogen firm that opened its doors in 2019.41 But the company’s technology is based on five previous years of electrochemistry research by Techion research team Avner Rothschild, Gideon Grader, and Hen Dotan. The team developed an electrochemical thermally activated chemical (ETAC) method for splitting water, a breakthrough that was important enough to be published in Nature in 2019. The company’s innovative design is promising indeed: a typical hydrogen electrolyzer is only about 70 percent efficient; 30 percent of the energy used in production is lost as heat. Unlike conventional electrolysis, H2Pro’s process generates hydrogen and oxygen separately in different steps—an electrochemical step and a thermally activated chemical step. This allows for high-pressure production of green hydrogen in a way that retains exceptional energy efficiency (98.7 percent HHV) inside the reactors.42
Today, the team has grown from Rothschild’s original four laboratory staffers to 100 workers, and the company is planning to build a factory. All this requires a significant budget, even though H2Pro has yet to produce its first demonstration unit and cannot know for certain whether its unorthodox process will work on a commercial scale. And even if it succeeds in cost-effectively producing green hydrogen at scale, profits will take at least a decade from initial investment to materialize.
Tech investors like to look closely at a product’s “technology readiness level.” The TRL system involves a nine-step progression, developed by NASA during the 1970s, that is useful for assessing the maturity of technologies for acquisition. It starts with basic science and feasibility research (levels 1 and 2) until ultimately reaching system development and system testing (levels 8 and 9).
Professor Rothschild characterizes the TRL sequence economically as “essentially a logarithmic scale.”43 In other words, as a company progresses, moving up through the different technology readiness stages, the costs rise.
The other factor that makes development horizons so long is the need to scale technologies so that prices can drop to economically feasible levels. For a
climate tech innovation to be successfully diffused, a lower-cost alternative typically must be available to replace an existing technology. H2Pro is the exception that proves the rule. It succeeded in raising over $100 million dollars from investors including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Israeli tech entrepreneur extraordinaire, Talmon Marco. This gave the company the necessary capital to build a commercial-scale facility for producing hydrogen. Presumably, idealistic billionaires have the stamina and the monetary muscle to see this project through.44 But it is unlikely that conventional VC investors can wait so long or are willing to assume the associated financial risk.
Driving the price of a disruptive technology down to a reasonable level does not happen overnight. But when it happens, it can happen fast. “Wright’s Law” was developed to quantify the pace of this process. It was in 1936 that aeronautical engineer Theodore Wright observed a drop in the production costs of airplanes during the preceding decades. Each year, the airframes manufactured became less expensive. As he formulated a historic cost curve, a clear pattern emerged: for every doubling of production, Wright saw a steady 15 percent reduction in costs.45
The same trend holds for climate technology: “Swanson’s Law” is the renewable energy equivalent, named for Richard Swanson, the Stanford University engineering professor and founder of SunPower, a solar photovoltaic cell manufacturer. The first solar cell was invented in the United States in 1954. But a year later, Japan made a prototype model of a solar cell and was quick to take the lead in developing the technology. By 1958, Japan had installed its first photovoltaic system, with a generating capacity of 70 watts, at a radio relay station on top of Mount Shinobu. It took another twenty years before photovoltaic electricity systems were connected to the country’s power grid: in 1978, Sanyo Electric began installing PV generation systems with the capacity to return the surplus electricity from individual houses to the power supply system. This breakthrough was soon reflected in expanded production. Meanwhile, PV cells were being used by Japanese manufacturers to power calculators. By 1999, Japan was the world leader in the total manufacturing of photovoltaic solar cells and, for a brief period, in PV electricity generation.46
Professor Swanson was among the first to demonstrate that solar electricity prices dropped by 20 percent for every doubling in solar panel capacity.47 Tracking the more recent lowering of prices of solar and wind energy suggests that the price decline has been even more precipitous, reaching as much as 30 percent with every 100 percent increase of installed base.48 As a result, by 2022 solar energy was 30 percent less expensive than electricity produced by natural gas.49
This relative advantage was the result of some forty years of constant multiplying in production.50 Expanded production and massive deployment of
decarbonizing technologies also yields innovation, which is soon manifested in lower costs. This is why it is impossible to separate general climate-mitigation policies from climate innovation. Programs to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions through deployment of clean technologies arguably constitute the single most powerful driver of climate tech R&D.
Moreover, for private capital to gain a reasonable return on investment, innovation has to have a large enough technological “moat” to ensure exclusivity. Many solutions, even if viable and marketable, are simple and easy to emulate. This makes them poor candidates for venture capital. Take, for instance, meat alternatives, which are much less carbon-intense than animal protein. One of the reasons why many analysts believe that Impossible Burger will ultimately beat Beyond Meat in the battle for preeminence in the plant-based protein niche is that the latter is based on technology which is relatively easy to copy.51
All this means is that climate tech promotion is simply a great place for public policy to shine. Government involvement is critical for providing the oxygen for completing the many long-distance runs that will be needed to reach the finish line in humanity’s race to a sustainable economy. If designed correctly, policies can provide numerous ways for making VC investment more compelling.
The High Cost of Early Experimentation
It is estimated that only about 1,000 of the 500,000 new startups each year in the United States succeed in receiving first-round venture capital funding.52 That’s because startups in general are a risky business; with its high incubation requirements, climate tech is even more so. As part of a derisking strategy, many venture capitalists like to frame technology startups as early-stage experiments. Presumably, the aspiring company constitutes a hypothesis. Like any theory, it can be tested through an iterative experimentation process, with benchmarks of success or failure along the way.53 For instance, whether a protein substitute will appeal to consumers can be tested for a lot less than the cost of building a factory. As the product proves its marketability, financing becomes easier. Still, meeting meaningful benchmarks can be costly.
The case of Quidnet Energy is instructive. The California-based startup has developed a unique geomechanically pumped energy-storage system. Given the cost and the solid-waste challenge posed by lithium and other battery technologies, the Quidnet system offers a promising response to the intermittency of renewables. The idea, at least in theory, is simple: when solar or wind systems produce a surfeit of electricity, the system pumps water from a pond, down a well,
into a body of rock. As soon as electricity is required, the well is then opened so that the pressurized water can pass through a turbine to generate electricity. The water then returns to the pond for the next cycle.54
Quidnet was established in 2012, but like so many climate tech startups, it had difficulty attracting venture capital. By 2016, it was stuck. For the company to move forward to the next stage in its development, a field trial was required for proof of concept. There was no guarantee that the test would succeed. Company engineers saw it as a binary, up-front risk: immediately upon its completion, they would know whether their system worked . . . or not. Unfortunately, the cost of the decisive test came to roughly a million dollars. Not surprisingly, no one was volunteering to pay for it. Ultimately, civil society became engaged. Prime, a newly formed NGO created precisely for this purpose, raised money from two foundations to conduct the test.55 Using retired Texas oil wells, the trial was conducted and proved successful, allowing the company to proceed with subsequent seed rounds.
Private philanthropy can certainly play a role in combating climate change. Yet early-stage experiments designed to reduce uncertainty and allow startups to move to the next stage in their development are costly, demanding resources far beyond most foundations’ capacity. A Harvard University Business School case study about entrepreneurial experimentation concluded, “The very long time-frames and costs associated with learning about a new way to produce clean energy, or different approaches to curing cancer, create a dearth of experimentation, despite intense societal interest.”56 Government involvement to help support and validate the testing is essential for reducing uncertainty and catalyzing investment from the naturally cautious private sector.
Urgency
As society confronts the climate crisis, momentum matters. Yale law professors Zachary Liscow and Quentin Karpilow describe its importance in terms of a process they call “innovation snowballing.” This means that innovation builds on itself over time; present innovations will make future ones even more effective and more valuable.57
If smart decisions in climate policy are made today, presumably the next generation will be in a better place to realize the next technological phase when it reaches the gun lap in humanity’s race to net zero—when a balance is reached between the greenhouse-gas emissions released into the atmosphere and those taken out. If, however, today’s generation fails to act, the potential to develop the technologies necessary for a sustainable planet in the future will be diminished.
Unfortunately, talking about the future has proven to be lousy strategy for galvanizing a bold public response to the climate crisis. At the individual level, people see their children and intuitively understand who will benefit from their efforts to decarbonize. But at an amorphous, societal level, “intergenerational justice” is a much harder sell. To inspire greater commitment to combat climate change, advocates often employ military metaphors.58 Societies at war presumably offer proof positive that if people would only understand what’s at stake, they would make the necessary individual sacrifices (and governments would make the investment) required to arrive at an economy with net-zero carbon emissions— even far earlier than the 2050 target. If Americans were willing to plant Victory Gardens during World War II, surely today they should be willing to install double-glazed windows in their homes and photovoltaic systems on their roofs.
This rhetoric resonates nicely but has not proven to be persuasive. There are many reasons why. A decade ago, Canadian professor Robert Gifford identified twenty-seven psychological barriers that explain why people in general—and presumably decision-makers as well—do not feel compelled to act to decarbonize, even in the face of mounting evidence that immediate and radical action is necessary: mistrust, behavioral momentum, limited cognition, social comparisons—the list of explanations goes on and on.59 Each barrier constitutes another reason why governments are going to have to step up and accelerate the speed of climate tech development.
If the public and its representatives would only listen to scientists, presumably commitment to development of climate technology would increase dramatically. This may be starting to happen, but it certainly is not happening fast enough. In 2018, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a generally cautious consortium of independent climate experts, released a special report in which its usual vagueness was replaced with refreshing, if alarming, specificity: in order to avoid a temperature increase exceeding 1.5°C, the world needed to reach an interim 45 percent reduction in global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions within twelve years.60 Unfortunately, since that time, release of CO2 has actually continued to rise, which makes achieving this goal increasingly unlikely. Many of the key technologies required to move the planet toward such targets still need to be developed, but they lack funding.
Whether because of complacency, myopia, or selfishness, humanity has not internalized a true sense of urgency about the crisis. Neither has the international community. Representatives of 200 countries convening at the 2023 UN climate conference in Dubai (COP28) resisted demands from leading scientists and climate activists to begin a phase-out of oil, coal and natural gas, and merely calling for the “phasing out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful
consumption.”61 (Even so in contrast to the earlier gatherings, the Dubai decision recognized that global greenhouse gas emissions needed to peak “at the very latest” by 2025 if global warming was to be limited to 1.5 degree C.62) The ability of individual countries to influence the international agenda and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) targets appears to be limited, but there is no reason why those countries cannot support climate tech ventures within, or even beyond, their own borders.
Quite simply, unlike the other problems the world faces that require technological solutions, for the foreseeable future global warming appears to be irreversible. This makes the task of developing climate tech far more urgent. Innovation experts generally estimate that technologies discovered today are likely to have their biggest impact two to three decades later. Unfortunately, humanity is in a race against time. Experts warn that if global warming continues, before long the planet will cross key tipping points that will set off a cascade of catastrophic consequences.63 To stop global warming, technologies that can scale far faster must be found.
Martin Luther King’s call to arms from sixty years ago is entirely relevant to the present situation: “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.”64
Public Policies to Promote Climate Tech Innovation— What’s on the Menu?
If government is justified in advancing climate tech, the question becomes: What innovations should it back and how should it support them? Just as the technologies required to move to net zero are hardly homogeneous, innovation itself can be broken into at least three different categories.
Incremental innovation improves existing technologies to make them more efficient without fundamentally changing underlying processes. Like a new model of car or cellular telephone, the new products are just a little better or a little less expensive than the previous version of the product or service. Disruptive innovation refers to more-profound changes in specific technological functions, without modifying the underlying system or technological regime.65 The new product may create a completely new market. The transition from typewriters to word processors or incandescent to LED lighting are good examples. Finally, there is radical or transformational innovation. This phenomenon is relatively rare. Technologies central to an economy experience a fundamental shift such as the move from steam power to the internal combustion engine, or
the Internet, which changed the entire nature of commerce and communications, or the transition that has already begun from internal combustion to electrically powered vehicles.66
It is not surprising, therefore, that different policy interventions are required to stimulate different kinds of climate technology transitions. Moreover, the needs of small companies and startups are fundamentally different from those of well-established industries. In the area of climate mitigation, there is no “one size fits all” policy alternative. Rather, a broad range of instruments needs to be applied to address the many pathologies that contribute to the climate conundrum.
One way to think about the various necessary approaches is to differentiate between policies designed to develop new technologies versus those designed to deploy existing technologies and make them affordable. It is critical that financial support for climate tech development be provided alongside incentives to meaningfully expand the supply of innovative low-carbon alternatives. An entirely different array of policies is required to increase demand for them.67
On the technology supply side are policies like the following:
• Direct government funding and subsidies for research and development;
• Tax credits and economic incentives to support the activities of climate tech companies in different stages of development;
• Patenting and protection of intellectual property for climate mitigation;
• Facilitating cooperative relationships between researchers and the private sector, including the establishment of technology incubators.
On the demand side are programs such as
• Carbon taxes and greenhouse-gas emissions trading systems;
• Tax exemptions and tariffs to incentivize decarbonizing technologies;
• Government procurement directives that prioritize purchase of climate tech products;
• Technology-forcing prescriptions that require adoption of a low-carbon technology;
• Carbon contracts for differences (described in chapter 5), in which governments change the economic calculus by covering the cost differentials associated with relatively expensive but promising new technologies; and
• Softer policy interventions, such as green labeling or disclosure requirements, that can gently nudge industries toward innovation and better climate performance.
The following chapters consider these alternatives and their design: what they are intended to do theoretically and what they actually do. While it is true that the “devil is in the details”—excessive detail and nuance can be devilishly numbing. So, in the following pages, the focus is on the big picture, basic principles, approaches, and outcomes from disparate programs. (Conscientious readers who wish to wonk out and take a deeper dive will have an easy time doing so by following the references.)
There are innumerable climate tech stories that demonstrate the soundness of different policy approaches. Because it constitutes the largest single source of greenhouse gases, decarbonizing electricity justifiably was the first climate challenge embraced by most countries. But it is only Act One in the larger drama that needs to unfold as humanity strives to save its planet. This book also considers how policies can support innovation in sectors that are proving hard to abate but are critical to achieving a net-zero economy.
Climate tech maven and podcast host Shayle Kann calls these sources “the eight horsemen of the Apocalypse”: steel, aluminum, cement, chemicals, aviation, shipping, trucking, and chemicals. Together, they constitute roughly a third of total global emissions. The food system contributes another 25 percent; transportation probably 24 percent. Without effective government interventions, their relative contribution to the greenhouse-gas burden will surely grow in the coming years as emissions from electricity continue to drop.
But trend is not destiny. Sound policies can harness the world’s abundant competence, creativity, and growing commitment to climate stability in order to hasten innovative solutions.
Hardcover | $30.00 | 352 pages
PUBLISHED: May 2024
ISBN: 9781642832488
The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future
Jonathan Mingle
aslight is the story of an epic, six-year battle between one of the country’s most powerful energy companies and the everyday people who stood in the path of its massive fossil gas pipeline. On one side, an archetypal Goliath: a corporation that commands billions of dollars and unparalleled influence over state politicians and federal government agencies alike. On the other, a diverse band of Davids: lawyers and farmers, conservationists and conservatives, innkeepers and lobbyists, scientists, and nurses.
Their struggle took them all the way to the Supreme Court, but their larger fight was in the court of public opinion. Would the nation swallow the industry’s narrative that gas was “a bridge fuel” to a clean, green future? Or would the public recognize it as a methane bomb, capable of not only wrecking local communities but imperiling the planet? Vivid and suspenseful, Gaslight is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the urgent stakes of the energy choices we face today.
Jonathan Mingle
Jonathan Mingle is an independent journalist. Over the past fifteen years, he has written about climate change impacts and solutions, air pollution, public health, energy and resource issues, technology, and much more for a range of outlets including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Undark,
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Gaslight
The route of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. (Courtesy of Dan Shaffer, ABRA)
Gaslight
The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023949502
All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Keywords: Allegheny–Blue Ridge Alliance; Appalachian Mountains; climate activism; climate change; Dominion Energy; Duke Energy; electrification; Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC); fossil fuels; fracking; Hurricane Camille; Inflation Reduction Act (IRA); Joe Manchin; Marcellus Shale; methane; Mountain Valley Pipeline; natural gas; renewable energy; Southern Environmental Law Center
For Quinn, Vivien, and Liza
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
—Frederick Douglass
A Note to the Reader
“Whoever gave it the name ‘natural gas’? Now there was a marketing coup!”
Cheryl LaFleur, former chair of the obscure but powerful Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, had a point. The world’s fastestgrowing fossil fuel has some built-in branding advantages.1
Consider a lump of coal. Chances are you picture a crumbly, carbonaceous rock that leaves everything it touches smudged, smoky, smeared. Now consider the words “natural gas.” The first thing that comes to mind might be a neat blue flame dancing on your stovetop or in the pages of a kitchen design catalogue. In surveys, when Americans are asked what they associate with the words “natural gas,” most mention words like “clean” and “energy.”2 It’s worth taking a moment to ponder why that’s the case.
“Natural gas just sounds so . . . natural,” LaFleur noted. And who doesn’t like natural?
But natural gas is the sibling of coal and oil, derived from the same raw materials: long-dead organisms trapped deep underground. Natural gas is a fossil fuel extracted with chemicals and heavy machinery, refined and compressed and pumped across thousands of miles to be burned in basement furnaces and kitchen stoves and power plants, producing an array of pollutants from nitrogen oxides to volatile organic compounds to carbon dioxide.3 So it’s fair to wonder, like Cheryl LaFleur, just how this other carbon-rich substance acquired its label.
It turns out that the term was coined in the early nineteenth century to differentiate gas that occurred “naturally”—that is, seeping out of the ground—from “town gas,” which was manufactured from coal in a rather nasty process in urban factories.4 This era also gave rise to the first generation of gas utilities. “Gas light companies” spread from Norfolk to Atlanta, New York to Baltimore, supplying manufactured gas and, later, “natural gas” to city streetlamps. Before long, they veined
their way into America’s businesses and homes—more than 75million, at last count.
One consequence of this inherited terminology is that, today, relatively few people think about exactly what they are burning when they turn on their stove.
“Years ago, I had some people in my office talking about methane leaks,” said LaFleur, whose former job involved weighing the merits of some of America’s most consequential energy projects. “These were people from well-known, respected environmental groups.” One of them asked if she knew that natural gas emits methane. “I said, ‘I’m pretty sure natural gas is methane!’”
She was right on that score too. But when asked how they feel about “methane” or “methane gas,” Americans of all political persuasions report much more negative feelings. Their strongest associations: “global warming,” “greenhouse,” and “climate change.” Methane is emitted from a variety of human and natural sources, from fossil fuel production to agriculture to wetlands. In this book, “natural gas” and “methane” and “gas” and “fossil gas” will all be deployed to refer to the same substance: the colorless, odorless gas with the chemical formula CH4 that is lighter than air, easy to ignite, and traded as one of the world’s most prized commodities. These words are used interchangeably— partly for convenience and partly to illustrate how words can serve to clarify or cloud what we’re really talking about when we talk about “natural gas.”
Prologue
The People vs. the Pipeline
D. J. Gerken (center) and Greg Buppert (far right) on the steps of the US Supreme Court after oral arguments on February 24, 2020. (Nancy T. Sorrells)
Nancy Sorrells sat down in the gallery of the Supreme Court of the United States, looked around the storied chamber, and took a moment to marvel at just how far she and her neighbors had come.
It was February 24,2020.Nearly six years had passed since Dominion Energy, one of the biggest power companies in the country, had unveiled its plans to build a natural gas pipeline from West Virginia’s fracking fields across Virginia to eastern North Carolina.1 At 42 inches in diameter, the pipeline would be the largest to ever cross Appalachia’s rock-ribbed ridges. At close to 600 miles in length, it would be nearly as long as the Blue Ridge Mountains themselves. And with a price tag that had swelled to $8 billion, its owners would have a strong incentive to keep gas flowing through it for decades to come.
Sorrells, a publisher and historian who lived in a Shenandoah Valley hamlet a few miles from the project’s path, helped lead one of the dozens of grassroots groups that had banded together to fight it since 2014. She and a small contingent had traveled to Washington, DC, the night before, with plans to rise at three in the morning and wait for tickets to hear oral arguments in their case, Atlantic Coast Pipeline LLC and U.S. Forest Service v. Cowpasture River Preservation Association. But they discovered a long line of people already winding around First Street and East Capitol, angling to be among the fifty members of the public admitted.2
Throughout the night, fellow pipeline fighters from Virginia and West Virginia clustered together in small groups, chatting, sharing thermoses of tea, stamping their feet in the darkness. When Dominion routed its pipeline through their communities, the company had roused—and unified—a diverse group of citizens from across the political spectrum in opposition: retirees, innkeepers, farmers, scientists, physical therapists, pastors, nurses, teachers, builders, former lobbyists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. With temperatures hovering just above freezing, some wrapped themselves in sleeping bags and reclined on folding chairs to grab brief snatches of sleep.3 A member of Sorrells’s group stayed in line, while the rest retired for the night. At 5:00 a.m., having secured just one ticket between them, the group decided that Sorrells should be the one to use it. After all, few had been more 2 Gaslight
relentless in the struggle against Dominion’s pipeline or more confident that they could defeat it.
For years, Sorrells had been telling everyone that the Atlantic Coast Pipeline was not inevitable—that, if they kept fighting, their band of Davids could overcome Dominion’s Goliath. In every email she sent, every flyer she handed out, she included the sentence: “This pipeline is not a done deal.”
And here, she thought, was the proof. Nearly everyone had expected Dominion—the most politically powerful company in Virginia—to steamroll them. “At the very beginning it was like we were just a little drop in the ocean,” she said. But after years of contending in courtrooms, street protests, shareholders’ meetings, newspaper opinion pages, and under the fluorescent lights at every conceivable kind of county or state or federal public hearing, they had stymied the largest fossil fuel pipeline project to come out of Appalachia.
And they had forced Dominion to appeal to the highest court in the land for permission to build its gas line through Virginia’s mountains.
Once the justices had taken their seats, Sorrells’s first thought was: There’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg, this is unreal. But as she listened to the oral arguments unfold, her excitement was tempered by a dawning realization: they were going to lose this case.
Many of the grassroots groups opposing Dominion’s pipeline were represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit legal organization based in Charlottesville. As was common practice, SELC had hired a veteran counsel with experience before the Supreme Court to argue the case. As he jousted with the justices, Sorrells kept jotting down notes and thinking of points she wished he would make.
“It wasn’t a bad argument,” she said. “But he didn’t make those points, because he hadn’t lived it for six years.”
From her home at the western foot of the Blue Ridge, a few miles from where Dominion planned to drill a mile-long tunnel through the mountains, Sorrells had been living it since the day it was announced. In the fall of 2014, Dominion had mailed a flyer to residents of Prologue: The People vs. the Pipeline 3
communities along the project’s proposed route through western Virginia. Like a coach collecting opponents’ taunts on the locker room bulletin board to motivate her players, Sorrells had held on to it ever since.4 Printed in large font, against a backdrop of forested mountains and lush valleys stretching west of the Blue Ridge, was a bold claim: “The Atlantic Coast Pipeline will change everything. And nothing.”
This slogan encapsulated Dominion’s sales pitch: its gas conduit would supercharge collective prosperity, at virtually no cost. The company sought to convince everyone—local landowners, lawmakers, investors, regulators—that the ACP was essential to meet growing demand for gas, lower energy bills for its customers, and cut its own carbon emissions as it replaced older coal-burning power plants. And, moreover, that it could safely bury its pipe across the region’s steep, slide-prone slopes.5
But for many who lived in its path, that tagline offered an inverted reflection of their darkest fears. They feared that, in terms of concrete economic benefits, the pipeline would change nothing. Local businesses wouldn’t be able to tap its gas even if they wanted to, unless they paid a $5.5 million connection fee.6 Construction jobs would be temporary, largely filled by crews from Oklahoma and Texas. Many local residents got their power from local cooperatives, not Dominion.
And on the other side, they worried the project really would change everything. That it would threaten life and limb, water quality, property values, local businesses, ecosystems, the very stability of their beloved mountains themselves, and their children’s ability to live safely among them. They worried about dwelling within the “blast radius” of a potential rupture and explosion. And many feared the climate consequences of a fossil fuel project with an eighty-year lifespan.
“The pipeline will be virtually invisible,” Dominion’s flyer promised. “There are 2.5 times more miles of underground natural gas pipelines than interstate highways in Virginia. Yet few people ever notice.”
Yet few people ever notice. Those five words were, in retrospect, an inadvertent Rosetta stone for understanding the gambit of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the broader narrative driving the gas building boom that had engulfed America for more than a decade. Dominion was just one of many energy companies making big bets on gas. The success of
those investments depended on convincing people that there were few, if any, costs or risks worth paying any mind.
That line was intended to soothe locals’ anxieties—to suggest that, after construction crews packed up and left, all they would see was a grassy strip that resembled a golf course fairway. But it could also be read as as an admission that, if you looked closely enough, maybe there was something to see—cause for concern rather than comfort—going on down there. Nancy Sorrells, for instance, knew that beneath the flyer’s verdant vista, where Dominion planned to string its pipe, was a vast network of limestone caves, sinkholes, and underground rivers connected to downstream drinking water supplies around the region, from Washington to Richmond.
And in fact, from Pennsylvania to Virginia, people already in the fracking-and-pipeline boom’s crosshairs had been noticing for years. It was hard to ignore a massive trench being dug in your yard or farm or community, and giant pipes laid in it. And once you saw that messy process up close, it was hard not to wonder about some of the other, less obvious consequences—and about the strength of the industry’s broader case for building more gas infrastructure.
According to Dominion and many other energy companies, the argument for natural gas was a slam dunk. As the flyer noted, burning gas to generate electricity produced half the carbon emissions of burning coal. This talking point undergirded the familiar claim that gas was a “bridge fuel” to a cleaner, climate-safe future—a metaphor repeated so often, in news stories and politicians’ stump speeches and CEOs’ conference keynotes, that it had hardened into orthodoxy.
It was indeed a fact that gas power plants produced less carbon dioxide than coal plants. But those selling the “bridge” needed people to not notice some other facts. For one, that the metaphor was floated by the gas industry itself way back in 1988,as climate change first burst into public consciousness, helpfully proffering their product as “the least harmful alternative while the world looks for other, longer-lasting solutions to the ‘greenhouse’ effect.’ ”7 And secondly, that we all seemed to be stuck on their bridge, with no end in sight.
Bridges, of course, are meant to deliver you somewhere else. Three decades later, gas had dethroned coal as the leading source of power.
America had become the world’s top producer and exporter of natural gas. Meanwhile, in the period between 1988 and 2020, humans had added more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than in all of human history up to that point. Yet the industry continued to tout gas as the only sure route to a greener future. Exhibit A: the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, perhaps the most ambitious project yet.
By 2020, plenty of people had long since taken notice of some other salient facts too. Investing finite capital into gas meant fewer dollars available for renewables and a slower transition to clean energy. Building more gas infrastructure risked locking in decades of future carbon dioxide emissions.8 Gas wasn’t the only alternative to coal: wind, solar, batteries, and energy efficiency were readily available and getting cheaper by the month. The six years since Dominion had launched its pipeline had been the six hottest years since recordkeeping began. And more gas meant more emissions of a climate-warming super-pollutant. Because natural gas, you see, is methane.9 And methane is a greenhouse gas that packs eighty-six times the heat-trapping power as carbon dioxide over a twenty-year period. Some scientists have called it “carbon dioxide on steroids.”10
Methane is responsible for a third of the global temperature rise since preindustrial times. Since 2007, methane levels in the atmosphere had surged at twice the rate of carbon dioxide concentrations.11 Alarmed by this spike, climate scientists warned that unless methane emissions were wrestled downward, the world’s efforts to keep global warming under 2 degrees would fail.12 That would push us past tipping points from which there might be no returning, rendering unrecognizable the friendly climate that humans have evolved with—an outcome that really would change everything.
Dominion’s project—if built—would play no small role in bringing about that reality. Because, like all gas pipelines, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline would be a very large and long-lived methane delivery device.
Picture an enormous, 42-inch-wide interstate-scale cigarette lighter that keeps working for a century. At one end: the fracking wells of the Marcellus Shale. At the other: dozens of gas power plants and hundreds of thousands of burner tips in furnaces, water heaters, and
kitchen stoves. In between: a vast metallic spaghetti of gas field gathering lines and large-diameter pipelines and local distribution lines.
On its journey through all those pipes and valves and fittings—as any plumber could tell you—some methane would inevitably escape. If all the gas in the Marcellus Shale were to be exploited, methane leaks alone would likely equal three times the total annual carbon dioxide emissions of the United States—making the Marcellus the largest “methane bomb” in the world, according to researchers.13 The methane that did make it to the end of the pipe would feed machines designed to convert that gas into carbon dioxide—the primary driver of climate change.
Simple facts, derived from the laws of physics. But physics has a hard time competing with public relations.14
The word “methane” did not appear on Dominion’s flyer. Nor was it uttered in the chambers of the Supreme Court. As Nancy Sorrells listened, the oral arguments were starting to sound like a sophomore philosophy class: the justices seemed more interested in the metaphysics of trails than the physics of gas pipes.
At issue was whether the law allowed Dominion to build its pipeline at Reeds Gap, its chosen spot for crossing the Blue Ridge, where the Appalachian Trail ran through national forest land. The government’s lawyer, defending the Forest Service, repeated his core argument (which aligned with that of Dominion’s lawyers) that the company could bore underneath the iconic footpath because the “trail is not land.” This idea didn’t sit well with Justice Elena Kagan. “Nobody makes this distinction in real life,” she countered. A slightly surreal debate over the nature of a trail ensued, with musings from Justices Samuel Alito and Stephen Breyer. Is a trail inseparable from the land that it traverses? Is it something that lies on top of the ground, but separate from it, like a ribbon? Does it go to the center of the earth?
Then Chief Justice John Roberts chimed in and unintentionally cut to the heart of the matter. If the court ruled against Dominion, he worried aloud, would it “erect an impermeable barrier to any pipeline
from the area where the natural gas, those resources are located and to the area east of it where there’s more of a need for them?”15 In other words, would the Appalachian Trail become a wall preventing energy companies from tapping the vast fossil fuel reserves lying underneath Appalachia?
As he listened, Greg Buppert’s thoughts paralleled those of his client, Nancy Sorrells, sitting a few dozen feet away. The odds, he had to admit, were not looking good.16 Roberts wasn’t the only justice peppering his lead counsel with skeptical questions.
Buppert, a senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, had started scrutinizing Dominion’s proposed pipeline—and its risks to the region’s water, air, climate, citizens, and economy—in the summer of 2014. At the time, Dominion had confidently predicted that the pipeline would be finished, with 1.5billion cubic feet of gas flowing through it each day, by the end of 2018. But here it was, the winter of 2020, and not a single piece of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline had been laid in Virginia’s soil. The project was at least three years behind schedule. Construction had been mostly halted since late 2018, thanks to a series of successful legal challenges mounted by SELC, their grassroots clients, and partner organizations in the region. Buppert was a seasoned environmental attorney, but at the outset he knew little about the 1938Natural Gas Act or interstate pipelines. Over the past six years, he liked to joke, he had acquired an inadvertent PhD in both subjects. And to his now expertly trained ear, most of the justices seemed inclined to side with Dominion.17
Buppert and his colleagues—led by D. J. Gerken, SELC’s lead litigator on the case since 2018—had argued that, because the Appalachian Trail was administered as a unit of the National Park System, Dominion would need special authorization from Congress to cross it at Reeds Gap. A federal appellate court had agreed, citing a hundred-yearold federal law that prohibited drilling or pipelines on National Park lands. Dominion had appealed, and now the justices would determine whether it needed that act of Congress to greenlight its plan—a timeconsuming and uncertain prospect.18 The legal questions were narrow and technical, winding through a thicket of competing interpretations
of obscure statutes. But for a moment, the chief justice had gestured toward the much wider stakes of the morning’s debate.
The premise embedded in Roberts’s question was that America would need more methane gas, and more pipelines to transport it, for many years to come. This conviction was widely shared beyond the conservative-leaning Supreme Court: support for the natural gas construction frenzy underway across the country had become a fixed feature of the landscape of bipartisan elite opinion.
But that very premise—that building the Atlantic Coast Pipeline was good for America, that there was a need for its gas that outweighed all the risks it posed to the region’s people, forests, climate, and economy—was the delusion that Greg Buppert and his colleagues had spent years trying to dispel. With the patience of a master builder, he had painstakingly assembled a case—still waiting to be heard by another federal appeals court—that challenged Dominion’s rationale for the project and the methodology the federal government used to determine whether a gas pipeline was, in its arcane phrasing, in “the public convenience and necessity.”
In his view, that case was the main event. But no one was writing headlines about it. Instead, all eyes—Wall Street, the gas and utility industries, energy analysts, and environmental advocates—were trained on the Supreme Court.
As the oral arguments wrapped up, Buppert still had reason to be heartened.19 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had noted that the case before them addressed only one of four fatal flaws that the appeals court found in the Forest Service permit. Wouldn’t this question about who could authorize crossing the Appalachian Trail be “moot,” she wondered, if federal courts ruled the pipeline couldn’t proceed due to those various other shortcomings? Until the Forest Service fixed them all, ACP LLC would still lack permission to cross the national forests.
And even if those problems were resolved, Dominion would still lack seven other critical permits—several of which the SELC and its allies had already successfully challenged.
If they lost this high-profile battle—if, as media outlets were already speculating, a Supreme Court win for Dominion breathed new life
into their embattled pipeline—Nancy Sorrells and her fellow activists were determined to press on. The larger war was still up for grabs—and the stakes were high.
They were fighting for their homes, their neighbors, their children’s futures. The six-year-long fight—longer than the Civil War—that had converged on this contested spot atop the Blue Ridge Mountains was also a struggle to shape the trajectory of the US energy system for decades to come. Dominion and other energy companies wanted Sorrells and, indeed, all Americans to see projects like the Atlantic Coast Pipeline as a “bridge” to a better world—to a clean energy future.
But when they looked closely, many saw something that looked more like a fuse. With a blast radius that enveloped, and extended far beyond, their beloved Virginia hills.
Part I
The Public Necessity
John Ed Purvis on the land in Shipman, Virginia, that has been in his family since 1768. (Marcie Gates-Goff/BlueRidgeLife.com)
Chapter One
The Burning Spring
On March 9, 1669, John Lederer walked west out of Jamestown in the company of three Native guides. The German physician and explorer had been tasked by Virginia’s colonial governor with finding promising routes through the distant mountains to boost the fur trade and perhaps establish a “western passage” to California and its fabled Spanish mines of silver and copper, rumored to be just a few weeks’ march away.
On the sixth day of their journey, Lederer’s party crested a hill about a dozen miles northeast of what is now Charlottesville and glimpsed the mountains to the west. At this sight, Lederer’s companions prostrated themselves and prayed, crying out in reverence for the mountains: “God is nigh!”
After four more days of walking—past “great herds of red and fallow deer” and “bears crashing mast like swine”—and a difficult climb, Lederer became the first European to set foot atop the Blue Ridge and see the Allegheny Highlands beyond. The view filled him with awe— and disappointment. Mountains stretched westward as far as he could see. Daunted by the thick tangle of trees and cliffs below, he returned to Jamestown.
The following year Lederer set out again with the same mission and a much larger contingent of twenty Englishmen and five Native guides. They traveled to where the Rockfish River flows into the James at the southeast corner of what is today Nelson County, Virginia. A community of Monacan Indians, who lived in a series of villages along the river, greeted them. Lederer asked the locals for directions, as one does. An old man grabbed a stick and traced in the dirt two well-trod routes they could take.1
Lederer’s English companions rebuffed this advice and insisted on pressing ahead in a straight westward line dictated by their compass, heedless of obstacles in their way. (This didn’t sit well with Lederer, but he was outvoted.) After a week of rough going over “steep and craggy cliffs,” the party reached a place where the Mahock Indians purportedly lived, likely near present-day Lynchburg. But Lederer found no sign of the tribe. This journey, too, would end without discovery of an easy route through the mountains.
On returning east, Lederer briefed his sponsors, penned an account of his travels, and drew an annotated map. “They are certainly in a great errour,” he wrote, “who imagine that the Continent of North America is but eight or ten days journey over from the Atlantick to the Indian Ocean.” There were a lot more mountains in Virginia to cross, he reported, than people realized.2
Lederer hadn’t been the first to try. From the day that European colonists first set foot in Virginia, they dreamt of western riches and saw the mountains as something to be overcome to tap them.
In 1607, soon after landing near what would become Jamestown, Captain Christopher Newport attempted to press inland along the James River. The Powhatan who lived there tried to talk him out of it. They warned that a day and a half above the falls (around presentday Richmond) the Englishmen would encounter the Monacans, their enemies, and that they would find nothing to eat and hard going in Quiranck, their name for the Blue Ridge. Newport made later forays into Monacan territory in search of gold and silver and a passage to the South China Sea, to no avail.3
As for the Mahock, they vanished from the historical record after 1728.In their only previously recorded encounter by Europeans, in
1608,Captain John Smith and his men stumbled into a group of them near the Rappahannock River. The Mahock attacked with a volley of arrows. After a skirmish and a chase, Smith found a wounded warrior left behind named Amoroleck. While his men treated the man’s wounds, Smith asked what he knew of the land west of the mountains. Nothing, he replied, just that the sun lives there. Smith asked him why the Mahock had attacked. “We heard that you had come from the underworld to take our world from us,” Amoroleck answered.4
It would be several decades before the settlers found something they prized in the mountains themselves. In 1742 another adventurer found a coal seam on a tributary of the Kanawha River, near presentday Charleston, West Virginia. And then, in 1773, George Washington caught wind of a peculiar spot several miles upstream.
He had a keen interest in the Allegheny Highlands, after exploring them on foot as a young surveyor and an officer during the French and Indian War. While commanding the Continental Army in 1780, after years of maneuvering and petitions, Washington finally secured ownership of 250 acres along the Little Kanawha River. (Back then it was all part of Virginia, so Thomas Jefferson, the colony’s governor, ceded the lands jointly to Washington and another former army officer.)5
Washington had coveted the tract, he explained years later in his will, “on account of a bituminous Spring which it contains, of so inflammable a nature as to burn as freely as spirits, and is as nearly difficult to extinguish.”
The “Spring” was basically a hole in the ground that exhaled a steady stream of natural gas; when filled with rainwater, it seemed to boil, and the surface of the water could be set aflame.6
The source of the “Burning Spring,” as it came to be known, was not fully understood at the time. Washington didn’t know exactly how, but he intuited that these vapors would one day make the land more valuable—that booms would come.7
Designed in a Week
In the winter of 2014, Brittany Moody was taking a break during a company training workshop in Richmond when Leslie Hartz, a
senior vice president at Dominion Energy, approached her with a request.
“Hey, I’m gonna need you to route a pipeline. How long do you think it’ll take you to complete it?”
“I’ll have it done in a week,” Moody replied.
As a manager of engineering projects with Dominion Transmission, the company’s gas transportation subsidiary, Moody knew pipelines. She had mapped several before. She had even grown up with one running through her family’s backyard in West Virginia. Moody assumed this project would be like others she had worked on. But when she found out it would be at least 550 miles long and 42 inches in diameter—far bigger than any she had designed—she began to worry that she had overpromised.
Moody set to tracing digital lines across the pixelated contours of the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains on her computer screen. Eventually she settled on what seemed the most efficient path: a line connecting the spider’s web of gas-gathering lines in the fracking fields of northern West Virginia with the coastal city of Norfolk and the towns along the Interstate 95 corridor of eastern North Carolina, ending near the town of Lumberton, just shy of the South Carolina border.
When it was done, she had nearly delivered on her pledge. It took just over a week to design the initial route of what would become the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.8
To the uninitiated, that might not seem like adequate time to lay out the optimal route for the largest-ever gas pipeline to cross Appalachia’s steep terrain, two national forests, the karst-riddled Shenandoah Valley, the world’s second-oldest mountain range, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Appalachian Trail, and the James River, all while cutting through thousands of private parcels—each representing an easement to be secured through negotiation or the use of eminent domain.
But Leslie Hartz and her boss, Dominion CEO and chairman Thomas F. Farrell II, had their reasons for moving quickly. A twentyfirst-century gold rush was underway, and Dominion was determined to become one of its key players.9 If it moved quickly, it could own and operate its very own lucrative modern-day Western Passage. Because, while the mountains that John Lederer had spied were still an
imposing obstacle, they concealed a prize that fired the imaginations of Virginia’s contemporary elites: vast quantities of methane.
The Allegheny Mountains were formed around 300 million years ago, thrust to Earth’s surface as Africa collided with North America to form the supercontinent Pangaea. Prior to that slow-motion crash, countless organisms had lived and died and sunk to the bottom of a shallow inland sea that covered Appalachia for millions of years. As sediment piled above, heat and pressure transformed that carbon-rich stuff into methane and other gases, trapped in tiny crevices in the rock. That layer-cake matrix—known to today’s geologists as the Marcellus Shale—contains more than 200 trillion cubic feet of gas.10 A thousand feet thick, extending roughly 600 miles from West Virginia to New York, it is one of the world’s largest gas fields. And a few thousand feet beneath it lies another immense gas-rich formation: the Utica Shale.
That methane had remained mostly bottled up snugly in its subterranean crevices, sandwiched between impervious veins of limestone, until a Texan named George Mitchell came along. With the support of the US Department of Energy—which placed a long-running, taxpayer-financed bet on his idea—Mitchell spent years developing a technique called hydraulic fracturing.11 To “frack” a shale, crews drill down and then horizontally, then inject a huge amount of sand and water laced with proprietary chemical lubricants at high pressure to shatter the rock. As gas flows out of the resulting fissures, they pump it to the surface. Fracking enabled drillers to reach a mile deep and thousands of feet sideways into oil and gas deposits long thought inaccessible or too costly to tap. It proved to be the key that would unlock the ancient methane entombed in the Appalachian underworld.
Throughout the 1980sand 1990s,while his fellow oil barons scoffed, Mitchell refined his new technique in Texas. But once fracking’s effectiveness became obvious, its use accelerated in the early 2000s, as a bevy of wildcatters made their way into the hollows and hilltop farms of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.
The turning point came with the 2008 financial crash. In its wake, with record-low interest rates and corporate wreckage all around them, shell-shocked investors hunting for bigger returns to rebuild their portfolios set their sights on shale formations like the Marcellus, North
Dakota’s Bakken, and the Eagle Ford and Permian Basin in Texas. Banks funneled cash to brash new companies like Chesapeake Energy, which hungrily bought up leases from local landowners. On the strength of its Marcellus holdings, Chesapeake—founded by a risk-loving Oklahoman named Aubrey McClendon—quickly became the second-biggest gas producer in the US (after ExxonMobil), and Pennsylvania became the second-biggest gas-producing state (after Texas).12
By 2010, the frackers were producing too much gas. They needed to expand their markets—to gin up demand for their hydrocarbons among consumers and companies. But to reach those customers, they would need to move methane out of the mountains to population centers near the coast. The gas producers needed a conduit that would trace Lederer’s journeys in reverse. In fact, they needed several.
Pipeline companies answered the call with zeal. As in any commodity boom, fortunes were being made. Firms raced to capitalize, and new interstate pipelines popped up like mushrooms after a spring rain. There was the Rover Pipeline (Pennsylvania to Ohio to Michigan), the PennEast Pipeline (Pennsylvania to New Jersey), the Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline (Pennsylvania), the Constitution Pipeline (Pennsylvania to New York), and the Mountaineer Xpress Pipeline (West Virginia). And there was the Mountain Valley Pipeline, proposed by a consortium led by one of the biggest fracking companies in Appalachia, slated to start near the same point of origin as Dominion’s project and cross the Blue Ridge farther south. The CEO of the company behind the Rover Pipeline, a Texas billionaire named Kelcy Warren, summed up the situation when he told investment analysts in a moment of candor that “the pipeline business will overbuild until the end of time.”13
Amid this frenzy of activity, in the winter of 2014, Duke Energy—a utility giant based in North Carolina—had floated its own request for proposals to build a new pipeline to supply Marcellus gas to new power plants it was planning to build. That spring, Dominion and Duke decided to join forces. Dominion, as the majority owner, would lead the construction and operation of the project.
Under Tom Farrell’s leadership, Dominion had become a poster child for the nation’s ongoing “dash for gas.” He moved aggressively to expand the company’s gas portfolio, gobbling up storage facilities
and distribution utilities from Ohio to Utah and seeking federal approval to build a facility in Maryland to export supercooled liquefied gas around the world.14 But its new pipeline would be an even bigger undertaking.
As a piece of physical infrastructure, Dominion’s was perhaps the most ambitious gas pipeline project in US history. The company would need to secure at least a dozen state and federal permits, billions in financing, and thousands of easements all along the route.
To the casual observer these might seem like daunting obstacles. But Dominion’s leaders had cause for their confidence. Getting the newly fabled Marcellus riches to market had taken on the cast of a national mission. The story of “cheap, abundant, clean natural gas” had acquired seemingly unstoppable momentum. To many who lived in the project’s corridor, it seemed that the force of this narrative—combined with Dominion’s unparalleled clout—would be irresistible. More than enough to bulldoze a path straight across the mountains to the sea.
A Fragile Domain
Imagine one day you receive a letter in the mail. It informs you that a large energy company is planning to build a pipeline through your property. That surveyors will be coming out soon. That they’d like you to sign and return the enclosed permission form for them to do so. But that whether you do or not, the surveyors will be coming onto your land anyway. Because a state law gives them the power to do so without your permission.
Your likely response might be, Well, damn. Whatever your feelings about natural gas, if you have any, like most people, you are none too excited at the prospect of having your yard dug up and giant pipes full of pressurized, highly flammable gas buried in it.
Your next thought might be, Well, there’s nothing I can do about it. Because you know that said energy company is the most powerful and politically connected company in your state.
This was the scenario that played out for John Ed Purvis—and hundreds of other landowners in Nelson County, Virginia—as he checked his mailbox one day in May 2014.
The letter he found there explained that his property was among those in a “potential route corridor” for Dominion’s new pipeline, that the company planned to begin surveying on July 1, and that “we are notifying you so that we can begin keeping you informed throughout this process and because surveys will be conducted on your property.”
Purvis assumed—not unreasonably—there wasn’t much he or anyone else could do about it. Enclosed with the letter was a copy of Virginia Code 56-49.01,the “Right-to-Trespass” statute passed in 2004, allowing pipeline companies to survey private property, whether the owners want them to or not.15
The Purvis land lay just east of the county seat of Lovingston, not far from where John Lederer passed through on his first journey. Locals knew it as “Purvis Hollow.” Purvis lived in the house his grandfather built in 1904, the same house where he was born in 1932. Around the county, Purvis was a familiar sight in his customary ball cap and bib overalls, whether stopping to chat at the local store or attending meetings of Nelson’s school board, on which he sat for seventeen years, gaining a reputation as a civic-minded fiscal conservative and a man of deep integrity. He tended a herd of beef cattle and farmed the same hilly acres as seven generations of Purvises before him, ever since an Englishman named George Purvis built a homestead there in 1768.
His family’s tenure on the land preceded George Washington’s acquisition of the Burning Spring by 12 years, the signing of the United States Constitution by two decades, and Congress’s passage of the Natural Gas Act by 170 years. That law empowered the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to authorize projects it deemed to be “required by the present or future public convenience and necessity”— an archaic way of saying that a pipeline was in the public interest. With that approval came the awesome power of eminent domain.
A permit from FERC gave Dominion the authority to seize land so it could clear a 125-foot-wide construction right-of-way—roughly the width of a four-lane highway—from Harrison County, West Virginia, all the way to Robeson County, North Carolina.
For about 30 miles, it would cut right through the heart of Nelson County. Dominion’s crews would excavate a 12-foot-deep trench, lay the pipe in it, and bulldoze fill on top of it. Once in place, the
permanent right-of-way would be 50 feet wide. No trees could grow within it. Nothing larger than a garden shed could be built atop it.
The forever-ness of this arrangement rankled Purvis: a future foreclosed on. Half of the acreage he would lose was in timber. “Once that timber is cut down for the pipeline it can never grow back,” he told a neighbor. Dominion would either mow or spray herbicides to make sure of it, as tree roots would threaten the integrity of its pipe. To add insult to injury, Dominion would take permanent ownership of an easement across his land, even as he and his descendants had to keep paying taxes on it.
John Ed Purvis had experienced eminent domain before—from both sides of the equation. As a member of the school board, he had been involved in building new elementary and middle schools, which required claiming land to expand roads and parking and for the buildings themselves. The Purvises had themselves lost pasture and hayfields years back when the state needed to widen a road. They gave it up willingly, as long as they were fairly compensated, because it served the public. To John Ed Purvis, it just seemed like common sense that eminent domain should be reserved for projects that everyone could benefit from. Roads and highways, schools and parks, water facilities and power lines. When it came to the pipeline, there was no public good in it that he could see.16
But he also saw this invasion as an affront to his heirs and ancestors alike. “It just tears me all to pieces to see this land, they’re going to desecrate so much of our property,” he told one neighbor. “We’ve got it running fairly close to the graveyard down here, best we can tell.”
Purvis and his wife Ruth had four children, all of whom had stayed in Virginia. His daughter Elizabeth lived a mile away and taught at the elementary school. Purvis’s overriding concern, she said, was “to be a good steward of the land.” He knew the contours of that land, how water flowed through it, where cattle liked to bed down, what species of timber grew in its folds, like few others.
She watched with concern as spring turned to summer and her father became more distraught. He began losing sleep. The pipeline was all he could think about. “He worried constantly.”17
He fretted about contamination of the family’s water—they drank
from a well, like just about everybody in Nelson. How would they irrigate fields and care for their cattle? “I’m concerned for my family,” he told a local reporter. Elizabeth and her family had built a home nearby on the family’s land; he feared for their water too. “I may kick the bucket anytime and be planted in that graveyard down there, and my concern is for the children and grandchildren.”18
Watching her 82-year-old father agonize was painful enough for Elizabeth.19 Their interactions with Dominion’s land agents hadn’t been all that friendly or helpful either. But what really steamed her was the response he got from some county officials, who appeared all too ready to give up. After one public meeting, she recalled, two of the five elected supervisors approached Purvis and told him, “We’re so sorry this is gonna happen to you. But you can’t stop it. Get the best price for your timber that you can.”
She knew they meant well, that they cared about her father—but she was incredulous that they didn’t plan to fight. “They were just rolling over.”20
Rick Webb Goes Fishing
On a May morning in 2014, Rick Webb decided to go fishing. He had the time, after all.
After a career spent monitoring the recovery of brook trout in Appalachian streams, Webb was three months into retirement. He decided to try catching some brookies on Benson’s Run, one of his favorite streams in the George Washington National Forest.
He climbed into his Toyota pickup and drove down the long gravel driveway of the home that he shared with his wife Susan, the one he had built himself over many years, near the West Virginia border. Webb headed east through the heart of Highland County, along the distinctive folds of what geologists called the Valley and Ridge complex. In cross-section, that stretch of Virginia looks like a rough green sea, with parallel waves of long, heavily forested, north–south ridges cresting above troughs of lush valleys.21
Webb knew that folded terrain as intimately as just about anyone alive. Except for a stint in college at William and Mary, not far from
Jamestown, he had lived his entire life within the view that once lay at John Lederer’s feet. He had grown up in Waynesboro, exploring and fishing the small, cold creeks that tumbled down the western slope of the Blue Ridge.
That passion had eventually led him to his life’s work: leading two concurrent, long-term monitoring studies of Virginia’s mountain streams. For twenty-five years, the shaggy-bearded, soft-spoken scientist had collected samples from remote headwaters all over the state. This work entailed hiking to a set of 65 streams every three months since 1987;once a decade, he and his colleagues fanned out to survey all 450 streams tracked in their larger study. Some required 20-mile round-trip hikes. Many had only been touched by human activity in the form of acid rain.22
The data that Webb and his colleagues painstakingly gathered and analyzed told a clear story: in most streams, hard-hit brook trout populations were slowly recovering from decades of acid rain caused by air pollution from midwestern power plants. The 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act had imposed limits on sulfur dioxide and other pollutants from power plants. Webb’s work helped show that the law was, albeit gradually, working.23
Now that he had finally handed the reins over to colleagues, he could focus on catching a few trout himself. After a few hours chasing the brookies of Benson’s Run, he packed his rod and headed home. On the way, he stopped at the post office in Monterey, the tiny town— population 139, elevation 2,894 feet—that served as Highland’s economic hub and county seat.
An acquaintance hailed him in the lobby with a question: “Hey, have you heard about the pipeline?”
Word was going around that Dominion Energy was planning to build a large gas pipeline through Highland County and central Virginia, all the way to the coast. Locals had been getting letters requesting permission for surveyors to come on their land. Not much other information had been made public. Confusion and apprehension reigned.
This was all news to Webb. Before he drove home, he asked around and managed to track down a hard copy of the map that Dominion
had sent to the county’s board of supervisors. It was low resolution, depicting the entire route from West Virginia down through eastern North Carolina on one page. But Webb could see clearly enough that it crossed some of Highland’s steepest ridges and remote watersheds, untrammeled areas in the Monongahela and George Washington National Forests, the Shenandoah Valley, and the Blue Ridge—the wild places he had dedicated his career to protecting.
Then he peered closer at the map in his hand. Sure enough, the route went right through the headwaters of the stream he had just spent the day fishing. Well, I know what I’m going to be doing for the next year or two, he said to himself.24
Long-delayed carpentry projects would have to wait a while longer. Beekeeping, another passion, would have to take a back seat too. As it turned out, he was off by several years. It wouldn’t be until the next decade that Rick Webb could focus on making honey or catching brook trout again.
Webb v. Fury
Webb devoted that first summer of his retirement to doing what he did best: research.
He pored over maps of the likely route. He read up on environmental regulations governing pipeline construction. He called experts and asked about industry techniques for controlling erosion and runoff on steep slopes. He even went up in a two-seater airplane with a pilot friend to peer down at other pipelines being built in similar terrain in West Virginia.
And he got up to speed on the nitty-gritty elements of the pipeline construction process. It sounded like a kind of large-scale open-heart surgery. First, crews would stake out the right-of-way. Then they would remove all trees, rocks, and debris within its boundaries. Operators of large backhoes or huge machines called “wheel trenchers” would scour out soil, rock, and gravel to a depth of 10 to 12 feet. If they hit shallow bedrock, they would hammer or blast deep enough that the pipe could be buried at least 3 feet beneath the finished surface. Truckers
The Burning Spring 25
would haul in 40-foot lengths of pipe and set them next to the trench. Welders would join them together. Each joint would be visibly inspected and x-rayed before being coated with anti-corrosion epoxy. Each “string” of pipe would then be lowered into the ground on a bed of sand or some other padding material. Then workers would backfill the trench, finishing with topsoil on top, roughly graded to the contour of the land. The pipe would be filled with locally sourced water at very high pressures and tested for leaks.25 After that, the right-of-way would be seeded with grass and pollinator-friendly plants.
As a beekeeper, Webb could appreciate that last gesture. But everything else he was learning flashed warning signs. That standard process had been developed in relatively flat places like Oklahoma or Texas. Dominion’s pipeline would cross some wickedly steep terrain. Crews would need to blast and flatten narrow ridgelines to accommodate both the pipe trench and a workspace for their machines. Where would they put all the material they removed? To trench across streams, they would either build temporary dams or divert water through a hose while they dug. How would they keep sediment-choked runoff from moving downstream?
The more he studied the route, the more Webb feared for the region’s drinking water too. The whole area was underlaid by karst—a subterranean network of porous limestone riddled with hidden rivers, fissures, sinkholes, and caverns. Groundwater flowed throughout it all. Any contamination would move through it as through a sponge, spreading to private wells and municipal water supplies.
He realized that the pipeline could also spell disaster for the brook trout. The fish was finally bouncing back in remote streams around the region. But it was, he said, as if “the pipeline was routed to maximize the harm to the best of what remains” of remaining native trout habitat in Virginia.
All in all, it struck him as a terrible place to bury a large pipe full of methane—and a cockamamie way to spend several billion dollars. The terrain was just too tough, too erosion-prone, too laced with fragile streams in a region with weather that was too wet, to boot.
He was skeptical that anyone could lay a pipe through that landscape
in a way that complied with both existing laws and regulations and the laws of physics. It was as though Dominion were promising to build a road to the moon.
Webb couldn’t help wondering if the map he had gotten hold of wasn’t the result of some miscommunication: maybe the engineers simply hadn’t informed Dominion’s leadership about the challenges they would encounter. Once they studied those obstacles, like John Lederer turning back atop the Blue Ridge, they would surely abandon this risky venture.
His wife Susan wasn’t surprised to see him working around the clock just a few months into retirement. “Rick’s been like that since we married,” she told me. “ ‘The wor ld’s going to hell, got to do something about it.’ ”
She didn’t seem surprised by his conviction that the pipeline could be stopped either. Webb had gone toe to toe with a giant energy company before—and won. In the late 1970s the couple lived near Elkins, West Virginia, and ran a small nonprofit that sampled streams for pollution from nearby coal mining operations. Webb filed complaints with state and federal regulators claiming that 7 miles of native brook trout streams had been destroyed due to mining practices in the area. The coal company operating in that area sued him for defamation—a so-called SLAPP suit (for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), a popular corporate strategy to silence critics by weighing them down with crushing legal costs. The 31-year-old Webb fought it all the way to West Virginia’s Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor.
The resulting decision, Webb v. Fury, sounds like a professional wrestling grudge match, but it would become a widely cited precedent, protecting the public’s right to report potential violations of the law by coal companies, or any other companies. He hadn’t set out to become a standard-bearer for the free speech rights of everyday citizens. He simply wanted to protect West Virginia’s brook trout streams from becoming collateral damage of the fossil fuel industry.
Forty years later, the same principle applied when Webb studied Dominion’s plans. “This is some of the best remaining wild landscape
in the East,” Webb would tell anyone who would listen. “And they are planning to cut right through the heart of it.”
But when he said as much to friends and neighbors he ran into, almost all of them offered the same two responses. The first was agreement: it seemed that no one in Highland—where most people’s livelihoods depended on farming or tourism—wanted a gas pipeline coming through their county.
The other sentiment Webb encountered over and over was resignation. “There’s no stopping it,” people would tell Webb ruefully, “because it’s being pushed by Dominion.”26
This attitude reached to the top of the county government. When asked for comment by the Recorder—the plucky local newspaper that broke the news in May 2014 about the project before any other media outlet—one Highland County board of supervisors member responded: “Holy cow, what else can you say?”27
“There might be nothing we can do,” he added. “It’s going to sock us.”
The Lords of Virginia
Dominion. In Virginia, the name was synonymous with power, in both senses of the word.
Dominion Energy was a Fortune 500 corporation, one of the biggest energy companies in the country, the second-largest utility holding company in the US by market valuation, and the second-most profitable.
Most knew Dominion as their only available source of electricity: it owned the monopoly power utility that served two-thirds of all Virginians. Fewer were aware that Dominion was a natural gas giant too. Under the leadership of Tom Farrell—its disciplined and demanding CEO and chairman—the company had grown rapidly, acquiring gas pipelines, storage facilities, and distribution utilities around the country. Dominion made its money from stringing both pipes and wires, from moving molecules and electrons.28
Dominion claims a pedigree longer than any other energy company in America. Its corporate roots stretch back to 1787, when the Upper
Appomattox Company was granted a charter—with trustees that included George Washington and James Madison—by the Virginia General Assembly to build canals for hauling goods to the Tidewater region. Two centuries and many corporate transformations later, Dominion had accumulated enormous sway over the lawmakers who met blocks away from its own high-rise headquarters in Richmond.29
Over the decades, the company had developed a playbook for getting its way—whether it was higher electricity rates or approval for large, lucrative power plants.30 With a market capital valuation of nearly $70 billion in mid-2014, it had massive resources to spend on media campaigns, attorneys at white-shoe law firms, and hiring former senior staffers from the federal agencies or governors’ offices that they now lobbied. Dominion had long been the state’s biggest corporate donor to political candidates and leaders on both sides of the aisle.31 The company took advantage of Virginia’s unusually lax campaign finance laws to shower Democratic and Republican legislators alike with contributions and perks like all-expenses-paid golf and hunting trips.
In 2014, Dominion seemed at the peak of its powers within its home state. The company’s logo was ubiquitous: it loomed over Richmond from the top of its twenty-story office tower, graced the promotional materials for the annual Charity Classic golf tournament and the annual Riverrock Music Festival on the James River (both of which Dominion sponsored), and greeted theatergoers in the lobby of Richmond’s largest performance venue—which would soon be renamed the Dominion Energy Center for the Performing Arts.
Its CEO, meanwhile, was widely viewed as the most influential man in Virginia. Tom Farrell was at the center of Virginia’s political and cultural power centers. He served on the boards of Virginia’s most prestigious philanthropic and education institutions—including the University of Virginia, which had employed Rick Webb for most of his career.32 He sat on the board of the state’s other iconic corporate behemoth, also based in Richmond: the tobacco company Altria (formerly known as Philip Morris, before it rebranded after a legal settlement for its decades of denial that its products caused cancer). Farrell was childhood friends with former governor Bob McDonnell; Farrell’s brother-in-law was chairman of McGuireWoods, Virginia’s leading
corporate law firm, and a former state attorney general; Farrell’s own son was a Republican state legislator.33
But beyond the personal reach of its CEO, Dominion’s longstanding grip on Richmond was so firm, so obvious, that there was no sense in pretending otherwise. In 2015, a Dominion spokesman couldn’t name for a reporter a single piece of legislation in the preceding five years in which the company didn’t get what it wanted from the Virginia General Assembly.34 During the same 2015 session in which Virginia legislators approved a bill freezing in place a large rate hike on Dominion’s customers, they also passed and presented a resolution to Farrell expressing their gratitude “for the company’s commitment to service.”35 (It would later come to light that the new law let Dominion overcharge its customers by as much as $426 million in 2016.)
For all these reasons, a Dominion representative wasn’t being hyperbolic when he reportedly told landowners along the path of its new pipeline in Augusta County that they should quickly sign easement agreements because “we’re a billion-dollar company, and we’re going to put the pipeline wherever we want to put it.”36
Everyone’s Favorite Fossil Fuel
There was another reason why people thought tending bees might be a more productive use of Rick Webb’s time than poring over pipeline regulations.
He was swimming against the ineluctable current of mainstream— and elite—opinion.
“Natural gas is, in many ways, the ideal fossil fuel,” read the first line of a 2014 study guide for high school students produced by the US Department of Energy.37 Natural gas, in the wake of the financial crisis, had become the great American comeback story—the fossil fuel almost everyone could love, used in everything from fertilizer to plastic to power plants. It was suddenly cheap and abundant, thanks to the ingenuity, pluck, and persistence of fracking pioneers like George Mitchell. The post-recession frenzy of drilling and pipeline-building had created jobs in economically depressed swaths of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. And it burned cleaner than coal, producing
fewer health-damaging air pollutants and less climate-warming carbon dioxide.
Gas—or, rather, the brand of “natural gas” that had been carefully constructed like a shiny, impenetrable shell encasing the actual molecule composed of one carbon and four hydrogen atoms—seemed to offer something for everyone. It was every politician’s fantasy: Abundant! Cheap! Job-generating! Environmentally friendly! Made in America!
This consensus had crystallized into its purest form by late January 2014—not long before Brittany Moody sat down to devise the initial route of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline—when President Barack Obama visited Congress to deliver his sixth State of the Union address.38 He devoted substantial time to singing the praises of natural gas: “The allof-the-above energy strategy I announced a few years ago is working, and today, America is closer to energy independence than we’ve been in decades. One of the reasons why is natural gas—if extracted safely, it’s the bridge fuel that can power our economy with less of the carbon pollution that causes climate change.”
Obama didn’t use the word “fracking”—it had already become too controversial to say out loud. But he and other politicians enthusiastically embraced the “all of the above” slogan that oil and gas giant BP had rolled out in 2006 to convince customers that fossil fuels could work hand-in-hand with renewable energy. (The campaign’s ads featured an image of several answers listed on a multiple-choice test: oil, natural gas, wind, solar, biofuels, and energy efficiency, with “all of the above” checked at the bottom.)
In 2007 and 2008, Obama had campaigned on his pledges to tackle climate change. Pursuing a clean energy agenda was, he said time and again, one of his top priorities.39 Once in office, he presided over a head-spinning surge in the production and export of fossil fuels. And he didn’t shy away from taking credit for it. A decade later, he would say during a speech in Texas, “That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas—that was me, people . just say thank you, please.”40
In the intervening years, to square that circle, Obama used his presidential bully pulpit time and again to portray the natural gas boom as a win for the climate.
“The natural gas boom has led to cleaner power, and greater energy independence,” Obama said in his 2012State of the Union address. He pledged to “take every possible action to safely develop this energy.”
In March of that year, Obama gave another speech in the Oklahoma oil town of Cushing to prove his fossil fuel bona fides. “We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some,” he boasted, before warning that even more would be needed. “In fact, the problem in a place like Cushing is that we’re actually producing so much oil and gas in places like North Dakota and Colorado that we don’t have enough pipeline capacity to transport all of it to where it needs to go—both to refineries, and then, eventually, all across the country and around the world.”41
Obama was trying to thread a delicate political needle. The fight over the Keystone XL oil pipeline was intensifying. A committed coalition of Native Americans, Nebraska ranchers, and other residents along its route had emerged to fight the project, which would ferry crude from Canada’s tar sands straight through their irrigation and drinking water sources on its way to refineries on the Gulf Coast for export. The White House was drawing fire from these grassroots groups and climate activists on one side and Republicans on the other (who decried his “anti-energy agenda” for not rubber-stamping Keystone without delay).42
All the same, on his party’s “all of the above” energy menu, the main entrees remained oil and gas. During his 2012 reelection campaign, Obama studiously avoided discussing climate change, for fear of alienating moderate voters. In a presidential debate with his opponent Mitt Romney in October 2012,he responded to attacks on his support for the fossil fuel industry by touting the record levels of oil and gas produced on federal lands on his watch. “We continue to make it a priority for us to go after natural gas,” the president said. “We’ve got potentially 600,000 jobs and a hundred years’ worth of energy right beneath our feet with natural gas. And we can do it in an environmentally sound way . . . natural gas isn’t just appearing magically; we’re encouraging it and working with the industry.”43
As a shot of economic adrenaline coming on the heels of the financial crisis, the timing of the fracked gas gusher was impeccable. The
sugar high of jobs—most temporary, but still, they were jobs—was something Obama could brag about to an increasingly polarized electorate in key swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, as he faced an intractable Republican opposition after the 2010 midterms. Gas was crowding out coal in the power sector, but the coal industry’s clout and workforce had been shrinking for years anyway.
What’s more, unfettered access to cheap energy had long been viewed by many Americans as a birthright of sorts—as revealed every time gasoline prices rose and politicians’ poll numbers tanked in response. The siren song of gas was irresistible. It let Obama and other leaders claim to have reconciled the false choice that had long been another enduring trope in American political discourse: the economy versus the environment.
Most people don’t spend their evenings reading policy papers about lifecycle carbon emissions. Instead, they take their cues from voices they trust. This rhetoric—coming from the first US president to, avowedly, take the problem of climate change seriously—helped cement the idea of natural gas as a form of “clean energy” in the minds of many Americans.
Years later, Cheryl LaFleur, Obama’s nominee to lead the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission—perhaps the most influential but overlooked climate actor within the federal government—would summarize the thinking that prevailed in Washington, DC, this way to me: “At that time, gas was seen as the environmental savior.”44
With natural gas, they could have it both ways.
A Bridge Made of Methane
But the soaring rhetoric cloaked an awkward fact: natural gas is a fossil fuel.
And leaders were offering it up as a solution to an accelerating crisis—the warming of the planet—primarily caused by fossil fuels
Even as Obama touted his oil and gas record, scientists were pointing out that natural gas might actually prove to be an “all of the above” approach to making climate change worse: via the carbon dioxide produced when it was burned, via the methane that leaked during
its production and transport, via the renewable energy investments it crowded out, and via the fossil energy production it locked in for decades to come.45
“We really have to be quite careful about the language we use to frame things,” climate scientist Kevin Anderson told the New York Times in 2011.Natural gas, he said, “is not a positive thing, it’s just less negative.” In fact, he added, it was “a very bad fuel” with “very high emissions indeed . . . not as high as some other fossil fuels, but given where we need to be, to compare it with the worst that’s out there is very dangerous.”46
Anderson wasn’t the only one ringing alarm bells.47 In 2011, Robert Howarth and Anthony Ingraffea, scientists at Cornell University, published an analysis suggesting that gas produced by fracking might be, in fact, dirtier than coal once you tallied up all the methane that likely leaked into the atmosphere.48
The entire premise of the “bridge fuel” idea, they implied, rested on sleight of hand: gas only appeared cleaner than coal if one ignored all the methane quietly streaming out of wells, pipelines, compressor stations, distribution lines, and even appliances like furnaces and stoves. And if enough methane leaked to nearly cancel out any benefits from the massive coal-to-gas switch underway, then natural gas was, in Howarth’s words, a “bridge to nowhere.”49
The data painted a troubling picture. In February 2014, a peerreviewed study in Science, drawing on twenty years of methane measurements, concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency’s leak estimates were too low by 25 to 75 percent.50 Another key Science paper followed, revealing that, in 2015, the amount of methane leaking across the US oil and gas supply chain was 60 percent greater than the EPA’s estimates.51 In October 2014 an international team of researchers published a study in Nature, the world’s other leading academic journal, warning that building out a gas-heavy global energy system would likely not reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades; most of their models projected an increase in total climate-warming pollution in a scenario of “abundant gas.”52
Those concerns struggled to get a hearing, though. There were louder voices in the room.
In 2013,Obama tapped Ernest Moniz, a physicist at MIT, to be his new secretary of energy. One of Moniz’s claims to fame was leading a yearlong project that produced a report titled The Future of Natural Gas. It recommended channeling more private investment and government R & D dollars into natural gas. Moniz and his coauthors confidently asserted that extracting and burning more shale gas would be, on balance, good for the climate because it would reduce the use of more carbon-intensive coal. They shrugged at the environmental consequences as “challenging but manageable.”53
“Much has been said about natural gas as a bridge to a low-carbon future, with little underlying analysis to back up this contention,” Moniz said at a 2011 press conference to launch the report. “The analysis in this study provides the confirmation—natural gas truly is a bridge to a low-carbon future.”
It was little noticed at the time, or in the ensuing years, but the MIT report’s primary funder was the American Clean Skies Foundation, a nonprofit that functioned as a pro–natural gas front group, founded by Aubrey McClendon, the CEO of Chesapeake Energy.54
The revelation that the MIT analysis was largely financed by the nation’s most aggressive fracking firm—and the second-biggest gas producer—did nothing to blunt its impact. Instead, the heavily footnoted document was widely cited by its intended audience of policymakers, politicians, energy analysts, and investors as ironclad evidence—from one of the world’s most prestigious research institutions—of the wisdom of expanding the country’s gas infrastructure. Moniz testified to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that summer, at a hearing convened expressly to air the report’s findings, soon after its release.55
Moniz went on to serve as energy secretary for the remainder of Obama’s time in office. He was proud enough of the Future of Natural Gas report that he would later have it painted into the background of his official Department of Energy portrait.56 (Years later, he would remain one of the highest-profile proponents of Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy; in 2018, he would go on to join the board of Southern Company, after it became a partner in the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.)
But the Obama administration’s eager embrace of the “bridge fuel” trope still wasn’t enough for some fossil fuel boosters.
Soon after his 2014 speech, the Brookings Institution—the most august and influential of DC think tanks—published a letter by one of its fellows addressed directly to the president. It exhorted Obama to go even further, to capitalize on “your energy moment” by making it easier to extract, pipe, and export methane to secure and spread American influence abroad: “While I welcome your prescience, I would argue that rather than being a bridge, gas is the future.”57
Paperback | $32.00
240 pages
PUBLISHED: May 2024
ISBN: 9781642833157
When Driving Is Not an Option
Steering Away from Car Dependency
Anna Letitia Zivarts, foreword by Dani Simons
ne third of people living in the United States do not have a driver’s license. Yet our transportation system is designed almost exclusively with drivers in mind. Since most involuntary nondrivers are lower income, elderly, young, Black, Brown, Indigenous, or undocumented, they are invisible to decisionmakers.
In When Driving is Not an Option, disability advocate Anna Letitia Zivarts draws from interviews with involuntary nondrivers from around the US and from her own experience to shine a light on the number of people in the US who cannot drive and outlines actions to improve our mobility systems.
When the needs of involuntary nondrivers are viewed as essential to how we design our transportation systems and our communities, we will not only be able to more easily get where we need to go, but the changes will also lead to healthier, climate-friendly communities for everyone.
Anna Letitia Zivarts
Anna Letitia Zivarts is a low-vision mom and nondriver who was born with the neurological condition nystagmus. Since launching the Disability Mobility Initiative at Disability Rights Washington in 2020, Anna has worked to bring the voices of nondrivers to the planning and policy-making tables through organizing,
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Keywords: The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), automobile insurance, autonomous vehicle (AV), car dependency, choice nondrivers, delivery service, disability, disabled person, housing affordability, immigration status, involuntary nondrivers, micromobility, mobility, paratransit, parking reform, public transit, remote access, rideshare, sidewalk, transit access, walkability, wheelchair user
Foreword
Dani Simons, VP Public Affairs and Communications for the Americas, Alstom
For the vast majority of my career, I have been trying to convince Americans to drive less. I have done this because it is a critical part of slowing and reversing the damage we have done to our planet. In theory, it should also help people improve their personal health and the health of their communities. It should make travel less expensive, helping people to keep more of their income for their families instead of putting it in the pockets of oil executives. I say “in theory” and “should” because these benefits are still largely theoretical in most of the United States. In order to achieve them we need to change the way we design our policies and our streets, the way we plan and price transit systems, our development incentives, and our zoning codes.
Before the pandemic three in four commuters in the US drove alone. The average length of a commute was thirteen miles, a distance not easily covered by walking or biking. According to
Governing magazine, taking transit for these trips took, on average, 1.5–1.9 times longer than driving alone.1
I have come to believe (despite much of what we see each day on social media) that most Americans are inherently rational—at least when it comes to their transportation decisions.
You cannot at any meaningful scale convince people to do things that go so far against their own self-interest, such as biking with their kids to school without safe infrastructure or waiting for a bus that only comes twice an hour in near-freezing temperatures on the side of the road with no bus shelter.
Yet as Anna’s book points out, there are many in this country, nearly one-third of our population, who have no other options.
We are failing people who cannot and do not drive, diminishing their quality of life and hindering their social and economic opportunities. These failures hold back our local and regional economies. As a result, we’re not able to make the strides necessary to fight the climate crisis, improve public health, and create a more just and equitable nation for all.
I was part of a team at the US Department of Transportation in the Biden-Harris administration that won the passage of a once-in-a-generation investment in American infrastructure. The bipartisan infrastructure law, or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) as it is formally known, is an opportunity for us to change transportation. It, along with the COVID-19 funding that came before it, represents the largest investment that the US has ever made in transit or in passenger rail. It has a first-of-its kind program dedicated to improving roadway safety with $1 billion a year for five years.
My colleagues across USDOT also helped to craft policies meant to encourage states to use more of their highway funding to repair
existing roads and in doing so create more “complete streets” and improve roadway safety instead of just expanding facilities.
The federal government has a vital role in making these kinds of transformations. But the projects that are funded are inherently local. That’s a good thing, but it also means that all of us need to be vigilant, be engaged, and make ourselves heard as we work plan by plan, project by project, to change the way we do transportation. As Anna points out, we will only be able to truly transform transportation if we listen to the needs of people who do not have the option to drive.
We must shift from a worldview where the system is centered on people who drive to one that is centered on people who need to get somewhere and who deserve a variety of options. We need to shift to a worldview that meets our collective need for a planet where our children can breathe the air and live free from the increasingly frightening rumblings of climate change, for a nation where all residents can participate in society and the economy and where we’re not spending extra hours a day waiting on a bus or walking and biking miles out of our way to keep ourselves safe.
Anna’s book is a wake-up call and a roadmap to some of the policies and practices we should all be advocating for so this burden does not fall just on those who cannot drive but can be shouldered by all who want a more sustainable, healthy, and just nation.
Preface
It probably wasn’t much past five o’clock, but it was dark and drizzling, as it does most of the winter in the Pacific Northwest, and so it might as well have been midnight. My friend Lara picked me up at my parents’ house in the woods, driving an old faded, mintgreen pickup truck that belonged to her mom. Both Lara and her mom were six feet tall, and because I was shorter, Lara always felt a little older to me, even though we were in the same grade. She spent a lot of time working on tall ships and prided herself on being just as strong as the guys. I envied her independence and wanted to be as tough and self-reliant as I imagined she was. So that night when she offered to teach me how to drive, even though I should have refused, I was pretty excited.
I was sixteen and I knew at that point I wasn’t going to be able to get a driver’s license. When all my friends were getting their permits, my parents took me to the DMV to see if I could pass the xiii
vision test. I remember standing at the counter, placing my head up to the chunky black vision testing apparatus. At the far end of the dark tunnel flickered a small yellow shape. Was it a letter? Was it a number? I couldn’t tell. We left, me in tears.
I was born with a neurological condition called nystagmus that makes my eyes wiggle and bounce. When I’m awake, they’re always wiggling and bouncing a little bit, and it becomes more pronounced when I’m tired or stressed. Researchers don’t yet understand what causes nystagmus. Sometimes it’s hereditary and linked to albinism, and so researchers have wondered if it’s a response the brain develops to a weakness in the anatomy of the eye. Some people get nystagmus later in life as a result of a brain injury. For them, it’s much more disruptive. They perceive the world wiggling and shaking, as their eyes do, and that can result in migraines and dizziness. My brain, having had nystagmus since infancy, has figured out ways to cope. The world doesn’t bounce around for me, but I don’t see better than 20/80 on a vision chart. This means I can’t see faces across a room or read text on a projector screen, blackboard, or a wall-mounted restaurant menu. When someone says hi to me, unless they’re right next to me, I won’t be able to recognize who they are, and trying to find people in a crowd is awful. But because when you look at me, you wouldn’t at first guess that I have nystagmus, or even know what it is, acquaintances often think I’m just rude or ignoring them when I fail to wave back or say hello.
As a child born almost a decade before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), I grew up with a deep sense of shame around my vision. And I felt intense pressure to camouflage my disability and to pretend I could see things I couldn’t to keep others around me comfortable. I didn’t know anyone else who was blind or low vision. Even in books or school, the only blind person I read about
was Helen Keller, her long white petticoats firmly grounding her in another time that had little relation to me, on the sideline of a middle school PE game after getting smashed in the face, again, with a volleyball I didn’t see in time to duck.
I wanted to be dateable, attractive, not the awkward kid I saw in photos with thick glasses, a head tilt, and eyes that couldn’t find the camera. Like the ugly duckling or Cinderella, I figured if I worked hard enough at masking, nobody would know I was disabled, and my life would be immeasurably better. I stopped using the binoculars I needed to read the board at school. I always pretended I could see something when someone asked. And when Lara offered to teach me how to drive, I was all in, despite the fact it was dark, raining, and it was her mom’s truck that we both knew I wasn’t supposed to be driving.
Lara drove us to one of the empty parking lots at a nearby college campus. Each row of parking spaces was divided by a grassy median planted with trees. This campus, all modernist water-stained concrete, was built in the 1970s, so by the late 1990s, many of these trees had grown some heft.
We started out slowly and I was doing great. First gear, no problem, then second, third. By the time we were working on shifting into fourth gear, I had to get more speed. Suddenly, in one of the turns, there was a curb sticking out that I didn’t see in time. We careened up over the curb, through the grass, and straight up the trunk of a thick fir tree.
Luckily, we were both uninjured, but the truck sustained considerable damage. I remember shaking from the cold and nerves as we tried to push the truck down off the tree, its hood crumpled.
I am incredibly thankful we weren’t seriously hurt and didn’t hurt someone else. And I’m also grateful that I had this experience, for while it took me another fifteen years to be comfortable
enough to openly tell people about my disability, this crash gave my teenage self the knowledge that I could not safely drive.
Looking back now, I’m embarrassed that as a teenager, I didn’t learn how to use the bus system in my town. Yes, it would have been a two-mile walk down rural roads to the nearest bus stop, but even that would have given me some sense of freedom. But I didn’t know how to use the bus, and I definitely never met other adults who couldn’t drive. I couldn’t imagine a future for myself in Washington State where I would have the independence and ease of movement I craved, so I was intent on getting out.
I moved to the Bay Area for college, and New York City after that, where I’d heard there was a subway system, the only one in the country that never stopped running. Twenty-four-hour service represented freedom to me, equality with my peers back in the Pacific Northwest who could grab their keys and go whenever they wanted. But seventeen years later, after having a child, the desire to be closer to family back in Washington pulled my partner and me to move back.
As much as I appreciated being closer to family, the move away from a city where transit access had given me near-equivalent mobility with my nondisabled friends was difficult. In Seattle, I felt resentful every time I looked up directions on how to get somewhere on the bus and my phone showed it would take two to three times as long as it would if I could drive there. What would be a fifteen-minute drive would be an hour-and-a-half, multi-bus trip, where missing bus shelters meant me and my toddler would be waiting on the side of a loud arterial in the rain, covered in grit from the puddle splashes of passing Subarus.
But very quickly, I came to see I wasn’t alone. Because of my job at a disability rights organization, for the first time in my life, I started meeting other disabled adults who couldn’t drive. And
I started to hear stories about how missing sidewalks and curb cuts, broken transit station elevators and blocked crosswalks, infrequent buses, and a lack of affordable housing anywhere with decent transit service were making it hard for disabled people to be engaged in our communities, to work or go to school, and even to remain out of institutions like nursing homes. And I knew it wasn’t only disabled people who didn’t have reliable or affordable transportation. Having worked for many years with labor unions organizing low-wage, mostly immigrant service workers, I knew that transportation barriers impacted many people outside the disability community as well.
In Seattle, the route 7 bus that I took to and from work was always packed. I’d have to negotiate room for my toddler and his stroller to squeeze in with the other moms, many of them immigrants from East Africa, with seniors pushing grocery carts returning from shopping trips in the International District, with young men getting off at Lowe’s to look for work as day laborers, with blind and deafblind workers on the way home from their shifts at the Lighthouse, with groups of high school students in the afternoons. Sitting on the 7, I started to think about what it would take to build a coalition with everyone on that bus, where we could fight for more reliable transit, for smoother sidewalks and nicer bus stops, for affordable housing close to where we needed to go.
In the fall of 2020, I had the opportunity to launch that vision with the creation of the Disability Mobility Initiative at Disability Rights Washington. My first goal was making nondrivers visible. I was tired of hearing from elected leaders that “everyone” in their communities drove, so spending more money on bus service or sidewalks just wasn’t necessary. I knew it wasn’t true, and I wanted to show that there were people—their constituents—on every street, in every community who couldn’t drive. I set out to track
down, interview, and document the stories of nondrivers from each of our state’s legislative districts.
I figured it would be difficult. In a previous gig, I worked for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to identify plaintiffs who lacked state ID cards or birth certificates for challenges to voter identification laws. For one project, I’d gone to every soup kitchen in Wichita, Kansas, and asked everyone who would talk with me if they had ID and wanted to be able to vote; on another, I’d scrambled to find someone to drive me in the middle of a snowstorm to Wausau, Wisconsin, to track down a senior who showed me how her birth was recorded in the family Bible. She had never had a birth certificate and was worried with the new voter identification laws that she would not be able to vote.
Finding the people with these experiences took a lot more effort than posting on Facebook. While I knew it would be relatively easy to find car-free urbanists or influencer disability activists to share their stories, the people I most wanted to talk with were unlikely to be connected to the existing networks of transit, biking, or disability activism. But I knew that it was these stories, from people who usually remained invisible to policymakers, that would have the most profound impact on shifting the narrative that our transportation system, and car dependency more broadly, was working for us. And so, I knew it was worth the effort.
I started with the same approach I’d used working for the ACLU: reaching out to everyone I thought might have connections to nondrivers in their communities—not just transit agencies or nonprofits that provide rides to seniors and people with disabilities, but also groups that work with refugee communities, labor unions, and environmental justice organizers. Soon I had 75, then 100, then 250 stories from nondrivers. I heard stories not just from the big cities where buses run on Sundays, I also heard from
people in small agricultural towns on the border with Idaho, up river valleys in the woods above old logging towns, from islands connected to the mainland by ferry, from all forty-nine of our state’s legislative districts.1
And it wasn’t just the stories that I gathered through the interviews—I was building relationships and creating an advocacy network. I was beginning to organize that coalition that I’d dreamed about while I was riding the 7 bus. So, when the time came to weigh in on transportation investments, people who previously had not had their voice considered were suddenly visible.
And more than just visible, most everyone I had the chance to interview was eager to be involved in advocating for changes that would improve our access. Unlike drivers who can grab the keys and quickly get somewhere, those of us without this privilege have spent hours and hours planning routes, coordinating drivers, waiting for buses, trying to find the most accessible and least unpleasant route to a grocery store. We’ve thought about the transportation system a lot. And as we’re standing there, waiting for a gap in traffic and watching the bus that comes once every thirty minutes drive away before we could get to the stop, we’ve thought about what has to change to make things work better for us.
This expertise, from using the system day in and day out, is critically needed right now to lead us away from the damage that was caused, and that continues to be caused, by car dependency. It’s not just the isolation, depression, and lack of community connections or access to critical services experienced by those of us who aren’t able or can’t afford to drive; it’s also the disproportionate public health risks that communities that prioritize automobility place on poor, Black, Brown, and immigrant residents from air and noise pollution and the inevitable crashes, causing injury and death. Bigger than all that, there is the harm from the chaos of
climate change that our reliance on automobility is locking in for our children and future generations.
From April through October my child wakes up every morning and checks the Air Quality Index before switching to the wildfire layer on Google Maps to track where the smoke might be coming from. This is the world he will inhabit, a world where no place is protected from the smoke, the more frequent hurricanes, the stronger tornado-spawning thunder cells, or higher king tides. Where climate-induced displacement and migration from crop failure or unsurvivable heat waves will reshape our communities as we create space for climate refugees.
It is easy to feel defeated when considering the scale of the challenges. But we know that if we don’t act to reduce emissions now, the disruption our children will have to survive will be even worse. And we know that our transportation system—in particular the way we have built our communities to work for, and mostly only work for, cars—is the largest contributor to emissions, and something that we have the power to change. We have to make it easier for everyone to get around more easily without driving. It’s a moral imperative, not just for those of us who can’t drive, but for the environmental health of our communities and the mitigation of climate change for our children.
I write this book from a place of hope. Not only because parenting gives me little choice, but because I have seen how much excitement and knowledge exists among those of us who can’t drive, especially those of us who know that it will never be available for us, to fundamentally rethink society’s car dependency. I know if we can put this passion into practice, change is not only possible, but inevitable.
Figure 0-1: Me and my kid waiting for the bus.
Image Description: A White woman wearing sunglasses and a blond toddler wait in the shade of a bus shelter. A stroller with a white cane resting on it is next to the woman.
Acknowledgments
The heart of this book are the experiences that nondrivers shared with me. And while I made sure to compensate those I interviewed for this book, my initial list of interviewees was way too long. I couldn’t include by name everyone whose knowledge and expertise informs this work, but it is the foundation of this work. I am deeply grateful for everyone who shared their story with me during my organizing work at Disability Rights Washington and for the support from the leadership of Disability Rights Washington, Mark Stroh and David Carlson, for allowing me the freedom to do this work, especially since I didn’t have any other models of success to point to.
Going further back, this book, and the work that led to it, was only possible because of the years I spent learning how to organize while working for labor unions—especially from my first boss and mentor, Roxana Rivera. It was also shaped by the years I spent working with the American Civil Liberties Union and the
communicators there, like my boss Paul Cates, who taught me how to think about the importance of finding the right stories to shift public opinion.
I also want to thank everyone who had patience for me as I figured out how to write a book, especially my editor, Heather Boyer, who held my hand through many, many versions of this book proposal. And finally, to my partner, who took over all the kid care when I took off, whether for a couple of hours or even sometimes a week, to get the space I needed to be able to write.
Despite What You Think, Not Everyone Drives
One-third of people living in the United States don’t have a driver’s license.1 This includes people like me who cannot drive because of a disability. It also includes young people, immigrants, people with suspended licenses, and people who have aged out of driving. Additionally, there are many people with licenses who can’t afford to own a car or pay for insurance, parking, or gas. But because of who the majority of nondrivers are—disabled and poor people, unhoused or recently incarcerated individuals, undocumented immigrants, kids, young people, seniors aging out of driving—we are largely invisible, far from power structures that would enable us to create a world that could better meet our needs. The consequence of this invisibility is a mobility system designed almost exclusively for drivers. And that system has costs, not just for those of us excluded from it.
The truth is, car-dependent communities aren’t just failing those of us who can’t drive, they are failing everyone. They fail all of us by forcing us to make the land use decisions that drive up
housing costs and saddle us with the financial burden of owning, operating, and maintaining a vehicle. Car dependency contributes to the public health crises of air and noise pollution and traffic crashes that cause life-changing injuries or deaths, all of which disproportionately harm low-income, Black, Brown, immigrant, and Native American communities. And perhaps most menacing of all, transportation is the leading contributor to carbon emissions. If we’re serious about addressing climate change, we have to address our transportation system.
When I share the fact that a third of people in the United States can’t, or can’t afford to, drive, usually my audience is incredulous. Even among professionals in the transportation field, it’s rare that someone grasps how many people are so profoundly excluded, if not severely limited, by not being able to grab car keys and go.
The narrative that everyone in the United States drives both shapes and is shaped by the metrics we use to try to understand mobility. How do we count who is a nondriver, not only those who can’t physically drive, but also people who can’t afford to drive or who don’t have reliable access to a vehicle?
The metric I cite at the beginning of this chapter, that one-third of the people in this country can’t drive, refers to the number of people in the United States without a valid driver’s license.2 But a driver’s license is a crude measure of access to driving. For example, many seniors who lose the ability to drive still have a valid driver’s license, and some people may retain a driver’s license even while having a temporary disability that prevents them from driving. On the flip side, some people drive without a valid license, though that ability to drive comes with the risk of arrest.
Another metric used to measure transportation access is household vehicle ownership. Seven percent of American households do not own a car, and an additional 17 percent of households have
a “vehicle deficit,” meaning they have more adults than vehicles.3 The Census asks about vehicle ownership in order to “plan and fund improvements to road and highway infrastructure” and “develop transportation plans and services.”4 But this is also an insufficient measurement of who has reliable access to a vehicle and the ability to drive it. Without understanding who within a household has primary access to a vehicle and the ability to drive, we can’t understand disparities of access within households. For example, if a household has one vehicle that is used for one person to go to work, what kind of access do other household members have?
As part of my work in transportation advocacy at Disability Rights Washington, we and our allies successfully advocated for the state to fund a study on the demographics and mobility needs of nondrivers. The study was conducted by Toole Design in partnership with Cascadia Consulting and Strategic Research Associates and released in 2023. Using US Census Bureau and Federal Highway Administration Highway Statistics data, the study estimated that Washington’s nondrivers represent 30 percent of our state population. These are people who are either under the age of 16 (and not eligible for a driver’s license) or who are 16 or older and either do not have a driver’s license or do not have a car.
In addition to the data analysis, the project team conducted a market research survey in which they called over fifty thousand phone numbers and reached out to 100,000 people online and asked them screening questions to identify nondrivers. Of those who were contacted, 2,786 met the screening criteria of being a nondriver, were over the age of 18, and responded to the survey. The respondents were from a geographically representative sample of the population of Washington State.5
Among people with driver’s licenses and vehicles in their households who responded to the survey, “women, those under 25,
and those with annual income under $56,000 are less likely to be the primary driver than males, those 25 years old and older, and those with income over $56,000.”6 By assuming that vehicle access among a household is equally distributed, the mobility needs of women, younger, and poorer individuals may not be evident.
Transportation mode is another common way to analyze how many people are drivers, but too often non-driving modes are undercounted when multiple modes are used on a single trip. Todd Litman from Victoria Transport Policy Institute writes that “commonly cited travel statistics, such as commute mode share, undercount active trips by ignoring shorter trips, non-commute trips, children’s travel, recreational travel, and active links of trips that include motor vehicle travel. For example, a bike-transit-walk trip is often classified simply as a transit trip, and trips between parked vehicles and destinations are ignored even if they involve several blocks of walking.”7 Metrics that try to establish destination type or trip purpose struggle with how to measure these “chained” trips, which are more likely to be taken by caregivers, whose mobility needs have been historically ignored.
Technology to measure car traffic volumes is in use in most cities, but pedestrian and bicycle counts have not been prioritized. Cell phone signals are used to determine car traffic volumes and retime “adaptive” traffic signals to minimize backups. But because the pace of bicycle and pedestrian travel is so much slower and varied, the same technology cannot be used to count cyclists and pedestrians and retime signals to value their wait times and crossing needs.8 Even with better pedestrian or bike counts, this data must be interpreted with caution. For example, very few people may choose to make a risky and highly unpleasant highway crossing to get from their apartment complex to a convenience store, but that doesn’t mean there’s not latent demand. The Washington
State Department of Transportation explains in its active transportation plan:
WSDOT and other transportation agencies have historically focused on actual counts for decision making. That method does not account for barriers or places where there is a lack of infrastructure; for example, the sidewalk ends and the only option is to walk in the travel lane so fewer people use that sidewalk. It also does not account for the level of traffic stress in a place that discourages people who would otherwise use active transportation. In other words, focusing on counts of people already moving through a place does not account for the people who would be there if adequate facilities were provided.9
Alix Gould-Werth from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and Dr. Alexandra Murphy, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, created a quantifiable metric for transportation that isn’t focused on mode or trip purpose but rather on whether someone can get to the places they need to go in a safe or timely manner. The sixteen-question Transportation Security Index (TSI) is a valuable tool because it can provide data that measures transportation insecurity within households or between individuals who live on the same block. For instance, for someone who can drive, bike, or walk to the bus easily, a neighborhood might feel like it has good accessibility, but someone else who perhaps walks more slowly or doesn’t feel safe waiting at a particular bus stop might not experience the same accessibility even though they live in the same household.10
When Gould-Werth and Murphy administered the TSI to a nationally representative sample of 1,999 adults in 2018, the researchers found that 1 out of 4 adults in the United States is transportation insecure. Fully half of adults experiencing poverty lacked
transportation security, and Black and Hispanic adults were more likely to be transportation insecure than White adults.11
The Transportation Security Index is a powerful metric, not only because it allows us to look at transportation access for the individual, a more detailed measure than household or census block, but also because it expresses transportation access with more nuance and is able to reflect how disability, income, and social networks may be just as important to access as geography, transit service, and physical infrastructure.
So, while I refer to “nondrivers” in this book, I understand that this isn’t always a strict binary between being able to drive and not being able to drive, having a functioning vehicle or not being able to pay for the needed repairs until the next paycheck. Driving access may be transitory, and even among people like me who have disabilities that fully prevent us from driving, our transportation access will vary depending on financial resources and stability, race, language proficiency, immigration status, gender, caregiving responsibilities, and geography.
But in a culture of car dependency, where our communities are almost always entirely built around vehicle mobility and speed, I think the binary of driver/nondriver is useful both in understanding access needs and in creating a cohesive political identity around which to mobilize for change. The fact that we have such insufficient knowledge of how people get around without driving, and how many of us and how frequently we travel or need to travel without driving ourselves, emphasizes how much this frame is needed.
We need to build a broad coalition, starting with nondrivers, to demand a different transportation and land use paradigm. This could be a powerful coalition given that car dependency is harming our public health and climate future. It could include advocates
who want streets where children can safely navigate to the park or school, people who want to undo the harms of structural racism in highway construction, and those who want to reduce carbon emissions, connect rural and tribal communities to transit and multiuse trails, and create abundant affordable housing in places where it is possible to get around without a car.
Why This Book?
I want to be clear that while I center disability and accessibility throughout this book, this is not a book about disability and transportation. Some disabled people do drive, and for some disabled people, driving is the most accessible form of transportation. I’m interested in describing a different collective experience, the experience of not reliably being able to depend on driving for access in a society based on cars.
What does it mean that we have designed a transportation system that doesn’t serve so many of us, and how can we change it? Nondrivers are a diverse group—from disabled people who can’t drive because of our disabilities, to low-income, Black, Brown, Native American, and immigrant communities, to seniors aging out of driving and young people too young to drive or choosing to delay the costs of car ownership. But even with these differences, I’ll discuss how our mobility needs form a cohesive identity.
When talking about disabled people, throughout this book I use “identity-first” language instead of “person-first” language. For example, instead of saying “I am a person with disabilities,” I lead with the disability: “I am a disabled person.” I made this choice because it’s how I, as a low-vision person, choose to identify, and it is more consistent with how we talk about other parts of our identities. I wouldn’t say that I am a person with queerness, or a person with Whiteness, for example. I recognize that other people
prefer person-first language and that for many disabled people who for decades have fought to be recognized as deserving of the same respect as everyone else, person-first language is an important step toward recognizing that someone is not defined by their disability. So, if an interviewee expressed this preference, I honor that preference.
Using examples from our success in Washington State, I show how advocates working on climate change, safer roadways, environmental justice, and better transit and bike infrastructure can benefit from more intentionally seeking out collaboration with and leadership from involuntary nondrivers—people who can’t drive or can’t afford to—and how organizing across communities and across identities, we build bigger coalitions with more power.
Drawing from interviews with involuntary nondrivers from around the United States and from my own experience, I explain how nondrivers get around and the changes necessary to make our communities more accessible. These include sidewalk connectivity; reliable transit and paratransit; options for biking, scooting, and rolling; affordable and accessible housing; and the unrecognized burden of asking and paying for rides.
If there’s one thing that you take from this book, I hope that it is the importance of listening to the knowledge of those who day in and day out rely on our network of sidewalks, on buses and paratransit, on rolling or biking, or on asking and paying others for rides. It is critical to include involuntary nondrivers in transportation planning decisions. I outline steps organizations can take to include and promote leadership of those who are most impacted—and too often excluded—by transportation systems designed and run by people with driving privilege. And if you don’t work for an organization in the transportation or land use space, I’ve included a checklist of actions you, as an individual living in
a car-dependent society, can take in your own life to help all of us move beyond automobility.
When the needs of involuntary nondrivers are viewed as essential to how we design our transportation systems and our communities, not only will we be able to more easily get where we need to go, but the changes will lead to healthier, climate-friendly communities for everyone. So, what are we waiting for?
Hardcover | $30.00 | 344 pages
PUBLISHED: September 2024
ISBN: 9781642833010
The Heat and the Fury
On the Frontlines of Climate Violence
Peter Schwartzstein
As a journalist on the climate security beat, Peter Schwartzstein has been chased by kidnappers, detained by police, and told, in no uncertain terms, that he was no longer welcome in certain countries. Yet these personal brushes with violence are simply a hint of the conflict simmering in our warming world.
A new dam that has brought Egypt and Ethiopia to the brink of war over water. ISIS recruiters who exploit drought to pad their ranks. Farmers-turned-pirates who can no longer make a living off the land and instead make it off bloody ransoms.
In The Heat and the Fury, Schwartzstein not only puts readers on the frontlines of these conflicts but gives us the context to make sense of seemingly senseless acts. His incisive analysis of geopolitics, unparalleled on-the-ground reporting, and keen sense of human nature offer the clearest picture to date of the violence that threatens us all.
Peter Schwartzstein
Peter Schwartzstein is an environmental journalist who reports on water, food security, and particularly the conflictclimate nexus across some thirty countries in the Middle East, Africa, and occasionally further afield. He mostly writes for National Geographic,
but his work has also appeared in the New York Times, BBC, Foreign Affairs, and many other outlets. He is a Global Fellow with the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, a TED fellow, and a fellow at the Center for Climate and Security.
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About Island Press
Since 1984, the nonprofit organization Island Press has been stimulating, shaping, and communicating ideas that are essential for solving environmental problems worldwide. With more than 1,000 titles in print and some 30 new releases each year, we are the nation’s leading publisher on environmental issues. We identify innovative thinkers and emerging trends in the environmental field. We work with world-renowned experts and authors to develop cross-disciplinary solutions to environmental challenges.
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Keywords: Climate change and gender-based violence; Climate change and terrorism; Climate migration; Climate security; Conflict–climate nexus; Drought; Environmental security; Extreme weather; Food security; Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam; Land grabs; Resource scarcity; Water security; Water wars
To my parents
A Note to the Reader Regarding Language and Sources xi
Introduction. The Fundamentals of Climate Violence 1 Who, where, what, why, how
Chapter 1. Cultivating Terror
How did water crises fuel ISIS? A years-long investigation reveals the environmental roots of Iraqi extremism.
19
Chapter 2. Bandit Fodder 55
Along a Bangladeshi coastline battered by sea level rise, the pirates are king.
Chapter 3. Water Wars? 83
History tells us that nations do not fight over water. Egypt and Ethiopia, roiled by a new mega-dam on the Nile, might break the mold.
Chapter 4. Merchants of Thirst 117
What happens when countries have the bad luck to have bad rulers during bad conditions? Meet the men feasting off Nepal’s dysfunction.
Chapter 5. Deadly Pastures
As access to water and land in West Africa fluctuates, farmers and herders are duking it out over the scraps.
Chapter 6. No Jobs, No Peace
For years, the Jordanian government has recruited unemployed rural men into the military. Now drought is torching that strategy, and no one knows what will take its place.
Chapter 7. Hunger Games
Having exhausted their own water, rich nations are seeking food in poor ones, like Sudan. Cue chaos.
Chapter 8. The West and the Rest
We think Western democracies are immune from climate violence. They’re not.
Chapter 9. Out of Chaos, Hope?
In the right circumstances, environment and climate can bring warring communities back together.
A Note to the Reader Regarding Language and Sources
As with any reporting or research that requires transliteration from different non-Latin alphabets, there is a wide range of possible ways to spell the names and places that appear in many of these chapters. Whenever possible I have plumped for the most common transliteration. In the case of uncommon names and places, I have just chosen the simplest option.
You may also note some unnamed or mostly unnamed sources, certainly more than I would like. However, there is good reason for that. Some of my interviewees only spoke to me on the condition of anonymity––given the potential risks of engaging with a foreign journalist in unfree countries—or, in particularly challenging circumstances, they declined to give their surnames or any names at all. Plenty more did give me their full names, but I have deemed it inappropriate to use them in instances where I feel that their words could come back to bite them. In still others, I spoke to these people in very different guises from that of a journalist or author—for example, as a researcher for a UN agency––and consequently do not feel that they gave informed consent.
The Fundamentals of Climate Violence
Who, where, what, why, how
The old man took his time to respond. It was late 2014 and I had come to northeastern Syria with one burning question in mind: Was there any evidence that climate change had contributed to the start of that country’s civil war? Right from the get-go, reporting went lousily. With ISIS (also known as the ISIL, the Islamic State, or IS) then on the warpath, people were panicked, never more so than when a rumor spread that the jihadists had broken through Kurdish lines, and my colleague and I were roused in the middle of the night to flee. I felt faintly ridiculous asking about drought while fellow journalists reported on—and embedded with—desperately outgunned defenders. Clearly, a few of my interviewees felt the same, and accordingly they fixed me with some very perplexed looks. Then there was the challenge of finding the right people from the right places. Like needles in a stack of needles, the villagers I sought were often indistinguishable from the hundreds of thousands of other refugees, all bundled into rainsodden camps and swollen towns across a narrow sliver of land along the Turkish border.
But then I got lucky. After spotting a group of men ogling a herd of grazing cattle, we pulled to the side of the road and got talking. They were all farmers displaced from other parts of Syria, and they—or more particularly, Talal, the older statesman among them—were keen to tell their tale. For many years in the lead-up to the 2011 revolution against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, he and his family had grappled with governmental corruption, as when officials laced state-provided fertilizers with sawdust and sold some of the genuine product on the private market for personal profit rather than passing it on to the intended recipients. And for about three years preceding the uprising, they had reeled from weak rains, which were debilitating enough in themselves but utterly destructive when fused with regime larceny. The very idea, Talal said, that they were being sabotaged by an unscrupulous state when they most needed its help was a “final indignity.” So, when anti-regime protests began, he and his similarly outraged friends and relatives were among the first in their area to join—and a little later, in the case of a few of them, among the first to take up arms. The rest, as they say, is history. “Bad rains, bad government, bad times,” Talal told me, withholding his surname. “We could not continue.”*
This is the story of climate-related violence, and it is already far more common than you might imagine. In large chunks of Africa and Central
* This is a much-simplified version of a complex tale. According to the dominant climateconflict narrative in Syria, years of drought in the run-up to 2011 had sparked a mass migration of battered villagers to cities, where they struggled to adapt and so were particularly inclined to join anti-regime protests. And that may be at least partly true. But in interviews across several trips to the country’s northeast, farmers gave me a slightly different account. That drought hit even harder than it otherwise might because of corruption and state incompetence. If only Damascus had not handicapped them so, perhaps they would have been better placed to cope with both poorly conceived subsidy reforms and a vicious array of climate shocks. Among many other grievances, farmers’ sense that the regime was undermining them amid unprecedented hardship was an insult too far.
Asia, climate stresses are fueling fights between farmers and herders. In the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, and beyond, these changes are intensifying everything from gang warfare in urban neighborhoods, to “old school” piracy in the coastal waters of Bangladesh. Across many of the world’s most vulnerable landscapes, climate change and other environmental furies are merging with other, better understood destabilizers, such as corruption, to undermine dozens of countries that can ill-afford additional crises. And that is just the here and the now. As these stresses and shocks come thicker and faster, rapidly changing conditions threaten to apply the kind of pressure that even the richest of places might struggle to withstand.
The Heat and the Fury is an attempt to unpack this “new” violence. Through a range of intensively reported examples, I will try to impress upon you that there are fewer and fewer forms of instability or out-andout violence that are not at least partly connected to climate or wider environmental woes—and relatively few communities that are not potentially susceptible to warming’s violent “entreaties.” Because, while climate-related violence is cutting deepest in poor countries, it will, in some form at least, come for “us.” As explored in the latter stages of this book, climate is already contributing to everything from increased aggression against women in Europe, to declining military readiness across much of the Western world.
Through an investigation of the muddled, under-the-hood mechanics of this form of violence, I will try to show that climate’s contribution to instability can be considerably more complicated—and almost always more nebulous—than is popularly understood. Since the 1990s and especially since the early 2000s, scholars of climate security, as this field is called, have done extraordinary work illuminating the risks that a warming world poses for peace and stability. However, there is still a lot more to uncover.
From chapter 1 onward, we will explore how climate and environmental drivers can hurl extra fuel onto already-smoldering fires, as per the most widely accepted characterization of climate’s contribution to violence, but also how climate change is simultaneously burrowing, termite-like, through the supports that individuals, communities, and nations turn to in times of crisis. What happens, for instance, when drought hobbles a farming village, and its leaders—the ones who used to arbitrate disputes—head for the hills (or, more accurately, the city), leaving the poorest and most vulnerable residents to try and resolve their troubles among themselves? What happens when a person becomes so beaten down by his circumstances that he resorts to behavior that can only be described as wild or deranged?
Many of my interviewees have mused, in seemingly genuine bewilderment, as to why their farmer cousins or pastoralist neighbors took up arms in improbable circumstances. “It’s a form of insanity,” a young man in Burkina Faso suggested of a nearby village’s decision to pick a fight over farmland that it could not hope to win. Amid the dislocation, exhaustion, and sense of powerlessness that climate change can unleash, I think there is something to that.
Crucially, for a book that is meant to be constructive rather than voyeuristic, I will hint at what makes some places more vulnerable to violence than others. As climate security scholars frequently emphasize, climate change need not fuel instability, and in many of the hardest-hit areas it has not. Why, for example, has climate contributed to conflict in Somalia but so far mostly spared the similarly afflicted Somali region of Ethiopia next door?1 Hint: It has a lot do with governance. Though I yo-yo in my personal assessment of our prospects for avoiding intense climate-related violence, I am heartened by how much can be done to prevent these shocks from spilling into bloodshed, even as temperatures continue to climb. For all its focus on the messy present and potentially
much messier future, I—and I hope you, too—see this book more as a call to arms than a cheerless requiem for our planet.
The Heat and the Fury is grounded in a decade of environmental reporting from over thirty countries, including frequent visits to every place that figures prominently in the book, and countless hours being bounced around the back roads of four continents. The scores of dirt- and sweatstained notepads that emerged from that work tell the stories of soldiers, scientists, spies, farmers, government officials, and many others who have been kind enough to share their insights over the years. It is through their often-bitter experiences that I have come to understand climate’s capacity to wreak havoc. It is largely through them that I will tell this tale.
But throughout this period, I have also depended on the scholars who have cut a long and, until recently, relatively lonely furrow developing the climate security field. Although I like to think that I am on top of my beat now, I did not come to it as a committed, or even half-informed, environmentalist. I grew up between Washington, DC, and the UK and had a love of wilderness, but no more than a superficial interest in its upkeep. It was not until I moved to Egypt at the beginning of 2013 and began to clock both the scale of environmental and climate trouble and how little political or media energy was being devoted to covering (or stifling) the story that I really became invested in the field. Out of an instinct for self-preservation as much as a sense of journalistic fascination, I have been motivated to try to articulate the severity of the climate crisis ever since. And what tells that story most forcefully than the violence it is leaving in its wake?
The journey to produce this book has not always been smooth. Along the way, there have been more bouts of food poisoning than I care to remember—or than you surely would care to hear about—as well as
frequent games of cat and mouse with authorities, and a number of the sort of security scares that one might expect of a hands-on exploration of violence. In one instance, while returning from an interview in one of the fast-expanding slum districts of Basra in southern Iraq in 2015, I noticed that the taxi driver whom I had engaged to drive me between meetings that day was behaving oddly. First, he began to nervously finger the gun that he kept lodged by the gearbox. Then he obsessively scanned his wing mirrors. After two men—“cousins who needed a ride,” he insisted— jumped into the back seats, I understood what he had in mind. Leaping out of the car at the next traffic jam, I weaved through the backstreets, the “cousins” trailing for the first bit, and sprinted as quickly as I ever did through school and college track and field. That evening, in an interview with the police chief, I learned that a local militia, one that was fittingly chock-full of recent migrants from the countryside, had noted my presence. “They’re desperate,” he said. “They saw you as money.”
Yet through it all, I have had constant reminders of the importance of this subject. One of the most pointed came the day before that terrifying Basra incident. I had traveled about an hour north of the city to one of the region’s fast-crumbling farming villages. There, I met an old man, Abu Mohammed, who lay in bed, struggling to breathe. He had no more than a sputtering fan to cool him, despite the humid 110-degree-Fahrenheit heat. Iraq’s severe year-round electricity outages are even more pronounced in the summer when air-conditioning demand overloads the grid. And he had had no functioning refrigerator for his many medicines since the family’s harvest had failed the previous year, depriving them of the funds to pay for generator fuel. After a brief, uncomfortable chat, I left him in peace. About an hour later, while conducting interviews next door, I heard a great wail from his daughter. He had had a massive, fatal heart attack that the doctor was adamant could have been avoided had he been living in more hospitable conditions.
On some level, it could be tempting to question what is new about climate- and environment-related violence. After all, conflict connected to water is as old as civilization itself, with some of the first recorded clashes fought between Sumerian city-states around 4,500 years ago, only miles from where Abu Mohammed took his last breath. I read a lot of environmental history, and natural landscapes have figured prominently as drivers, as victims, and as weapons of war over the millennia. According to one prominent theory, ancient Rome’s rise owed a lot to a centuries-long period of warmer, rainier, and hence prime crop-growing conditions, which allowed the empire to produce much more food for its tens of millions of people than the period’s farming techniques would otherwise have allowed. The violent famine- and plague-ridden fall of the empire’s western portion may have turned in part on the end of that climactic idyll a few hundred years later.2 According to another, rich rains may have facilitated the advance of Genghis Khan’s Mongol horde across the steppe to Europe in the thirteenth century, the pasture lush enough to support unprecedented numbers of horses and the troops they carried.3
But while the parallels with past perils are clear, I hope readers will emerge with the sense that we are now up against a different beast, or at least one that is striking in different ways with more complex ramifications across a more challenging political landscape. Decades of progressively fiercer warming means that more people have less access to resources, or at least less consistent access to them, while at the same time they must confront rampant extreme weather-fueled disasters, such as floods and fires. These cascading risks are merging with other day-to-day challenges to overtax coping mechanisms and fuel poverty of a sort that is hardly conducive to happy, well-ordered societies. “In the past, summer was summer, and winter was winter, but now everything’s
mixed up,” said Awad Hawran, who grows mangoes, sugarcane, dates, and watermelons on a one-and-a-half-acre plot alongside the Nile in Sudan. “It’s hard to continue farming when even the desert and weather are against you.”4
None of that immiseration necessarily leads to violence, but climate change is desperately unequal in its application of pressure. In my experience, troubles are more likely to emerge in places where some people are suffering mightily from climate-related stress, such as farmers or villagers in general, at the same time as others are getting by just fine or even prospering. It is that relative disparity in fortunes and government responses, a mirror of wider inequalities, that, much more than the poverty itself, can fuel dangerous degrees of resentment. “We suffer the most. They get all the help,” I have frequently heard communities and individuals say of another. Mohammed Atiyeh, a farmer and activist in a dangerously parched part of Jordan, perhaps put it best. “In a country that might run out of water,” he said, “there is regulation only for the weak and poor.” His own crops, already ailing from weak rains and feeble river flow, had been withered by the water hoarding of a politically connected neighbor.5
All the while, a half century or more of intense environmental degradation has combined with prolific population growth to maximize the impacts of these stresses. Climate-induced drought is a challenge. Climate-induced drought is significantly more challenging when it strikes communities that are already reeling from pollution, groundwater depletion, and other very “prosaic” ills. In these instances, minor manifestations of climate change can be enough to pitch struggling people into violence—particularly if they feel that corruption or other forms of state action or inaction are hobbling them at their time of greatest need, à la Syria. “Even a mosquito can make a lion’s eye bleed,” an Arab proverb goes.
It is no coincidence that many of the worst climate-related security crises are unfolding in precisely the places that are also battling severe non-climate-related environmental woes. Nor is it an accident that I have chosen to mention plenty of the latter in this book, many of which are either overlooked despite their often greater significance, or incorrectly lumped under the banner of climate change. Climate change is often considered “sexier” by donors and hence talked up by aid recipients too. Sometimes, the distinction between the two is seemingly lost on scientifically illiterate elites.
(Though not necessarily a challenge in absolute “Malthusian” terms, given that we seemingly do have the capacity to provide for eight billion people and counting, booming populations are reducing many communities’ and states’ margin for error—and sometimes sparking aggressive or erratic behavior from authoritarian governments who fear that climate change could compromise their sourcing of sufficient food and water in the future. As a measure of just how swiftly the global population has mushroomed, the number of people who could be displaced by climate change by 2050 is roughly equal to the total who lived on Earth around the time of Jesus’ birth—about 200 million.)
Vitally, climate change is not playing out in a political vacuum, and the world that spawned it and that is, in turn, now suffering from its fallout is arguably more geopolitically complex than at any time in recent history. After a peaceful-ish hiatus through the 1990s and early 2000s, the number of armed conflicts of any sort is at its highest since the Cold War and the number of intra-state conflicts in particular is possibly at its highest since World War II, while the quantity and quality of democracies has wavered badly across the board.6,7 There are more displaced and hungry people now than at any time since 1945. There is more state mismanagement, or more accurately perhaps, there are more complex issues for more states to mismanage. Almost like a faceless,
nameless cartoon villain, climate change is stealing into communities where people are already divided, institutions weak and discredited, and officials reviled, and stomping its metaphorical boot on wounds that often need little encouragement to widen or reopen.
There is a good deal new about this book too. Because while The Heat and the Fury owes an enormous debt to the academic and security communities that have dominated the climate security space since its inception, it is also written as something of a reaction to the not-alwaysaccessible fare they have often produced over the years. At the same time, some media have been guilty of hyper-sensationalizing accounts of budding water wars and other supposedly inevitable disasters. In attempting to walk the line between the scholarly and the simplistic, I have put together something that I hope will appeal to a wider audience than the climate security field has previously enjoyed.
I have also heard frequent suggestions that we need more real-world illustrations of how you go from X climate stress or shock to Y violence. By writing a book based almost entirely on original reporting, I have tried to fill part of that gap. And by venturing into places and subjects that are less frequently covered, I have sought to expand the web of climate-conflict examples beyond the most-documented. Through the so-called Streetlight Effect, there can be a tendency for researchers to focus on the safest, most accessible, and linguistically familiar locations.8 In this regard, I hope there is still plenty to interest those who have been in this field for significantly longer than I have.
Above all, this is one of the first books of its kind—if not the first—to explain on a very granular level how climate change interacts with and sometimes intensifies other drivers of conflict. Indeed, if you are new to this subject but have already heard about climate and conflict, your knowledge is likely related to Syria—and the discussion with which
I began this introduction. Almost since that conflict began, there has been an energetic back-and-forth in academia about the precise nature of climate’s role in triggering the initial revolution. That is all highly worthy in light of the policy implications, and important, given the tendency of leaders from Assad himself to former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari to use climate change as a convenient means of explaining away violence that is often of their own creation. But, to my mind, the “death by a thousand cuts” nature of climate change and the overlapping “polycrises” with which so many communities are now wrestling renders that something of a red herring.
For example, climate can help push long-standing public anger over issues such as state brutality or inequality and corruption into violence—and all in ways that can make it impossible to gauge where one stressor ends and another begins. To that end, The Heat and the Fury does not attempt to quantify the magnitude of climate change’s contribution to violence (nor, of course, to attribute to climate shocks all, or even most, of the chaos described in this book), but merely to show that it is almost always part of the mix. Again, I feel that a decadeplus of relevant ground-based reporting has given me the capacity to do just that. Ultimately, this book is as much about poor governance and the messy mosaic of other destabilizers as it is about climate change itself.
Climate security can seem like the most intractably insoluble—and hence depressing—of topics. For one, we know that good governance is pivotal in preventing climate stresses from spilling into bloodshed, as you will read throughout the book. Yet those very same stresses are also kneecapping governments’ capacity to govern well, thereby reducing states’ ability to act when their services are most desperately required. You want to help the victims of widespread flooding in Pakistan—and
ignore mounting popular fury in the process? Try doing that when those waters have also washed away the very roads and bridges that you need in order to distribute aid, as happened when up to a third of that country was inundated in late 2022.
You want to “climate-proof” farming communities, whose livelihoods are among the most vulnerable to climate change and whose prevalence can be one of the clearest markers of possible climate-related violence?* Good luck with that when technical innovations tend to kill farm jobs and accelerate migration to the cities, which can itself unleash new security challenges. For example, police in Kathmandu already report more frequent fistfights among competing day laborers on construction sites. Officers do not relish the prospect of more turmoil as displaced rural Nepalis continue to pour into the city.
Even well-intentioned attempts to address climate change can prompt as much trouble than the initial challenges, if not more—a concept called backdraft. It is clear that large-scale electrification will be pivotal to weaning our economies off oil and gas. But that will require an awful lot of new mining for battery components in troubled countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is tricky to envisage without considerable violence. It is possible, too, that we will eventually need to turn to exciting, if still very unproven, carbon-capture technologies to rein in warming. Can we do that without opening a whole new Pandora’s box of trouble? At a TED climate summit in Scotland in 2021, an exercise dedicated to gaming out the possible ramifications of
* Scholars Josh Busby and Nina Von Uexkull have identified three characteristics that they deem particularly likely to contribute to climate-related conflict. In addition to a large percentage of the population engaged in agriculture, they noted that places with histories of recent or ongoing conflict (and so with plenty of existing cleavages for climate stresses to exacerbate) and exclusive political systems (which are frequently unresponsive to climate-related crises) are uniquely vulnerable to this form of violence.
countries using cloud seeding and other forms of geoengineering rapidly descended into war.
There is a deep unfairness to much of this as well, one that goes beyond the fact that it is those who contributed least to climate change who are most vulnerable to its violence. In the long run, some of the most significant climate chaos might emerge from climate-battered states failing to meet citizens’ expectations. Those mismatches can undermine authorities’ perceived legitimacy and fuel anti-statism, even if the lost or reduced services—regular water supply, superior roads, and so on—are largely a product of recent developmental advances. In other words, climate might punish with violence states that have enjoyed some success in raising living standards, while sparing those that have failed to progress.
Nevertheless, there is still a big question mark as to how much violence climate change will eventually fuel. And a lot of that, beyond issues of governance, boils down to the as-yet-unknowable extent to which the planet actually warms. For every incremental shift toward higher temperatures or more extreme rainfall, some regions could see a 14 percent increase in group-on-group violence, according to one (very contested) study.9 The amount of warming will determine whether one billion or possibly even three billion people live outside the “human climate niche,” the range of conditions that have served us so well, according to another.10 For all the complications inherent in decarbonization (which I will also get into), there is little doubt that meaningful climate action—and meaningful climate action alone—can stifle the worst of this form of violence. As faint a hopeful note as that might initially seem, the grand reality is that most of this remains in our hands. ***
The Heat and the Fury is ambitious and wide-ranging and, I hope, very readable. But there are plenty of things it is not. For one, this book is
more a series of snapshots of the violence that climate change is leaving in its wake than a systematic exploration of the climate security field—and most certainly not of the climate domain in general. There are plenty of key stories that are not told or not told in any depth, such as the instability that could emerge from the prolific mining of rare-earth elements, or the tussle for resources and strategic positioning in a thawing Arctic. There are plenty that are overrepresented. You will read a lot about water, which, as scientist Jay Famiglietti says, “is the stealthy messenger that delivers the bad news about climate change to your town, to your neighborhood, and to your front door.”11 Since 2001, about three-quarters of all natural hazards have been water-related.12 I will repeatedly revisit the uncertainty that climate change brings, a complication that may be generating more violence than does absolute scarcity, despite the latter’s greater celebrity.
You may note a limit to the geographic range of these stories. Having been based in Cairo for almost six years and then Athens, Greece, for six and counting, my reporting has naturally been centered on the Middle East as well as North, East, and West Africa, with frequent forays into South Asia and Eastern Europe. I have not worked in other current or potentially climate-violence-heavy hotspots, such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Southern and Central Africa. Adamant as I have been about basing everything on my own research, these other regions remain largely untouched in this book. Fortunately, in reporting terms, climate-related violence is even less equitably distributed than “regular” climate change impacts. In their grimly perfect marriage of severe climate stresses and dreadful governance, I have had a lot to work with on my doorstep.
Progressing through these chapters, you may also perceive an occasionally blinkered-looking focus on physical security at the expense of other, arguably more-serious forms of climate-related fallout—that is,
spotlighting violence among some Sahelian herders and pastoralists at a time when many more people there are going without sufficient food for similarly climate-related reasons. But there are two explanations for that. The first is that this book would have bloated into an unmanageable mess without a relatively tight focal point. The second is that most books about climate change have explored the subject through the prism of food access, justice, human rights, migration, and so on. And so they should. (Insofar as those subjects relate to security, they come up plenty.) However, I am trying to tell a slightly different kind of story that may appeal to a slightly different readership, which requires a slightly different framing. As Jonathan Franzen writes, “The paradox of nature writing is that to succeed as evangelism, it can’t only be about nature.”13 Sometimes it has got to be about violence and war.
Finally, in an attempt to produce something that is compelling for a wide audience, I have also excised a lot of jargon and alphabet-soup-like acronyms, kept statistics to a relative minimum, and trimmed a bunch of country-level context. In doing so while simultaneously deploying frequent anecdotal evidence rather than important contextual studies, this book could come across as somewhat lightweight. The plural of anecdote is not data, after all. But I have almost always taken whatever studies exist into account. Owing to my fixation on un- or under-covered research angles, there often have not been any to cite. Additionally, I argue that the messy interplay between climate change and other drivers of conflict is generally impervious to quantitative study, requiring instead the kind of very “human” stories that I have tried to deploy throughout. For moredetailed, nuts-and-bolts descriptions of climate security, I have provided a list of relevant books and papers in a bibliography at the end.
This brings us to the journey that you are about to begin! These chapters could be read in isolation, each effectively a standalone investigation
with its own “cast of characters” and plot, but there is a narrative arc throughout, and I would love for you to follow it. Just as climate change builds on other challenges to complicate the lives of millions, so I have tried to sequence these chapters in such a way as to show the cascading nature of climate-related security risks. For lack of a better, less-grim way of putting it, I want the sense of violence to close in on you. Each chapter explains how varying manifestations of climate change are combining with very different socio-economic-political contexts to fuel different forms of violence. More practically, I have tried to fold in relevant science along the way—and generally try not to repeat myself.
Chapter 1 is a years-long investigation in Iraq, where water shortages formed a rich backdrop for ISIS to recruit and conduct its terror operations. Chapter 2 takes you to Bangladesh. There, merciless pirates are making fat profits by kidnapping displaced farmers and holding them for ransom—or worse. Then on to the Nile basin (chapter 3), the scene of a possible conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia centered on a mega-dam, and Nepal (chapter 4), where the state’s inability to keep the taps flowing in a water-rich nation may spell its downfall. Chapter 5 is set in Africa’s Sahel. Based on reporting across a half-dozen countries, this chapter delves into violence between farmers and herders, who are attacking one another across a drier, less predictable landscape. From there, we will begin to explore some of the violence arising out of responses to climate change.
Struggling villagers in Jordan have traditionally leaned on the government for army jobs during lean farming times. But as conditions worsen and public coffers empty, that quick fix is crumbling, with dangers big and small for the country (chapter 6). Chapter 7 is located in Sudan, where drought-wary foreign nations are buying up farmland to secure their food future—at local people’s expense. Chapter 8 makes clear that the West is neither safe from direct climate violence, particularly against
women, nor invulnerable to the possible fallout from our attempts to mitigate and adapt to warming temperatures. Finally, this book will culminate with a hopeful chapter 9. Because even though climate change is tearing plenty of states and communities apart, it can also in certain circumstances help bring them back together. Through a whirlwind tour of environmental peacebuilding successes, many in the countries that we will have visited beforehand, I will emphasize that there is some reason for optimism.
AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE US MILITARY’S JOURNEY TO BECOMING A CLIMATE AND CLEAN ENERGY LEADER
Threat Multiplier
Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security
Sherri Goodman
Threat Multiplier takes us onto the battlefield and inside the Pentagon to show how the US military is confronting the biggest security risk in global history: climate change. We learn how the military evolved from an environmental laggard to a climate and clean energy leader. And we discover how a warming world exacerbates every threat—from hurricanes and forest fires, to competition for increasingly scarce food and water, to terrorism and power plays by Russia and China. The Pentagon now considers climate in war games, disaster relief planning, international diplomacy, and even the design of its own bases. No one knows the stakes better than Sherri Goodman, the Pentagon’s first Chief Environmental Officer, also known as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Environmental Security). In Threat Multiplier, she offers a front row seat to the military’s fight for global security, a tale that is as hopeful as it is harrowing.
Photo credit: Pexels
Sherri Goodman has been a leader in environmental, energy, and climate security since she served as the first Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Environmental Security). Today, she is Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate & Security and a Senior Fellow at the Wilson Center.
She is credited with educating a generation of US military and government officials about the nexus between climate change and national security, using her famous coinage, “threat multiplier,” to fundamentally reshape this field.
Also available:
The Heat and the Fury
On the Frontlines of Climate Violence
Peter Schwartzstein
An unparalleled exploration of climate violence across the globe, vividly depicting the dire human consequences of climate change.
HARDCOVER | $30.00
344 PAGES | 2024 | 9781642833010
Gaslight
The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future
Jonathan Mingle
Journalist Jonathan Mingle tells the vivid and inspirational story of everyday citizens standing up against the country’s most powerful energy companies.
HARDCOVER | $30.00
352 PAGES | 2024 | 9781642832488
Future
Arctic
Field Notes from a World on the Edge
Edward Struzik
Struzik provides a look forward to how we might yet shape a future in a vastly changed polar region.
PAPERBACK | $25.00
216 PAGES | 2016 | 9781610917179
Humanity’s Moment
A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope
Joëlle Gergis
An unflinching guide to the latest climate science and personal call to action from a leading climate scientist.
HARDCOVER | $30.00
336 PAGES | 2023| 9781642832846
Sherri Goodman
Praise for Threat Multiplier
“Climate change adds additional instability to a world already disrupted by strategic competition with China, Russia, and Iran, two regional wars, and mounting challenges from new technologies such as AI and cyber. Sherri Goodman shows how the US military is managing these risks and why a bipartisan approach to building a more resilient future supports our national security.”
—Stephen J. Hadley, former US National Security Advisor
“As Secretary of Defense, my job was to protect the nation from all manner of threats. Climate change was one of those threats. But it’s not just one among a list of many. It’s the threat that multiplies all others. Sherri Goodman gives us a first-hand account of how climate change affects the military and our national security—and the steps we must take to build a more secure future.”
—Leon
Panetta, former Secretary of Defense
“When I led US forces in Europe and Latin America, I witnessed how a changing climate creates instability, from weather extremes to environmental degradation. Threat Multiplier is a must-read for military, civilian, and humanitarian leaders who want to understand how a changing climate and the energy transition affect decision making on these critical global challenges.”
—General Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander
“When the scientific understanding of climate change and its impacts was just beginning to solidify, Sherri Goodman realized that climate change would be at the very heart of military security, for the United
States and every other country. Her leadership on climate change as a threat multiplier has been the stimulus for a rich and dynamic body of scholarship and policy. This book connects the threads that link the science and the strategy. And it points the way to a safe world.”
—Christopher Field, Director, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
“As Secretary of Defense, I observed how our allies and partners face direct risks to their stability from a changing climate. Sherri Goodman’s insider’s view shows us how our nation’s militar y leaders are making decisions that improve our global resilience to climate change.”
—Chuck Hagel, former Secretary of Defense and US Senator
“Sherri Goodman draws on her own experience and that of many military leaders to make a compelling case that climate change serves as a catalyst for conflict in vulnerable parts of the world and can weaken our security at home if we don’t act now to build resilience to these complex geopolitical risks. Her message is a bipartisan call to act today to protect our national security in the future.”
—Michael
Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security
“For anyone interested in climate change and US national security, Threat Multiplier is a must-read book. Goodman offers a compelling history of the Pentagon’s pivot to consider climate change as a major security threat and provides invaluable insights to guide future defense policy in dealing with this growing danger.”
—Michèle Flournoy, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
“When I led US forces in the Middle East, conflict, not climate change, was at the front of my mind. Yet, I could see how the two are inextricably intertwined, with climate change multiplying the threats that lead to conflict. Sherri Goodman makes those connections in this excellent book—one I would recommend to all military leaders.”
—General Anthony Zinni, former Commander, US Central Command
“No one understands better than Sherri Goodman how a changing climate is reshaping our national security, and how leaders, both military and civilian, must integrate these risks and opportunities into our global future. Threat Multiplier offers an insider’s perspective on how climate and energy affect national security strategy and our military operations.”
—Fred Kempe, President and CEO, Atlantic Council
“As a conservation leader, I want to protect our planet’s precious natural resources for future generations. Sherri Goodman shows us how the military is doing its part and why natural resource conservation and climate change are core components of global security, as seen through the eyes of the nation’s top military leaders.”
—Carter Roberts, President and CEO, World Wildlife Fund US
“Sherri Goodman tells the stories of how military leaders like me experience the changing climate in our missions, from drought to storms. She helps us understand how we can better prepare and adapt, showing that the threat multiplier of climate change can become the opportunity multiplier of smart solutions.”
—General (Ret) Tom Middendorp, Chairman, International Military Council on Climate & Security, and former Dutch Chief of Defense
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Threat Multiplier
CLIMATE, MILITARY LEADERSHIP, AND THE FIGHT FOR GLOBAL SECURITY
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024931902
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Keywords: Arctic warming; China illegal fishing; climate change; climate security; climate-vulnerable countries; CNA Military Advisory Board; Department of Defense; deputy undersecretary of defense (environmental security); environmental security; International Military Council on Climate and Security; military bases; military energy efficiency; natural disasters; nuclear disarmament; Pentagon; Russian oil industry; sea level rise; search and rescue mission; Senate Armed Services Committee
To my parents and grandparents, whose decision to leave Nazi Germany made everything possible.
“I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment . . . an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well.”
—John F. Kennedy, remarks at Amherst College, October 26, 1963
Introduction
“Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.”
—US Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin
While attending a leadership summit on climate change in 2021, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin called the climate crisis an existential threat, one that no nation can ignore if it wants to achieve lasting security. Roughly thirty years earlier, when I became the first deputy undersecretary of defense (environmental security) in US history, you would have been hard-pressed to find a military leader who worried as much about the stability of the planet as about the aggressions of our enemies. Indeed, through much of the twentieth century, the environment was at best a secondary consideration for much of the military. Our leaders were, after all, occupied with other matters, from deterring a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union to confronting terrorism. As a major global power, America needs the most capable,
best-equipped, and best-trained fighting force in the world. Few could argue with our nation’s military prowess, yet that effectiveness often came at a high cost to the planet. From dropping Agent Orange on the battlefield to dumping toxic chemicals on our soil, actions by the US military have had long-lasting health and environmental consequences at home and abroad. And yet, today, environmental stewardship is integral to the US military’s activities.
This stunning turn has enabled the military to keep pace with a changing world. Our armed forces are now working actively to understand and reduce the risks from environmental degradation and a changing climate. And beyond our borders, militaries around the world have become climate leaders, establishing ambitious emissions goals, building installations that can stand up to the extreme weather of a warming world, and designing revolutionary clean energy technologies. At a moment when global climate leadership is desperately needed, our military has built on its past and stepped up to become a guiding light toward a more sustainable future.
What happened in the thinking of America’s civilian leaders and military officers? Did the nation’s generals go to bed one night as warfighters and wake up the next morning as environmentalists? Hardly. Instead, the idea of environmental security—the notion that our safety depends on a stable, healthy planet—is now deeply connected with concepts of mission and military readiness, across the administrations of both parties. This transformation occurred slowly at first but has accelerated as environmental challenges have increased. And it is still evolving today.
In some ways, military leaders have always been acutely aware that the state of the natural environment affects security. For generals to launch a ground offensive, they must know every detail of the terrain. Sending naval ships into battle similarly requires a sophisticated understanding of oceanography. Likewise, accurate weather forecasting has played a decisive role in many of history’s pivotal battles, including the famous D-Day landings that helped put an end to World War II.
But for too long, environmental protection remained a blind spot for our military. How could defense officials be expected to worry about a few chemicals or the fate of polar bears when they were charged with saving human lives and defeating adversaries? The prevailing view among the uniformed military when I arrived at the US Senate Committee on Armed Services in the 1980s was that environmentalists simply did not understand the threats facing our nation or what was required to keep us safe.
Yet even in those early days, cracks began to form in the seemingly impenetrable wall constructed between national security and environmental protection. As the Cold War came to a close and the nation shuttered its nuclear bomb–making plants, the US Department of Defense (DOD) was forced to deal with decades of contamination—and, as I’ve often said, my career went from weapons to waste. Similarly, as groundbreaking environmental laws and regulations were enacted, including protections for endangered species on military bases, DOD had to figure out how to conserve natural resources while training the world’s most elite fighters.
Slowly but surely, if not uniformly, attitudes began to change. The mere fact that in the 1990s, I was appointed to serve as the first deputy undersecretary of defense (environmental security) demonstrated that both the military leaders and the civilian officials they answered to were beginning to recognize that military readiness and environmental protection could go hand in hand. We cleaned up military bases, protected species’ vital habitats, and shared these practices with nations around the world. Of course, there were naysayers: soldiers, sailors, generals, and plenty of civilians who thought environmental protection was mission creep that distracted our forces from their core job of defending the nation. But the progress was undeniable. The military’s new awareness was not only good for trees and turtles; it was also good for the health and safety of our troops and the communities they served.
Then, in the early 2000s, we started confronting a new foe, one unlike
any the world had ever seen, one that had been gathering strength for decades: climate change. From extreme storms to rising seas to drought and wildfire—and the political conflict and violence fueled by these stressors—climate change is a major international security threat. In fact, as I put it in 2007, it is a “threat multiplier,” making every fragile state more vulnerable and every conflict more dangerous.1
In many ways, the military’s environmental awakening in the 1980s and 1990s was excellent training to confront a warming planet. Our leaders had always relied on scientific evidence, and as health and environmental conditions changed, they adjusted military operations and training structures in response.
However, when the nation’s generals first learned about climate change, it was considered a theory, one that was hotly contested in the media, if not in the scientific community. Moreover, this threat went far beyond any environmental challenge the military had faced before. It wasn’t a matter of replacing harmful chemicals with benign alternatives or working around a sensitive habitat. Climate change would fundamentally shift the world’s geopolitics, demanding new diplomatic strategies, new energy strategies for powering the force, and new approaches for protecting bases from natural disasters.
Today, we face the global threat of a rapidly changing climate that is reshaping our security environment. How do military leaders view this threat? How has their thinking evolved? What are their contingency plans? Where do they see the coming conflicts?
I can answer these questions because I’ve been on the front line of this fight for my entire professional life. I’ve debated generals in budget battles, asking that a small portion of our massive defense spending be used to address environmental threats. I’ve negotiated conflicts between environmental activists, who, understandably, want safe, healthy communities, and our armed forces, who, equally understandably, do not want to compromise military readiness.
In the 2000s, I convened a group of venerated military leaders to examine climate change as a threat multiplier. Their voices would cut through the political noise and show the world that an unstable climate puts global security and our national defense in serious peril. Indeed, the field of climate security sprang from the initial work of these leaders, known as the CNA Military Advisory Board, and then sprouted into a thriving international community of practice led by the Center for Climate and Security, the Climate and Security Advisory Group, and, later, the International Military Council on Climate and Security.
In the following pages, I share their stories and my own. We will travel to the top of the world, where collapsing permafrost and retreating sea ice in the Arctic are transforming trade and intersecting with growing competition among Russia, China, and other nations. We will follow military leaders to Africa and the Middle East, where they witnessed how violent extremist groups are weaponizing water and manipulating vulnerable communities who are already hit hard by climate change. In the Indo-Pacific region, we will see how the military is working to counter China’s growing influence while actively supporting allies whose very sovereignty is threatened by sea level rise and a lack of fresh water. In Latin America, we will examine our own role in the mining of critical minerals—pursuits that can undermine already fragile states, whose citizens are migrating north. And on the home front, we will track the military’s efforts to cut our tether to fossil fuels and prepare our bases for the raging storms to come.
I wrote this book to help readers understand the severe security threats that climate change presents and the hard choices that our military must make to defend against them. By putting you in the room and on the battlefield with generals and other military leaders, I hope to convey not only the complexity and danger of these risks but also the opportunity that the military is seizing. With the right strategies, from transforming the energy systems that power our tanks and aircraft to partnering with
allies to improve weather forecasting, we can prepare our forces and our families for the most existential threat of our time.
It is not a straightforward task; there will continue to be doubt and disagreement about how best to protect ourselves in a dangerous world, where climate is one of many compounding factors. Yet it would be a dereliction of duty to turn away from this fight—and the military leaders with whom I have spent my career have no intention of doing so. They are already making tremendous progress, and there is still so much more to do. I make recommendations in the final chapter about how to further integrate climate into national security, from improving predictive capability to transforming energy use for a warming world.
Finally, I want to celebrate the individuals who have put their careers and their lives on the line to defend our nation in a warming world: The young officer in Afghanistan who inspects fuel trucks entering his base, knowing full well that the next one could contain explosives. The US Navy commander who leads her ships to provide aid in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. The admiral who is willing to tell a skeptical US Congress that climate change is among the most serious dangers he faces.
Experiences such as these have taught our armed forces the imperative of resilience in the face of an unprecedented global threat. Against all odds, and in defiance of all stereotypes, the military has become one of the world’s strongest forces in the fight against climate change, and not solely for the sake of the climate. The military’s focus is about ensuring it can continue its primary mission: to protect and defend the nation. In today’s multipolar world, with US forces engaged around the globe, protecting America and gaining the upper hand against adversaries means being climate-smart.
To understand how we got here, we need to begin with the Cold War, as we will do in the next chapter.
From Weapons to Waste
Arriving for my first day at the Russell Senate Office Building was like entering a museum as a child. The space was grand, with large marble columns and high ceilings, but the furnishings were bureaucratic government-issued: deep fake-leather couches and old wooden desks with mismatched chairs. A female receptionist politely ushered me in, but her stare seemed to confirm my fear that I didn’t belong here. I was shown to an empty desk in a musty back room and told I could work there until the whole office was renovated months later.
It was September 1987, and I had just been hired as the youngest and one of the first female professional staff member of the US Senate Committee on Armed Services, chaired by the Senate’s authority on defense, Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia. Walking into my first staff meeting, I really knew I was out of place. When the staff director, Arnold Punaro, asked me to introduce myself, the one person I had already met piped up that he was pleased to introduce “Sherri Wasserman” to the committee. Punaro said, “Well, Sherri, aren’t you married now?” I nodded: indeed, my wedding had been just the month before. Punaro replied, “Well,
then your name is Sherri Goodman.” I was so flummoxed that I couldn’t utter a word. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had managed to explain that my legal name was now Sherri Wasserman Goodman. The staff director’s pronouncement was sufficient: as a married woman, I would have my husband’s name. It was as simple as that.
I was an unlikely hire for Punaro and the Senate Armed Services Committee in more ways than one. Punaro was a retired marine, with portraits of Confederate generals hanging in his office. I was the daughter of Holocaust refugees, raised in New York and educated at colleges and universities in New England. In some ways, I had gotten used to being one of the few women in the room. In 1977, I had joined the second class of women to enter the formerly all-male bastion of Amherst College, where I fell in love with diplomatic history and international affairs. It was during a year at the London School of Economics and Political Science that I met several officials from the US Department of Defense (DOD) at a conference: encounters that would send me down a path that ultimately led to room 222 at the Russell Senate Office Building. I thought I was launching my career in nuclear weapons and arms control; little did I know that this would become a gateway to pioneering the fields of environmental security and, later, climate security.
I was fortunate to arrive at the Senate Armed Services Committee armed with good degrees and powerful professional connections. (At Harvard Law School, I had been classmates with Elena Kagan, now a justice of the US Supreme Court.) My mentors had unparalleled national security bona fides, and they were willing to ask hard questions and level criticism when it was due. When I was in college, a deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, Walter Slocombe, suggested I write my thesis on President Jimmy Carter’s failed effort to deploy the neutron bomb, known as the weapon “that kills people and leaves buildings standing,” into the arsenal of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). That became my first book, The Neutron Bomb Controversy:
A Study in Alliance Politics. 1 Later, at Harvard, I studied with a former undersecretary of the navy, Robert J. Murray, who was leading a project that examined the “waste, fraud, and abuse” in defense contracting that became notorious during President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup in the mid-1980s. That research led me to a critical examination of DOD’s contracting practices and my first law review publication.2 I learned during those years that you don’t need to be an activist to create change; you can challenge the status quo by well-reasoned analysis from within the walls of the establishment.
Perhaps it was this willingness to think critically that Arnold Punaro responded to during my interview with him. He later told me that, while he usually never hired anyone without fifteen years of experience, I had impressed him. For Senator Nunn, my unusual perspective was an asset rather than a liability: there was a “gap in oversight” of the US Department of Energy’s weapons complex, and they needed someone who would “challenge the basic assumptions” and not just “come in and salute.”3 He told me, “We wanted someone with a fresh pair of eyes and a big brain.”4 This turned out to have been the real reason Senator Nunn and Punaro tasked me with overseeing the nation’s nuclear weapons plants. For many years, I’ve been half-joking that I got that assignment because no one else wanted it, but Punaro told me I shouldn’t sell myself short. Looking back now, I can see that the man who identified me by my husband’s name called out a trait I often observe in young women but had failed to recognize in myself. I doubted my own abilities, even when others praised them.
In this case, the praise came from an authoritative source. Senator Nunn had ascended to chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee after the 1986 midterm elections, when Democrats recaptured the Senate six years into Ronald Reagan’s presidency. At forty-nine, Nunn was already legendary in defense circles. Elected to the Senate in 1972, he was known for his deep knowledge of and affection for America’s
military. Nunn traced his political lineage to the congressional defense barons Senator Richard Russell and Congressman Carl Vinson, both of Georgia, who had ruled the roost as chairs of the Senate Armed Service Committee and the US House Committee on Armed Services. Indeed, Senator Nunn was a grandnephew of Congressman Vinson and the latest in a long line of defense-oriented Southern Democrats, whose chief power and purpose was protecting our troops and ensuring they were trained and equipped to fight America’s wars.
Senator Nunn, however, prided himself on not being a rubber stamp for either the military or the president. The Senate Armed Services Committee largely exercises its power through the annual National Defense
Figure 1-1. Senator Sam Nunn, Robert Murray, and Sherri Goodman, Pentagon, 1996 (photo credit: author’s personal collection)
Authorization Act, which directs policy and programs for defense spending and is one of the few major legislative vehicles passed each year by Congress. In this role, Senator Nunn wanted to be recognized for his independence and integrity. And he had plenty of both. He worked hard to learn the defense budget and to show the military leaders that when he held them to account, he did so with their best interests in mind.
Senator Nunn’s formative experiences had taken place in the shadow of the Cold War’s major nuclear crises, particularly the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which, as a twenty-four-year-old congressional staffer, he found himself on a delegation at NATO. Those early days gave him a visceral knowledge of the dangers of nuclear weapons, and he devoted most of his life to preventing the horrors they could inflict. I was now that young staffer, witnessing new threats posed by the nuclear age and charged with keeping them in check.
Since World War II, the United States had built dozens of nuclear reactors and related processing plants to make the fissile materials needed for nuclear warheads. These weapons were, after all, the centerpiece of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. As the only superpowers with nuclear capabilities, the two nations were locked in a precarious pact of mutual assured destruction (MAD): a deliberate balance of nuclear weapons that was supported by facilities scattered across remote parts of the United States and the Soviet Union.
Now I was responsible for overseeing the billion-dollar budgets that the Senate Armed Services Committee would annually authorize to fund these plants. And that meant one of my first assignments was to visit them, often in the middle of nowhere. In the high desert of eastern Washington, I toured the reactors cranking out fissile materials for nuclear weapons and met the engineers and other workers who were putting their lives and health on the line every day. I visited the Rocky Flats plutonium-processing plant outside Denver, where plutonium pits were fabricated, and was warned not to enter the infamous “glovebox”
building, where plutonium parts were assembled, because I was of “childbearing age.”
If it was too dangerous for me to make even a short visit, what did that mean for the workers inside, slipping their hands into extended rubber gloves through a glass wall to manipulate plutonium parts for nuclear warheads? Within months, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was conducting overflights of Rocky Flats, leading to criminal charges against the plant for safety and health violations. Pit production halted not long after I visited the plant, in 1989, and it never reopened.
Reimagining Safety
At first, it seemed that my job was to oversee a functioning set of facilities churning out the raw materials for weapons needed to ensure Americans were safe from the Soviet nuclear threat. But the more I learned, the more questions I had. What if that “safety” also endangered the lives of the people working in the plants and those beyond its walls? I was hardly the only one with these concerns. And they were put in stark relief by improvements made in civilian nuclear power (but not defense) plants after the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility.
The accident was the worst in the history of the US nuclear power industry.5 It started at 4:00 a.m. on March 28, 1979, when a pressure relief valve in the Unit 2 Reactor at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, failed to close. While no one died as a direct result of the accident, two million people were exposed to small amounts of radiation and 140,000 people evacuated the area.6 After that partial meltdown—the only nuclear disaster on US soil—civilian nuclear power plants underwent substantial reforms. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission increased its safety oversight of civilian reactors to ensure such an incident could never happen again.7
These reforms, however, did not extend to the nuclear weapons complex. Defense reactors produced plutonium and tritium for nuclear
bombs, not power for homes and businesses. Their operators answered to a less rigorous safety authority at the US Atomic Energy Commission and, later, the US Department of Energy (DOE), whose priority was producing warheads in the arms race with the Soviet Union. Indeed, the nuclear weapons facilities operated as if many of the nation’s environmental laws did not apply. Local opposition to these facilities had been building for years, fueled by concerns about polluted water and sloppy safety practices. Then, in 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster brought further scrutiny of US defense reactors.8 If a meltdown could happen outside Kiev, could it also happen at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina or on the banks of the Columbia River in Hanford, Washington?9
By the fall of 1988, the New York Times was running front-page stories almost every week about safety lapses at the nation’s nuclear weapons plants.10 From the first of October to the end of December, eighty-five stories on the issue appeared in the paper, with headlines such as “Accidents at a U.S. Nuclear Plant Were Kept Secret Up to 31 Years” and “Chronic Failures at Atomic Plant Disclosed by U.S. High Rate of Shutdowns.”11 As one Times reporter recounted, “Our editors haven’t been this psyched about a story since the Pentagon Papers.”12
With hard copies of newspapers appearing on their desks every morning, members of Congress started paying attention. It was my job to report each new concern at nuclear weapons plants to the Senate Armed Services Committee, including to my direct boss, Senator Nunn, whose Savannah River Site, where many Georgians worked, was among those chronicled. With each successive story, the senators asked more questions. The committee held hearings on the issue, and my career went “from weapons to waste.” Senator Nunn directed me to draft legislation creating a new oversight mechanism for these nuclear weapons plants. I got my first lesson in legislative politics when I went up against another committee that also claimed jurisdiction
on this bill—the formidable US Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs.
Senator Nunn knew that it was time for better oversight of the nuclear weapons complex, and having the Armed Services Committee write the legislation would both preserve the committee’s prerogatives and ensure that the committee that funded these facilities stayed in control. However, another member of the Armed Services Committee and the chair of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, Senator John Glenn of Ohio, and his senior staff had other ideas. One of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s original seven Mercury astronauts, Glenn was considered a national hero.13 His home state also had nuclear weapons facilities, including a uranium-processing facility in Fernald, where local citizens were already raising alarms about the safety of working at the plant. Senator Glenn believed strongly that the nuclear weapons plants should be governed as the civilian power plants were. And his staff director was eager to take on a battle with my staff director because they had clashed on other matters in the past.
The legislative battle lines were drawn: the Governmental Affairs Committee sought jurisdiction over the legislation that Senator Nunn had directed me to draft. That set me up against Steve Ryan, an experienced prosecutor then serving as general counsel to the Governmental Affairs Committee. Ryan would later become one of the go-to lawyers in Washington, DC, for congressional investigations, including by representing Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. At the time, Ryan reported to his staff director, Leonard Weiss, a nuclear engineer who had been the chief architect of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978. They were both pushing for as rigorous a regulation of the nuclear plants as they could convince a majority of the members to adopt. My marching orders were to give very little to their demands, regardless of how much they yelled at me, which was not infrequently. I often felt on the verge of being outwitted by more experienced staff,
but eventually, after months of negotiating, we landed on a compromise: what is today called the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.14
Like many legislative battles, ours ended in a territory where no one was entirely happy. The safety board would be part of the executive branch and provide recommendations for the nuclear plants to the US president and the secretary of energy. But it would not provide for the formal “notice and comment” regulation that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducted of civilian nuclear power plants. That type of regulation would have moved oversight from the executive branch to an independent regulatory body, which neither the Armed Services Committee nor the Reagan administration wanted: the Armed Services Committee wanted to tighten the safety processes within DOE while retaining the committee’s ability to conduct oversight and provide funding as its principal sources of leverage. As it turned out, with the Cold War waning and the Soviet Union collapsing, many of these plants, such as Rocky Flats, eventually closed down. DOE reorganized the closed facilities into an Environmental Management program, consisting of many Superfund sites, part of a vast cleanup program with separate management, leaving only a small set of plants still operating within the oversight of the new board.
Little did I know that I had arrived at the tail end of the nuclear weapons production era. In 1988, the secretary of energy declared that the United States was “awash in plutonium,” meaning there was no need to produce more.15 This statement, along with the growing safety and environmental risks, became the nail in the coffin for the nation’s nuclear weapons complex. In my first few years on the committee staff, I even witnessed one of the last underground nuclear weapons tests in the country. Accompanying members of the Nuclear Weapons Council, I traveled to an expansive control room in the middle of the Nevada desert. As the explosion rocked the terrain several miles away, all we felt was a slight shake.
Yet the fight over regulation of the nuclear sites was a transformative experience. I learned the power that committees such as the Armed Services Committee had to shape the direction of vast agencies. A decision made in a single committee room could have profound implications for DOD and DOE, whose work went to the heart of America’s national security. I also learned how power in the Senate is wielded. Passing major legislation in the Senate requires garnering support from many different quarters, and Senator Nunn and his staff director, Arnold Punaro, were master legislative tacticians. They knew that coalitions are not always created by party affiliation. When it came to regulating the nuclear weapons complex, for example, members did not vote red or blue but on the basis of whether they had nuclear plants in their districts.
Maybe most importantly, I learned that even a carefully constructed national defense strategy can be overturned by real-world events, such as a nuclear disaster. As the military saying goes, “No plan ever survived first contact with the enemy.” In this case, the enemy was “safety” being defined too narrowly. Public opinion would not support a defense strategy that protected Americans from foreign powers but threatened their health and safety at home. I would watch this movie—the convergence of the environment and the military—many times during the course of my career.
Innovating Environmental Technology for Defense
As Senator Nunn thought about the growing environmental problems at the nation’s now mostly defunct nuclear weapons facilities, he returned to an idea that had motivated his own career: the talent and commitment of public servants across the defense enterprise, from our uniformed military to the scientists and engineers in DOD and nuclear weapons labs. Senator Nunn made a point of visiting our national labs on a regular basis to keep abreast of key scientific and technological developments by the people who were “smarter than him.” The highly
regarded Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and California were created as part of the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons. Some of the nation’s most talented scientists flocked to these labs during the Cold War in the way that scientists today want to work in the tech meccas of San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston. These defense labs, at both DOD and DOE, were the place to be for the best and brightest physicists and engineers in the nuclear age, such as Robert Oppenheimer.
Now that the Cold War was over, Senator Nunn reasoned, their talent could be put to equally good use in addressing the nation’s environmental challenges. And Senator Nunn had an eager partner in this endeavor: Senator Al Gore of Tennessee. Al Gore was a young and ambitious senator in the 1980s, having already made a run for the presidency in 1988. He had carved out his congressional profile in technology and environmental leadership. After joining the US House of Representatives, Gore held the first congressional hearings on climate change and cosponsored hearings on toxic waste. In 1990, he presided over a three-day conference with legislators from over forty countries, which sought to create a Global Marshall Plan, designed to help developing countries grow economically while still protecting the environment.16
Gore was also a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and one of the early advocates on this committee of considering environmental matters at both DOD and DOE. Senator Nunn and Senator Gore joined forces to create the first Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) for the military. The SERDP Council is composed of officials from DOD, DOE, and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); advisors from the President’s Science Advisor and NOAA Administrator; and representatives from state government and nongovernmental organizations.
The program would, among other priorities, develop technologies
for the toughest environmental problems the federal government faces, from radioactive and hazardous waste in the 1980s and 1990s to perand polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), the “forever chemicals” found at both military and civilian locations today. It has also developed technologies to remove unexploded ordnance from ranges, and it has trained almost half of the country’s experts in wildland firefighting, a specialty that has become increasingly important as forest fires have grown into a national crisis.17
Little did Senators Nunn and Gore know when they created this program in 1990, with just $25 million in federal funding, that it would grow to lead the environmental technology revolution. They also did not know, nor did I, that this program would become the engine of environmental technology development so crucial to my work in the 1990s at DOD. There, I was in charge of cleaning up over one hundred bases listed as Superfund sites and needed to ensure that DOD was complying with the nation’s major environmental laws.
Unusual Partnerships
While I was dealing with defunct nuclear plants, a young US Air Force officer was having his own environmental moment. In 1987, Tom Morehouse, who would later become my first military assistant, was an engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. He was tasked with improving chemical agents used to fight fires. Morehouse was sitting at his desk when an EPA official, Steve Anderson, walked up and informed him, “What you’re doing is destroying the ozone layer.”
Until that moment, Morehouse had not considered the environmental impact of his work. Anderson walked him through the science of how the chemical halon destroys ozone. “I was persuaded that there was something there, and it became obvious to me that the people who
sell halon had done an extremely good job on selling it for purposes for which it was not required,” Morehouse told me years later.18
The bulk of the air force’s halon was used for training and testing rather than firefighting. Once Morehouse began looking at alternatives that were less damaging to the ozone layer, he found that the air force needed halon for only about 5 percent of the prior uses.19 It also didn’t need to flood entire rooms; the military could use halon in a more targeted way to manage fires. “Basically, our research showed that this was not a good story for halon, in terms of the size of the market as it existed at that time.”20
Anderson was so impressed by the research that he asked Morehouse to present it at the negotiations on the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. It was the beginning of a friendship and professional partnership that has lasted for thirty-five years. Morehouse and Anderson have coauthored numerous peer-reviewed articles on alternatives to halons, and Morehouse’s groundbreaking work helped lead the air force, and later DOD, to develop better substitutes for destructive chemicals.
What was unique about this collaboration? It marked one of the first times that military research was used to both improve defense capabilities and address a global environmental problem. Such partnerships would become increasingly crucial as environmental threats compounded, making ozone protection seem like a relative cakewalk. By the time I arrived at DOD six years later, in 1993, the military would be on the front lines of even more dire environmental challenges.
ultisolving is a simple but powerful idea: using a single investment of time or money to solve many problems simultaneously. In a world that tends to approach complex, deeply intertwined societal issues from siloes, it offers a hopeful vision for holistic change.
This unique resource is for anyone working to fight climate change, reduce hunger, advance social justice, conserve biodiversity, or otherwise make a difference—and who senses all these issues are tied together. It may also be for you: doing the work you know is imperative but that is sometimes overwhelming and often faces opposition from well-heeled interests.
Multisolving can’t promise a list of “fifty simple things to make everything OK.” It does offer strategies to build solidarity between diverse groups, overcome powerful interests, and create lasting progress that benefits all.
Elizabeth Sawin
Elizabeth Sawin is Founder and Director of the Multisolving Institute and an expert on solutions that address climate change while also improving health, well-being, equity, and economic vitality. She developed the idea of “multisolving” to help people see and create conditions for such win-win-win solutions.
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Keywords: adaptability; behavior shift; climate change; complex systems; cross-sectoral networks; destabilization; diversity; Donella Meadows; ecological restoration; environmental and social crises; environmental justice; equity; feedback loops; interdisciplinary solutions; living systems; multiracial coalitions; racial justice; redundancy; resilience; resistance to change; stocks and flows; sustainability; systems thinking; worldviews
To multisolvers everywhere, and to Phil, Jenna, and Nora, in love and appreciation.
Converging Crises, Cascading Solutions
Change, emergencies, even crises, are normal occurrences in our lives. We build and engage with systems to help us prepare for, and cope with, disruption. As individuals we insure our homes and cars, learn first aid, and maybe even volunteer for the local fire department. We practice conflict mediation and pay taxes to help support emergency responsiveness. We save money for a rainy day and donate to the local food pantry to help others who have fallen on hard times.
Shouldn’t that be enough?
With regard to future crises, shouldn’t it be enough to do what previous generations have done? Shouldn’t it be enough to take some personal precautions and create institutions to do the rest? Well, if you’ve reached for this book, then the odds are you suspect that the answer to both questions is no. Are you seeing signs of increasing disruption? Are you witnessing problems cascade, converge, and amplify one another? Are you feeling as though maybe something more is needed in response?
Climate change is powering stronger storms and more intense wildfires.1 Biodiversity is falling, and the frequency of economic disruptions is quickening.2
In many places democracy is weakening, and in others the elite are consolidating wealth.3 In the face of these mutually reinforcing crises, we need different strategies for coping. The old ones seem to be proving not up to the job.
There is no one-size-fits-all experience of destabilization. For wealthy North Americans or Europeans, the shocks may feel muffled. For a poor family in the Global South, they may be cataclysmic. But if it feels to you that instability is rising and that the periods of calm between storms are shortening, you are not alone. On a planet with growing ecological crises, the trend is toward more destabilization rather than less.
When I wrote the following words, in notes for what eventually became this book, in mid-2020 in the United States, this is what destabilization looked like from my vantage point:
COVID-19 is spreading unchecked in some states, and hospitals are being overwhelmed. The coronavirus is infecting and killing people of color at a higher rate than white people.4 This is at least partly due to inequities in environmental health, access to care, and access to remote jobs. For over a month, protestors have been in the streets of most cities in the US in response to police violence directed at Black men. The protestors are calling for the abolition of police and prisons. Schools closed in the spring, and many summer activities have been canceled or moved online. Parents are stretched thin. Meanwhile, most of my country is in the midst of a heat wave that is already two weeks old and is expected to last at least two more weeks. The pattern, called a “heat dome” is made more likely and more intense by climate change.5
By the time this book is in your hands the specific symptoms of global and local instability will be different. But if trends continue, one or perhaps both of us may still be navigating some flavor of it.
Not only are we experiencing increased instability, sometimes it seems to be feeding on itself. Notes to myself from early in the pandemic captured how destabilization in one place can ripple out to cause destabilization elsewhere:
This month roughly one-third of households in the United States missed paying their rent or mortgage.6 Some analysts are predicting a wave of evictions and utility shutoffs in the midst of the heat wave.7 Where will evicted people go during a heat wave, people ask? Traditional solutions—cooling centers, libraries—are closed due to the pandemic. Evictions combine with heat waves to collide with a pandemic to create a situation that exceeds the system’s ability to cope.
Many of those who still have jobs are working from home, in the midst of the heat wave. Without air-conditioned office buildings to work from, many will purchase air conditioners. Energy use will increase, and so will climate-changing
greenhouse gas emissions. The solution to a heat wave, which was made worse by climate change, could make future climate change even worse.
And so it goes. Problems escalate, converge, and cascade. They shape-shift and spread. Here are some of the patterns I’m noticing. You may recognize them, and others, in your own life.
Sometimes, crises arrive faster than we can cope with them. Given enough time, we could manage many of the types of crises we are currently facing. But when they arrive too fast or in dangerous combinations, they overwhelm our ability to cope. In 2020 for instance, the city of Lake Charles, Louisiana, had yet to recover from Hurricane Laura when Hurricane Delta struck.8 Houses whose roofs were still covered with blue tarps from Laura’s impact were even more vulnerable when Delta arrived. The radar system, damaged by Laura, was not working optimally to give people information about Delta’s approach.9 That’s what happens when crises arise faster than the speed of recovery.
In addition to the same types of crises following one after the next with increasing frequency, communities or businesses may also experience several different types of crises at close to the same time. When crises are slow and sporadic, responding to several types of crises using the same coping capacity can work. It is efficient, in fact. But what happens when the same emergency response department has multiple overlapping crises to deal with?
As the 2020 hurricane season began in North America, I was on a conference call with officials worried about the hurricane readiness of a major US city. The city had depleted its emergency response budget trying to manage COVID-19. As a result, the whole city stood vulnerable at the beginning of hurricane season. One crisis had depleted its capacity to cope with other potential crises.
Some crises feed on themselves; others erode our ability to cope. Viral pandemics—including COVID-19, of course—are classic examples of crises that feed on themselves. All else being equal, the more people who are infected in a community, the more people are exposed, leading to a rising tide of infections, sometimes with devastating results for health systems and for human well-being.
Even if a crisis doesn’t feed on itself, it can cause enough damage that it becomes harder to respond to the next crisis. When a house is burned out
by wildfire and not rebuilt, that’s one fewer property tax payer in a community. It’s also a smaller budget with which to respond to future fires. If a business lays off workers when supply chain issues disrupt the production schedule, it will take longer to fix mechanical problems that crop up on the production line because the most knowledgeable workers won’t be on the floor. Countries that have spent heavily to cope with the pandemic have fewer resources to invest in climate change adaptation. Each of these is an example of one crisis depleting the ability to respond to others.
Solutions to one problem can make others worse. In 2018 sparks from electric transmission lines in California led to climate change–exacerbated fires that burned thousands of acres of land and destroyed homes and businesses.10 In response, for the following fire season, one electric utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), instituted power shutoffs. The shutoffs may have prevented some fires, but they also caused small businesses to lose revenue. And people who lost the contents of their refrigerators and freezers were put at risk of food insecurity. The way the utility addressed the fire problem contributed to new problems.
Vernice Miller-Travis, an environmental justice leader in the United States, wrote in 2020 about the “synergistic epidemic” of COVID-19 and environmental injustice, another example of complex, interacting, mutually exacerbating problems:
While most Americans are confronting the coronavirus pandemic, communities of color are confronting something worse, the Syndemic of Coronavirus and Environmental Injustice. A syndemic is a synergistic epidemic. It is a set of linked health problems contributing to excess disease. To prevent a syndemic, one must control not only each affliction in a population but also the forces that tie those burdens together. Constant exposure to high levels of air toxics in communities of color has already resulted in explosive levels of respiratory disease, including asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and emphysema, as well as heart disease. These preexisting conditions have compounded the devastating impact of this pandemic; communities of color are now experiencing the highest rates of infection and death from COVID-19 in the United States. Lax attention to poor air quality has provided the perfect conditions for coronavirus to ravage minority neighborhoods.11
Failure to address one crisis diminishes gains made on others. In an interconnected world with long, interacting chains of cause and effect, sometimes the efforts to solve a problem in one sector are successful, only for some other neglected problem to feed back around and erode the initial progress.
For instance, let’s say that new housing is designed to be energy efficient. Terrific! This will allow the residents to save more of their paycheck for other expenses, like food, education, and medicine. But if the city where the new housing sits hasn’t mustered a strong climate change adaptation program, the combination of urban heat island effect and longer and more frequent periods of extreme heat might create a stronger need for air-conditioning in the summer. Energy bills go back up, and residents’ savings go down.
And so on. When problems interconnect, focusing on them one at a time can result in unanticipated and sometimes devastating backlashes.
Crises grow in size and scale because vested interests resist change. Some problems, whose consequences are extremely dangerous, have welldocumented solutions that are waiting to be implemented. Biodiversity loss and climate change come to mind. For crises like these, the scientific consensus is strong. However, a few powerful interests stand to lose a lot if action to solve the problem is taken, and so they deny the problem and prevent the strong response that is needed. There is a mismatch in power between those working for change and those who resist it, and that delays the response to the crisis.
When you look at these patterns of crises and responses, though they occur at various scales, in a range of geographies, and concern different issues, what do you see?
I see problems that are not yielding to the standard ways we have been approaching them.
I see problems that are interconnected and solutions that are too often siloed.
I see short- and long-term components being addressed with solutions that focus on only one timescale.
I see problems that span silos and people working within silos trying to solve them.
And when I talk to the people who are trying to address these problems, I hear frustration, exhaustion, fear, and demoralization.
I see, more than anything, problems that cry out for different approaches.
The good news is people are experimenting with different approaches around the world, designing weblike solutions for weblike problems. The very good news is that we can all learn from these experiments and add to them. It’s not too late to start. But there’s also not a moment to lose.
The term I use for these weblike solutions is multisolving and, of course, I will have much more to say about multisolving in the chapters that follow. But I haven’t always seen the potential of these silo-crossing approaches; I haven’t always understood just how much difference multisolving could make in our world. In fact, for much of my career, I was far from being a multisolver.
My work focused quite narrowly on a single concern: global climate change and the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to it. That was good, important work, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to do it. I taught about the carbon cycle and how the extraction and burning of fossil fuels push it out of balance. I attended United Nations climate conferences. I watched with pride as our think tank’s analysis was shared on the front pages of newspapers. I celebrated each time our tools informed the thinking of top government officials and grassroots climate activists. All this work had a single purpose: squeezing greenhouse gases from the global economy. All of it was satisfying and all of it was needed. It still is. But . . . none of it was sufficient. Every year of my career, the greenhouse gas emission levels we and so many others were working to drive downward continued instead to climb.
Amid one particularly disappointing round of UN climate negotiations, I pulled a negotiator from Latin America aside. What could we add to our analysis, I asked her, that could help to unlock larger climate commitments from the UN parties? Should we show deaths from future heat waves? Decreases in the global wheat harvest? Something else? What do negotiators pay attention to?
She didn’t pause to think for long. “We pay attention to how far we can go before our president or our prime minister loses the next election. That’s pretty much it.”
That exchange was a turn in the road for me, though I didn’t know it at the time. It planted the seeds of two questions: Could we really solve climate change the way it was being framed if political leaders saw it mostly as a cost or sacrifice that their constituents would only stand for so much of? And if not, could we make more progress by widening the lens with which we looked at climate change, to include costs and benefits?
My search for answers led me forward to new research, new projects, and new partners. It also led me back to some of my own training and intellectual roots. And it led me outward, to other communities of practitioners, thinkers, and change-makers. Each of those threads—forward, back, and outward—has shaped the thinking in this book.
Let’s start with forward. Not long after that climate negotiator set me thinking, I asked my colleague, researcher Diana Wright, this question: What else would be different in a world that had successfully addressed climate change? Diana brought me back a report that stunned me. After surveying studies in health, agriculture, water, and jobs, she estimated that the savings from being free of fossil fuels would balance out the costs required to reach that low carbon goal. That understanding is more commonplace today (though by no means universal). But at that time it shocked me so much that I asked Diana if she made a math mistake! Her report flipped my view of the climate change problem. I began to see that those leaders, afraid climate action would cost them politically, could truthfully promise their constituents cleaner air, better jobs, improved health, more energy security, and more resilience to natural disasters.
While Diana was conducting her research, I was also learning from my friend Angela Park, an expert in equity and justice in mission-driven organizations and movements. Her report, Everybody’s Movement, was published the same year as the UN climate summit where I began to wonder about the possibility of widening the lens with which we looked at climate change.12 Based on in-depth interviews with environmental justice leaders, the report made the case that the climate movement over-relied on science and policy goals instead of organizing, movement building, and connecting climate change to other struggles. As a result, society saw climate as an ecological issue, lacking immediate relevance to daily concerns, like family, health, community, or economic well-being. Everybody’s Movement painted a picture of what might be possible if the climate movement was broadened, with openness to leadership from different segments of society than the “usual suspects.” Angela wrote, “We must create new partnerships and a new framework, connecting seemingly disparate issues and addressing the systemic inequities and chronic dilemmas facing communities, people, and ecosystems across the planet.”13 Angela joined our project as a consultant and interviewed environmental justice leaders about how they saw climate change intersecting with other issues. In our conversations Angela was a strong advocate for rethinking climate change in ways that
tied health, safety, economic opportunity, and equity together in a more integrated package.
While my thinking had been sparked at the level of UN climate talks, Angela was articulating similar conclusions from a very different starting point: for people in marginalized communities, climate change, inequities, health, and well-being were interconnected, not separate. Many fruitful conversations with Angela, dating back to that time and continuing over the years, have sharpened my thinking about multisolving, particularly when it comes to equity and environmental justice.
Spurred by these conversations, I started up a new stream of work at Climate Interactive, the organization that had brought me into the UN climate conferences in the first place. We began to document the multiple benefits of climate action and to profile “bright spots” of multisolving where people acted together to address climate change and solve other problems at the same time. Those bright spots showed that the potential gains in health, equity, or jobs weren’t guaranteed. They had to be designed for. They took collaboration. There was an art to it. Wanting to better understand that art led to projects on green infrastructure, health, climate, and equity in Milwaukee.
During the work in Milwaukee, we didn’t have a word for multisolving. We were using the term co-benefits, but it didn’t fit well. If all the benefits mattered, which one was “main” and which was “co-”?
Angela Park was seeing something similar in her interviews with leaders who were addressing climate change in ways that helped meet other needs too. She described that way of working as akin to multitasking but without the negative connotations of being spread too thin or being distracted. Rather than attempting multiple tasks simultaneously, Angela pointed out in one conversation, we need approaches that solve lots of problems at once. Angela’s observations reminded me of one of my favorite Wendell Berry essays, “Solving for Pattern,” and we began using the term multisolving for what we were observing in Milwaukee and beyond.
After Milwaukee, our focus shifted to a collaboration in Atlanta, where I met another key partner who also influenced how I think about multisolving: Nathaniel Smith, founder and Chief Equity Officer at the Partnership for Southern Equity. Nathaniel’s deep knowledge of equity, especially racial equity in the United States, influenced my thinking a lot, and I’ve done my best to acknowledge his influence in relevant places throughout the book. Tina Anderson Smith, who led the evaluation of our work in Atlanta, first
exposed me to ideas like coherence and self-similarity, and you’ll read about those ideas in the second half of the book.
My early training is the source of the systems framing of this book. Much of that framing I attribute to my friend, mentor, and boss Donella Meadows. She’s known both for her contribution to the Limits to Growth project and for her book Thinking in Systems. From Donella I learned how to apply a systems lens to complex problems. She convinced me of the power of vision and the importance of questioning our mental maps and giving up our quest for control, all themes of this book.
In her essay “Dancing with Systems,” Donella wrote:
Systems thinking leads to another conclusion—however, waiting, shining, obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. It says that there is plenty to do, of a different sort of “doing.” The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. We can’t impose our will upon a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.14
To the extent you find the spirit of working with systems—rather than trying to control them—throughout this book, you have the influence of Donella Meadows to thank.
While there are other books about systems, my approach is a little bit different. For this you have the many people to whom I’ve taught systems thinking to thank, especially the Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows. From these global sustainability leaders, I learned that you don’t always need a diagram or a graph to impart important systems ideas. In that spirit, in the chapters that follow we’ll approach systems through stories, metaphors, and even poems, more than through diagrams and charts.
Another thread I pulled into multisolving came from another mentor, Joanna Macy. Joanna is the developer of what she calls the Work That Reconnects, tools and practices for working with the strong emotions that the converging crises of our times can provoke. 15 One of Joanna’s teachings
is that there are many types of actions needed at this time. She says we need creative experiments (like eco-villages and resilient urban design), new worldviews, and holding actions that prevent harm. That’s a way of describing multisolving: stopping the harm and creating the new all at once. Joanna’s background as a scholar of both Buddhism and systems theory also shaped some of my thinking about the partnership worldview that is core to multisolving.
In addition to threads from my past and my own learnings (with partners) along the way, the ideas in this book have been influenced by many others also searching for ways to address problems in an integrated fashion. From public health experts measuring the lives saved by clean energy to labor researchers investigating the potential for green jobs, there’s a growing body of scholarly research that has shaped my thinking about multisolving.
My thinking has also been influenced by the work of environmental justice leaders and the communities to whom they are dedicated. Health, justice, equity, energy, water, jobs, and climate all intersect in communities. The environmental justice movement has shined a spotlight on these interconnections for decades, dating back at least to the formulation of the Principles of Environmental Justice formulated by the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991.16 With their emphasis on solidarity, bottom-up leadership, and just relationships among collaborators, these principles of environmental justice offer a transformative approach to addressing environmental and social challenges. There’s also the work of scholars like Dr. Robert Bullard, who is often called the father of environmental justice. His books focus on environmental health and racial justice and the impacts of events like Hurricane Katrina.17
My understanding of multisolving hasn’t emerged solely from teachers and text, or from partnerships and practical experiments either. I also saw the power of multisolving firsthand (though I didn’t have a word for it yet) in 2011, the year Tropical Storm Irene battered New England, including the region around my home in Vermont.
There I was, a climate researcher watching (and trying to assist in) the recovery from a disaster likely made more severe by climate change. What I noticed in the early days of the disaster was that it was food pantries, farmers markets, locally owned businesses, and churches that most helped my flooded-out neighbors. Those entities organized volunteers, collected and distributed supplies, fed people, charged phones, and provided drinkable water. Watching and participating in that recovery helped me see how the
same dollar I donated to our local food pantry might contribute to both community well-being in normal times and resilience in dangerous times. That’s the essence of multisolving, and it was made visible across my state during the Irene recovery.
A lot of threads wove together to shape the ideas of this book, and maybe that’s appropriate. Maybe a book about solving problems by bundling them together can only be informed by a bundling a lot of different perspectives and schools of thought. Maybe a weblike approach to solving problems requires a weblike collection of teachers, mentors, and colleagues.
My hope is that such a book will be of interest to a web of readers as well. I came to multisolving via a focus on climate change, but you could just as easily pick up this book because you want to see more progress in health, equity, biodiversity, or economic vitality. In that sense, this book is for people who are alarmed about at least one problem and want to do something about it. If something in your world is keeping you awake at night, that’s your entry point. I hope what you find here will give you some new ideas to try, either on your own or with others.
As we will see in later chapters, multisolving can be employed at a scale as small as a single neighborhood or hospital. It can also be employed regionally, nationally, and at every scale in between. And no matter what scale interests you most, you can learn about the principles of multisolving from studying how it works at other scales too. The same goes for what sector you focus on. Multisolving can involve the collaboration of governments, nonprofits, businesses, and individuals. There’s room for everyone, and I’ve aimed in my choice of examples throughout the book to showcase that diversity.
Is this book for everyone, then? Regardless of what problem or crisis motivates you, what scale that problem manifests at, and what sector you come from? Well, no, probably not. There’s one more ingredient that will make this book worth your time: frustration with other approaches. If your efforts to address one or more of our converging crises (at whatever scale, from whatever sector) seem to fall short of what’s possible, I hope you will find new ideas here. If you can see possible solutions but don’t have enough allies (or dollars or shovels) to make them happen, I hope this book might help you see other routes to success. And if you just feel stuck or alarmed by the complexities and interactions of multiple converging problems, I hope that some of the tools in the book will help you make more sense of it all.
Many of you will read this book alone, but I hope that many of you will read it together with others. You’ll find questions for reflection at the end of each chapter that could be fodder for your journal or your morning walk but also for a discussion group in your classroom, your community, or your organization. I hope some of you will read this book at the outset of collaborations, to have a common language and a library of solutions that others have used to overcome some of the obstacles you might find yourself facing along the way. Especially if you meet together with others to read this book, I hope the process itself will help you develop the friendships and connections that make multisolving possible.
Whether reading alone or in a group, you can also find more resources to support your journey through the book at https://www.multisolving.org/ multisolving-the-book/.
A funder once asked my colleagues and me to conduct a global scan for multisolving. They were interested in examples from outside the United States that could be replicated here. We found many examples but also drew a conclusion I think they found surprising. We recommended that they not try to replicate the specific projects we had found. Each project fit perfectly to the specific geography and culture and needs of its place. We didn’t see how those projects could be replicated elsewhere. Instead, we said the foundation should try to foster the attitudes and approaches of those projects. That’s part of the beauty of multisolving. Every example has something to teach, even if the specifics of your situation are very different from mine.
Multisolving isn’t a specific set of procedures one must follow. You won’t find ten simple steps or cookie-cutter protocols in this book. What you will find are the best descriptions I could capture of those attitudes and approaches, the true replicable units of multisolving. As you read the following chapters, I hope you will listen for that vital underlying spirit.
AN ACCESSIBLE AND PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCIENTISTS LOOKING TO INFLUENCE SOCIETY IN AN ERA OF SKEPTICISM AND MISTRUST.
Science with Impact
How to Engage People, Change Practice, and Influence Policy
Anne Helen Toomey
Will you please just listen to me? If you are a scientist, or a fan of science, have you ever wondered why fact-based explanations of ground-breaking scientific research don’t always change minds or behaviors? Social science communicator Anne Helen Toomey argues that science today faces a public-relations crisis, and she calls for a whole-scale change in how scientists engage with the world. This practical and engaging guide will help scientists and their allies address public distrust, communicate about uncertainty, and engage effectively with communities and policymakers for real-world change. Science with Impact argues that science can—and should—make a meaningful difference in society, and offers hope and guidance to those of us who wish to take the steps to make it so.
Anne Helen Toomey
Anne Helen Toomey is an associate professor of environmental studies and science at Pace University, a visiting scientist at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum
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of Natural History, and the cofounder of Participatory Science Solutions LLC, a socialimpact research consulting company. She lives in Sleepy Hollow, New York.
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Science with Impact
Science with Impact
HOW TO ENGAGE PEOPLE, CHANGE PRACTICE, AND INFLUENCE POLICY
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.
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Keywords: citizen science, civic science, communication and science, evidence-based policy, evidence-informed policy, inclusive science communication, open science, parachute research, participatory science, peer review, research ethics, research methods, research practice gap, research with impact, risk communication, science communication, science education, science skeptics, science-society interface, scientific impact
For David, who loved birds, trees, and, most of all, people
INTRODUCTION
Science—The Next Generation
I discovered I was a Star trek nerd relatively late in life, in my midthirties. I amused my family members with regular references to Vulcans and Klingons, androids and warp drives. Before watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, I had assumed that a Trekkie (or Trekker, the more distinguished term) was someone more obsessed with space than with life on Earth, but as I became increasingly immersed in the world of the USS Starship Enterprise, the appeal that the show held for me was not in its discovery of new worlds and alien life-forms, but in the promise of what human society could someday become—equitable, advanced, and plentiful. Humans in The Next Generation were no longer plagued by twenty-first century problems such as poverty, discrimination, and war, in large part because the promises of science and technology ensured that the basic needs of all humanity had been met. In this bold, new world, all individuals were thus free to pursue their passions and curiosity.
As I got over my initial embarrassment of being a Trekker, I came to learn that most of my scientist friends were also Next Gen fans. How could
one not be? The series—more than any other—validates what science is about.1 The dream of the rational, peaceful, and supremely intelligent human and alien creature (if they happen to be Vulcan, anyhow) is both reassuring and compelling. Multidisciplinary research teams explore the universe in search of new ideas, friendships, and, ultimately, meaning. Contact and the ensuing collaboration with other cultures are highly esteemed; meals are eaten in a mess hall with colleagues and friends; and every member of the crew is valued not just for their individual genius, but for how they contribute to the greater good of the mission. Perhaps most importantly, science’s role as a beneficiary goes unquestioned, not only for humanity, but across the reaches of the galaxy.
Contrast this utopian vision with the relationship that science holds with society today—one in which the scientific consensus on key issues, including climate change, vaccines, and, in some corners, even of the roundness of Earth—is frequently called into question.2 Sometimes it seems as if the more evidence that mounts, the more pushback it faces. And such perceptions are not shadows in the dark. They result in major consequences for society, such as the battles over the teaching of evolution in some parts of North America or the documented decrease in routine childhood immunization across the world.3
Those of us who work in science increasingly believe that it is our responsibility to do what we can to explain its value. We write blog posts, we give radio interviews, we get into heated debates on social media, and we spend countless hours preparing lectures for undergraduates who, we hope, will lead us one step closer to a Next Gen future. Yet it often seems that no matter what we do, it isn’t really helping. Even as we produce more and more reliable data, we are beginning to understand that facts aren’t quite enough, and we’re at a loss about what to do next.
I understand this feeling because, as someone who has worked in the environmental field as a researcher and practitioner for more than twenty years, it has long played in my own mind. Scientific research has
been crucial to our movement—from measuring air and water pollution to studying the benefits of clean environments for physical and mental well-being. I got into research to better understand how people perceive, connect to, and ultimately care for natural spaces, whether those be richly biodiverse landscapes of the Amazon or polluted waterbodies in densely populated cities. But I never wanted my research to stay within the confines of academia. I wanted it to matter for society—to have impact in terms of the way people thought or even acted. And I know I’m not alone.
Many of us in the scientific community are here because we care about producing interesting research and we wish to “make an impact” with our work. We want to influence the way society thinks about a certain issue and, in turn, the decisions of policy makers. But often we don’t feel like we know how to achieve those goals. Scientists endure criticism for not doing more to educate or engage with the public. Almost within the same breath there is acknowledgment that scientists lack the training and skills to communicate effectively. Even James Hansen, the NASA scientist and climate activist known for his groundbreaking testimony to the US Congress about climate change in late 1980s, said, “Most scientists are not good communicators. We’re not trained to do that. Science itself is hard enough without trying to communicate with the public.”4
He has a point. As a newly tenured professor, I have a deep understanding of the pressures in academia that make it almost impossible to take the time needed to think about how my research could have a greater impact on society, let alone to engage in actions to do so. I know the stress that comes with trying to juggle an ever-increasing load of teaching, research, and administrative tasks and the frequent fantasy of giving it all up to start a sheep farm in Vermont. I can remember once, during a particularly frenzied hour as a new assistant professor, eating my lunch at my desk so fast that a piece of bread flew out of my sandwich and got stuck in my eye.
In part because of the sheer amount of work that needs to be done, academic research is increasingly lonely and stressful. As a result, we are entering and leaving academia in droves—pulled in by its promise, pushed out by its pressures. Even among those who have “made it,” some are looking back at their careers and wondering if the impact of their science is what they intended at the start. A good friend of mine, a tenured full professor of ecology at a research institution, told me that he’s taken to emphasizing to students the importance of fields like business and engineering in addressing environmental issues like climate change, as opposed to specializing in science-focused disciplines such as ecology. “We don’t need any more papers about the predator-prey relationships of dragonflies and tadpoles,” he told me, provocatively, having published quite a few himself.
But I have pushed back against my friend, not because I think he is wrong about adding to the stack of papers on dragonflies and tadpoles but because I think there is a future for those who wish to make a difference with their research. However, something different is needed than the model we currently have, which is largely based on the premise that the fact-based recommendations made by scientists will somehow trickle down to the masses and influence the way our societies function.
This is where I’ll return to Next Gen. At first glance, this utopia seems to be a natural product of three centuries of technological progress and scientific discovery that has made life easy and plentiful. The famous Star Trek “replicators” can instantly produce anything—food, water, clothing, the latest Barbie doll—anyone could desire for free, thus obliterating the need to earn money. Faster-than-light-speed travel (warp drives) enable humanity to connect with other civilizations and thus broker world (and, ultimately, intergalactic) peace. And medicine is constantly advancing in leaps and bounds, with “hyposprays” instantly administering vaccines to newly discovered diseases, basically eliminating illness. Upon deeper analysis (cue to rewatch those favorite episodes),
however, what makes the Next Gen utopia so compelling is not really the advanced gadgets and gizmos. Yes, warp drive, food replicators, and medical tricorders are cool, but they don’t automatically make for a better world. Rather, what makes all the difference are the choices made around science and technology.5 Intergalactic travel could have meant colonization of other planets and an expansion of war and exploitation, as in many other sci-fi franchises, but the Enterprise is not a military vessel but a scientific one, dedicated to encountering (not conquering or extracting) other forms of life and knowledges. Food replicators are not patented, profit-driven ventures, but are open-source technology, shared freely among more than one hundred planets.
In the Star Trek universe, choices are also made about whose knowledge counts, which reflect certain values. Yes, logic is prized (after all, who doesn’t love our pointy-eared friends?). But valid knowledge and valuable perspectives come in many shapes and sizes and from many lifeforms and cultures, including those not human. Diversity of all kinds is seen as extremely valuable, and different abilities are not just accommodated, but celebrated.6 The autonomy of alien worlds is protected by a commitment of noninterference (the “Prime Directive”), so societies are left to develop in the ways they see fit. The most interesting discoveries (and episodes) arise when a given character has been challenged to see things differently and thus must update their worldviews and actions accordingly. Ethics and philosophy are constant companions of science and technology, seen as friends rather than foes.7
So, too, is this book about choices. Specifically, it is about the choices that scientists and their supporters can make to effectively engage with communities, influence policy, and get more people genuinely excited about science. Years ago, I began a journey to tackle, head on, the question of what makes research impactful for society. Throughout this process, I interviewed many people from different walks of life—environmental managers, policy makers, Indigenous land stewards, farmers,
educators, health workers, science communicators, agricultural extension agents, and lobbyists, among others—about their perceptions of research and the role of evidence in individual and collective processes of change.
At the heart of my inquiries is the word—or perhaps concept of— impact. Dictionary definitions of the word often include phrasing such as “an impinging or striking especially of one body against another” and “the force of impression of one thing on another.” Synonyms include bump, collision, concussion, crash, impingement, jar, jolt, jounce, kick, shock, slam, smash, strike, wallop, affect, impress, influence, move, reach, and sway. If you search images of “impact” online, one common image you will find is of a drop of water splashing into a larger body of water, ripples spreading outward. Another is a finger about to topple a line of dominos, where they will fall in sequence, one after the other.
These definitions and images convey a few popular notions about what we think impact means. First, that for impact to occur, two or more separate entities are required, one that impacts the other in a predetermined direction—an impactor and an impactee. Further, there is the impression that an impact is something controllable. We throw the stone, we make the ripple—the larger the stone and force, the greater the ripple and the longer and farther the waves will continue to go. Similarly, impact is often seen as predictable. If we push one domino and the others are lined up and ready to go, they too will fall in a predetermined row.
Now more than ten years into my journey, one thing is clear: scientific research can—and frequently does—have great impact for society, but not in the way many of us have traditionally believed. As you will learn in the coming chapters, impact is not straightforward, nor does it travel in one, predictable direction. Rather, it looks more like a complex network, with arrows and lines spreading across space and time and
where scientific “facts” are just one piece of a very large system that, above all, is social in nature.8
In this book, I will share what I have learned about the impact of science beyond academia to influence how policy makers make decisions and how society operates. I will share some of my own choices, both good and bad, to demonstrate the types of impact (not always positive) that can arise at different stages in the scientific process. I will also talk about how my choices were never just my choices, but rather emerged from a complex mix of individual preferences, societal pressures, and institutional resources (or the lack thereof). As such, this book is written not only for the individual researcher, but for a wider professional audience committed to the societal use of research, including those involved in grant funding, science communication, and research policy. The choices scientists make about how to “have impact” are thus not theirs alone but belong to the entire scientific community.
I made a few choices while writing this book. First, I opted to publish with Island Press, a small, nonprofit publisher that specializes in environmental and science books, rather than a standard academic press. I did so because I wanted to reach a wider, professional audience, not just an academic one. I also wanted some freedom to have fun with the writing without going down too many scholarly rabbit holes.9 For those who wish to dive further into the scholarship, I have provided an extensive endnotes section with resources.
Additionally, I have tried to make this book as much of a guide as possible. To this end, part one partially follows my own journey in learning more about the different ways science can have impact. Chapter 1 describes the way I used to think science communication had to work, which I like to call the “Will You Please Just Listen to Me” approach. Chapter 2 provides an alternative model of how to spread science-based ideas and behaviors based on the story of one of the most powerful
public health achievements in history. And chapter 3 describes how my understanding of impact changed from focusing on the products of science to focusing on a process that is based in opportunities for encounter and connection.
I have also structured some of the chapters the way my friend and colleague Monica Palta recommended. She was trained in ecology and biology and suggested that the book should be structured the way scientists think—like the different stages of the scientific process. That made a lot of sense to me, and part two is organized in this fashion. For example, chapter 4 focuses on the research stage when we ask questions; chapter 5 is about choices we make when setting up a research project, such as determining location and methods; chapter 6 is centered on the data collection stage; and chapter 7 addresses peer review and the dissemination of research results. In this sense, the book takes a closer look at the multitude of choices that are made throughout the process of scientific inquiry, even before any samples are collected or analyzed. When it comes to impact, what many people often think about is disseminating the results of science to policy makers and various other “publics.” That’s the focus of part three. Chapter 8 explores conversations and stories about science, chapter 9 dives into the question of how to communicate uncertainty, and chapter 10 is about engaging in policy and advocacy. The chapters in parts two and three have accompanying flowcharts on islandpress.org/impactful to guide readers to the specific choices they might need to consider in various stages of their journey.10
Although this book provides guidance on including and impacting a wider array of participants in science, there are important aspects of diversity and inclusion in science that it does not directly address, such as how to increase participation of people who have been historically excluded from the science and technology workforce, particularly women, minorities, and persons with disabilities. For more guidance on how educators, mentors, researchers, and academic administrators
can create equitable opportunities for these groups, two excellent books are Making Black Scientists by Marybeth Gasman and Thai-Huy Nguyen and Women in Science Now by Lisa M. P. Muñoz.11 Similarly, this book does not directly explore the various types of impacts that science can have in terms of industrial, technological, and military uses and related ethical debates. A superb book that does directly tackle the broader issue of values in science for industry and other considerations is A Tapestry of Values by Kevin Elliott.12
Some choices I made around the guidance provided in this book were not quite my own but, rather, stem from my positionality and location in the world. I write from the village of Sleepy Hollow, about an hour’s drive north of New York City, where the institution that employs me, Pace University, is located. Although I have spent approximately half my adult life outside the United States (in Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, England, and Bolivia), my perspective is very much influenced by the political, ethical, and social debates happening in my neck of the woods.13 Thus, while I have attempted to provide examples from other parts of the world in this book, its message comes to you from a specific lens—one that is North American, white, female, and politically liberal. As any responsible researcher, I’ve shared drafts of this book with many different people, all of whom have their own set of lenses through which they view the world, and it is my hope that this practice, more than any other, will make the material relatable, interesting, and applicable to different contexts.14
Above all, I chose to write a book that would reconcile the idealistic Trekker within and the logical pragmatist who dives into the peer-reviewed literature when she has a question about how the world works. Fundamentally, this book is written to challenge the scientific community to consider whether our work is having the desired impacts for society and, if it is not, how we can change to make it so. Although calls for change can seem daunting in the face of current barriers,
structures, and incentives in the academic system, in the pages ahead I hope to show that such changes are not only possible, they’re already happening. Or to put it in the defiant words of Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the USS Enterprise, “Things are impossible until they’re not!”15
Searching for Impact
“Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see people can change, and there is hope.”
—bell hooks
“If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.”
—Anita Roddick
Will You Please Just Listen to Me?
If Star trek: the Next GeNeratioN provides an idyllic vision of what humanity could become if science takes its rightful place in society, an increasing number of apocalyptic films seek to portray what will happen if it does not. One film in this category, 2021’s Don’t Look Up, features two astronomers—PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky and Dr. Randall Mindy (played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio, respectively)—who discover that a comet will collide with Earth within the year, causing the extermination of the human population.1 However, when they present their findings to White House officials, they are met with derision and apathy. The film quickly devolves into an Earth-IsDoomed adventure complete with internet memes, sex scandals, and an Elon Muskesque scheme to harvest rare elements from the comet instead of destroying it. It’s quite a ride, and the message is clear: look what happens if we don’t listen to scientists.
Although Don’t Look Up is clearly a satire, designed to exaggerate the apathy of government officials and ignorance of the public to very real
threats, it was explicitly written as an allegory for how governments, media, and the wider public have reacted (or not reacted) to decades of warnings from scientists about climate change. One article published in Wired magazine, aptly titled “Don’t Look Up Nails the Frustration of Being a Scientist,” quoted climate scientists who said they could relate to the experiences of the main characters, who were simultaneously desperate to get the word out and baffled at why their message was not getting across.2 In another article, the film’s scientific advisor, NASA scientist Dr. Amy Mainzer, was quoted as saying, “I told (the actors), you really have to speak for the science community, when we feel like we’re being ignored. . . . There are some lines in the movie that are just, ‘we’re trying to tell you, you’re not listening and we really want you to listen, because we know we can make things better if everybody does.’”3
The idea that scientists need to be listened to is at the heart of what many of us think of when we talk about science communication and scientific impact. Rigorous scientific research is carried out, again and again, until the scientific community begins to develop a consensus around a topic. The science is so strong that it is practically indisputable (in the case of Don’t Look Up’s comet, a 99.78 percent chance that it will destroy Earth). Furthermore, the science has clear policy implications— something must be done to address the issue. Scientists and their allies thus must do what they can to get the right information to the right people to make this change.
I like to call this model the “Will You Please Just Listen to Me” approach to science communication. It assumes that the problem is one of lack of knowledge, understanding, and motivation to act and thus what is needed is to get the facts out to the masses to convince people to do what the science says needs to be done.4 Indeed, in the film, the scientists tried their darndest to do just that. They repeatedly talk to the press, they post livestream videos on social media, they travel to Washington, DC, to speak with policy makers, and they even organize a benefit
concert with rapper Kid Cudi and singer-songwriter Ariana Grande, who emerges onstage dressed like a comet to perform the original song “Just Look Up” for tens of thousands of lighter-holding fans.
Alas, their efforts are not exactly met with resounding success. The scientists, particularly the young female PhD student, are ignored and mocked, first by White House staff, then by the media, and even within their own social circles. In one humorous scene, the scientists wait for hours outside the Oval Office for a reception with the president of the United States and are charged for snacks by an Air Force general. Later in the film, Dibiasky, the student who discovered the comet, goes home to find that her parents have locked her out of the house. “No politics!” her dad says as they look at each other through the screen door. “We’re for the jobs the comet will provide,” says her mother.5
Thus, even as the scientists spend their time and money trying to save the world, nothing is enough. Spoiler alert: Humanity will not save itself from the comet, though at least the scientists and their allies get to have one good final meal before they die. So, although Don’t Look Up does a great job at demonstrating that the “Please Just Listen to Me” approach isn’t sufficient to convince society to take action, it doesn’t quite explain why that is the case and what scientists might do differently.
So why aren’t the facts enough to incite change or influence policy? How can it be that large groups of individuals see some scientific findings to be in conflict with their worldviews, thus forestalling societal change and political action? To begin to answer these questions, let’s travel to Tangier Island in Virginia, a tiny island that is quickly going under water due to sea level rise and whose residents are skeptical that climate change is the culprit.
Notes from a Disappearing Island
Tangier Island is a small island in the Chesapeake Bay off the eastern coast of the United States, part of the state of Virginia. For centuries,
the island was used by the Pocomoke peoples for oystering, fishing, and possibly as a seasonal settlement.6 In the eighteenth century, the island was homesteaded by White farmers, who established a community that eventually grew to approximately thirteen hundred inhabitants by 1930.7
Along with many islands in the Chesapeake Bay, Tangier Island is slowly being swallowed by the sea. Since 1850, two-thirds of the island’s landmass has disappeared, a trend that has been increasing due to erosion driven by sea level rise and increasing storms.8 As the land has disappeared, so have many of the inhabitants; by 2021, the population of Tangier had dwindled to approximately four hundred residents.9
Scientists say that climate change is the main culprit and predict that the island will be uninhabitable within the next few decades.10 If that happens, the residents of Tangier will be among the first climate refugees in the United States, a label more commonly associated with island communities in the South Pacific, who have been at the front lines of the fight for climate action at an international level.
However, unlike communities from the Pacific islands of Tuvalu, Nauru, and Kiribati, the residents of Tangier have not been spokespeople for climate action. To the contrary. Many of the residents of Tangier contest the idea of human-caused climate change and sea level rise and think that it is, if not quite a hoax, a distraction from the real issue of God-made erosion. Indeed, if you travel to Tangier, you can stop by a gift shop and purchase a T-shirt that reads, “I refuse to be a climate change refugee.”11
Scientists often understand that scientific knowledge on a particular issue is difficult to get across to nonexperts. It’s not always easy to explain the mechanisms of how things work, especially when those mechanisms are abstract, invisible to the human eye, or beyond one’s personal experience.
But the impacts of climate change on Tangier Island are none of these things. Residents have regular floods in their yards and in their homes. The level of the Chesapeake Bay has risen by approximately three feet in the last five hundred years, the number of intense storms has increased, and whole sections of the island have been lost along with the homes of many residents.12 Although many communities across the world are facing impacts from climate change, Tangier is a place where it can be experienced in a visceral way.
But that is not how many Tangier residents see it. In 2017, the island became the center of a media storm when its mayor, James “Ooker” Eskridge, was filmed making a plea to then US president Donald Trump for help in shoring up their island. “They talk about a wall; we’ll take a wall,” said Eskridge, adding that he was a fan of Trump.13 In an atmosphere in which much of the country was still reeling from Trump’s election to office and his quick withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, the subsequent public shaming was quick, witty, and mean. In the opening monologue of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in June 2017, Colbert made fun of the mayor’s faith in Trump to cut through red tape to protect the island, saying, “Trump is going to get them that wall and make the ocean pay for it!”14 And in another news satire program, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, a reporter visited Tangier Island to interview its residents, poking fun at the social, cultural, and religious differences between the islanders and her (presumably) more urban and liberal audience.15
What was lost on the media, who often reported this story as a battle of conservative, religious viewpoints over liberal, science-based perspectives, was that the islanders of Tangier simply, and quite literally, saw things differently. When residents said it was erosion, not climate change, taking their island, they were not just being obstinate. They really meant it.
What Our Brains Do in the Shadows
Think about these questions:
Do you believe we are already experiencing the impacts of climate change?
Do you believe human activity is the primary cause of modern-day climate change?
How did you determine your beliefs?
If you have a few minutes, go online and research these climate change topics. Perhaps you will find data and information to support your beliefs, and perhaps you will also find data and information that challenges them. Which did you click on? Which did you spend the most time reading?
Now think about these related questions:
Why exactly does the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere create a greenhouse effect?
If pressed, could you explain why to someone else?
If you are not an atmospheric scientist and find these questions somewhat challenging, take a moment for some online research. Possibly you will find some websites that refer to the molecular structure of various molecules and how the structure of carbon dioxide differs from that of nitrogen gases. Okay, that might make sense. Read on, and you may learn about how the bonds between atoms in certain molecules can vibrate in different ways, which influences whether the energy of a photon corresponds to the frequency of a molecule and then whether that energy (or heat) is absorbed. If the infrared photon is absorbed, the energy will cause the molecule to vibrate—until it in turn reemits the photon to another molecule, increasing the speed of that other molecule’s motion. Have you had enough yet?
If you are like most people, with limited time and your own work and life concerns, after a while you will probably conclude that you don’t have time to understand the scientific details that underpin the greenhouse effect and settle on one or two articles from sources you trust. That’s completely natural and normal. The world is extremely complex, so the way we make sense of it is to rely on what our intuition, the world around us, and other people tell us to be true.
In research, we do that all the time. We don’t know every aspect of what we study, yet that does not stop us from collaborating on projects and papers with experts from other disciplines whose expertise fills in our own gaps. It’s not just because science is overly specialized; it’s because there is an extraordinary amount of information out there and our brains can only contain so much information. This is true for all of humanity and can be explained through our evolutionary past.
Humans are social creatures. We evolved from hunter-gatherer units in Africa, and in many ways we were not physically well adapted to our environment. We could not run as fast as animals that preyed on us or those we preyed on. Our skin was not covered in protective spines or scales, and we suffered greatly from cold temperatures. We needed to drink and eat every day, and many foods available to other animals were poisonous to us. Our young were born so developmentally immature that we had to watch them carefully for years lest they be snatched up by a lion or bitten by a snake.
Given that early humans were comparatively weak, vulnerable, and slow, how did we not only survive, but thrive, in the face of such handicaps? The answer is deceptively simple: we learned to cooperate.16 We formed social groups that shared the labors of hunting, building shelter, preparing food, and rearing children. It was a lot of work, so we became specialized in certain tasks and relied on others in our group to become experts in others. Some group members hunted while others gathered medicinal plants and prepared meals, which allowed those who were
hunting to dedicate time and effort toward improving their skills in that area and, similarly, for those preparing the food to make it taste better.
As we have evolved as a species and our society and technology have become more and more complex, our knowledge has become increasingly specialized.17 We may know how to go to the supermarket and buy the correct ingredients to make chili for our friends, but very few of us know how to raise and butcher a cow for ground beef. We live in homes full of piping and wires that we do not fully understand, so when the sink backs up, we typically call a plumber, and when a fuse blows, we call an electrician. In our daily lives, we rely on the expertise of others so regularly that we almost forget how reliant on others we are. As cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue in The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, we live in the illusion that we are independent thinkers and self-sufficient, an illusion that holds as long as the internet doesn’t inexplicably cut in the middle of watching our favorite football team.
Because we cannot know everything, when we encounter new knowledge, we do our best to make sense of it. But “making sense” of that knowledge does not mean some Spock-like approach to logical information processing. Rather than carefully deliberating over every new piece of information, what typically happens is something more akin to a gut reaction. Our brains automatically make assumptions about the validity and importance of the information, relying more on our prior experiences than logic to inform us.18 Most of this process is unconscious and requires very little effort or energy, which is by design. Our brains evolved to prioritize survival. If we heard noises in the underbrush that sounded like a predator approaching, we didn’t wait around to confirm our assumptions—we ran for it.
Behavioral scientists often refer to our brains as “cognitive misers,” cheapskates when it comes to having to spend time or conscious thought on new ideas.19 Being cognitive misers means that we often rely on
almost anything besides brain effort to make sense of the world, and thus we typically use mental shortcuts (often referred to as heuristics) to make rapid assessments about ideas about which we know very little.20 Being a cognitive miser is mostly a good thing as it means that we can go about our lives efficiently, not spending hours deliberating the utility of everyday actions. Life without such heuristics would be exhausting—we would regularly spend hours pondering matters as trivial as what to have for breakfast or the best route to get to work.
The use of such mental shortcuts can have costs, however. Specifically, they bias our decision-making processes, causing us to get stuff wrong. Our cognitive stinginess means that we tend to rely heavily on previous experiences and stories that quickly come to mind for decision-making rather than taking the time needed for thoughtful deliberation. We’re also prone to see patterns that aren’t there and to accept or refute new information without evidence. And “we” isn’t just other people—it is all of us, scientists included. For example, historians have argued that some of the most prominent examples of science losing its way have come about when the leading researchers at the time were biased toward one theory or approach, discounting others.21
In addition to our cognitive limitations, another major influence in terms of how we interpret new information is related to our social networks and identities. As mentioned earlier, humans are social animals, and if we don’t know what to think about something, we often turn to those we trust to tell us what’s what.22 We are attuned to what is considered normal or acceptable in our social environments, and we instinctively know that acting in violation of such norms will have negative consequences. Most such social obedience feels so natural that we don’t even realize we’re doing it most of the time. Typically, it’s only when we encounter someone who doesn’t share a given social norm that we realize our behavior is learned rather than natural. For example, an Indian friend shared that she was taught to touch elders’ feet as a sign of respect,
which was surprising to me, as doing so among my own family would be disconcerting to all parties.
Prior experiences and social factors are hugely influential in how we see the world, sometimes quite literally so. One striking example is “the dress” phenomena, in which a picture of a blue-and-black dress was posted on social media. Bizarrely, not everyone’s brains processed the colors of the dress in the same way. Some people, including myself, saw the colors of the dress as being white and gold. Neuroscientists who later studied the phenomena discovered that what was happening was that the picture was so overexposed it essentially forced our brains to make assumptions about the lighting conditions in which the photo was taken.23 Because our perceptions of color are informed by our perceptions of lighting, those of us whose brains assumed the picture was taken under natural lighting (possibly outside) saw it as white and gold, and those whose brains assumed it was taken under artificial lighting (indoors) saw it as blue and black.
Researchers surveyed thirteen thousand people to try to understand why some brains assumed one lighting condition and not another and found that the main difference between the blue-black people and the white-gold people was how much time in their life they had spent working inside as compared to outside. Those who were more accustomed to outdoor lighting conditions were more likely to see the dress as having been illuminated by natural light, which led their brains to subtract blue light, leading the image to look more yellow. In other words, our brains quite literally saw the dress as being a different color based on our prior life experiences. This process is out of our control. For example, even though I now know that the actual color of the dress is blue and black, I still see it as white and gold. I’ve tried to tell my brain that it is wrong, but I suppose my years of working (and even living) outdoors will simply not allow me to see it differently.
This example is rare in some ways, but in another sense, it is extremely common. In his book How Minds Change, David McRaney used the example of “the dress” to explain that just as our brains can trick us into seeing different colors or shapes based on a process of filling in missing information, so do we do this in other areas of our life.24 When faced with a novel situation, our brains will automatically and unconsciously make assumptions based on what we have most frequently encountered in the past and what “feels right” based on our social environments. For example, researchers at Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project conducted a study in which they showed two separate groups of participants a video of people protesting and asked them whether they believed the protesters were acting lawfully or not. One group of participants was told that the protesters were protesting abortion outside of an abortion clinic, and another group was told that the protesters were protesting against the military’s then-existing position against openly LGBTQ+ soldiers outside a military recruitment center. The researchers found that participants’ political and cultural identities largely dictated how they interpreted the actions of the protesters.25 Participants who the researchers categorized as having more “egalitarian and individualistic” worldviews (associated with more liberal or progressive perspectives) saw the abortion protesters, but not the military protesters, to be unlawful, whereas “hierarchical communitarians” (associated with more conservative or traditional viewpoints) perceived the opposite. But they were all looking at the same video. This tendency to interpret the same information differently, McRaney argued, is why we disagree so much and why such disagreements often seem to happen across different social identities (such as political ideologies), writing: “Unaware of the processing that leads to such disagreement, it will feel like a battle over reality itself, over the truth of our own eyes. Disagreements like these often turn into disagreements between groups because people with broadly similar experiences and
motivations tend to disambiguate in broadly similar ways, and whether they find one another online or in person, the fact that trusted peers see things their way can feel like all the proof they need: they are right and the other side is wrong factually, morally, or otherwise.”26
Because of this reaction, information that challenges our preexisting worldviews or our social identities can feel threatening and even offensive. The more complex and stressful the information, the more likely it is to be processed in parts of the brain such as the insula, ventral striatum, or amygdala (associated with emotions such as fear or pleasure) rather than in the prefrontal cortex (associated with rational thinking and deliberation).27 Research has found that although winning an argument triggers “feel good” hormones such as dopamine and adrenaline, when our beliefs are threatened, we release cortisol, a hormone associated with stress and the fight-or-flight response.28
In a similar way, climate change was not a neutral concept to Tangier residents. For decades, they had been trying to raise awareness about the increasing rate of land loss to the sea. In fact, the islanders had been doing measurements of their own for more than a half century, calculating the loss of land from the ocean long before scientists arrived to talk about climate change.29 That their island was disappearing, and disappearing fast, was something anyone who lived on Tangier Island knew. Erosion was part of the natural cycle of life, which fit into their Biblical worldviews that God controls the doings of Earth. Furthermore, erosion was the so-called enemy they knew, something that their parents and grandparents had dealt with and something that could be addressed in the future.
In contrast, climate change was a concept from the outside, promoted by the “come-heres” (“outsider” in the local dialect of the island) with whom the residents had little in common. It was human caused and often used by liberal politicians (the “other” political party) to promote solutions such as carbon taxes and electric cars, but who offered little in
terms of protecting coastlines. Whereas erosion could be addressed by shoring up the perimeter of their island—perhaps by a seawall—climate change meant the end of their island.
Furthermore, scientists had a poor track record as far as Tangier residents were concerned. The residents had a long and frustrating history trying to work with scientists and government officials to bring actionable solutions to address the loss of land. The first government study commissioned to look into the problem was conducted in the 1970s, and solutions to protect the island have typically been half measures that proceed at a glacial pace. In 2017, when the press visited the island in droves to poke fun at the irony of a climate-denying island of soon-to-be climate refugees, islanders were waiting for construction of a promised rock jetty to begin. The jetty had first been proposed in the mid-1990s but had been mired for years in studies and red tape. In his book Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Waterman of Vanishing Tangier Island, author Earl Swift captured the frustration of the townspeople, epitomized in a conversation he had with Mayor Eskridge, who said, “They do studies, then they study the studies. I know that’s their procedure, but it gets frustrating. We’re at the point now that it’s like me coming across a family in a boat that’s sinking, and I say, ‘I’m going to rescue you, but I have to study it first.”30
How a Hockey Stick Became a Boomerang
In 2017, with all the press attention on Tangier Island, Eskridge was invited to take part in a televised town hall on climate change, which featured former vice president Al Gore.31 Gore is most well known for raising awareness about climate change through the release of his award-winning documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth.
I clearly remember when An Inconvenient Truth came out. It was 2006, and I was in a graduate program focused on environmental issues. Climate change was a regular point of discussion in my classes,
among my peers, and with my professors. Prior to watching the film, I had already accepted the links between an increase in greenhouse gases, global temperatures, and more intense and more frequent hurricanes in wetter parts of the world and unprecedented wildfires in drier parts. My left-leaning worldview was also consistent with the policy recommendations that would inevitably stem from climate science—reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions from polluting corporations and a focus on community and social responsibility for addressing the issue.
So as a budding environmental researcher, Gore’s film really resonated with me. At the time, I remember thinking, “Wow, now everyone will know about this problem.” To my twenty-something mind, Gore was straightforwardly presenting the facts, even using graphs to prove his points. Who could dispute that?
Many people did. Conservative-leaning Americans saw Gore, a Democrat who lost the 2000 US presidential election and thus failed to advance his policies through government, make a film depicting a global environmental problem that could only be solved with sweeping policy change. More taxes. More environmental regulation. More public transportation. Hmm. Such proposals were like those that had been promoted for decades by liberals, long before discussions of climate change took the national stage. Right-wing media called the phenomenon a “watermelon”—green on the outside, red on the inside. They mocked climate change action as an “Al Gore deal” and flouted the hypocrisy of his flying around the world to promote the issue, charging a hundred thousand dollars a pop for the pleasure of his telling people to reduce their carbon footprint. Climate change skeptics, with major funding by fossil fuels–supported right-wing think tanks, made it seem like the science was debatable.32 They talked about theories of sunspots and solar radiation, false data, and parts of the Antarctic that were getting colder. At a 2010 conference organized by the Heartland Institute, a free market
think tank skeptical of climate change, attendees were even handed miniature hockey sticks as a symbol of their alternate interpretations of the hockey stick graphs popularized in Gore’s film.33
So even as An Inconvenient Truth helped raise awareness and concern among liberals like me, it had the opposite effect among many conservatives, particularly in the United States. In 1997, 52 percent of Democrats and 48 percent of Republicans agreed that the effects of global warming had already begun, but by 2008, while the percentage of Democrats who agreed that global warming was occurring increased by 24 points, to 76 percent, for Republicans that percentage decreased by 6 points, to 42 percent.34 Some scholars referred to this change as the “boomerang effect,” which is said to occur when a message designed to persuade has the opposite impact of that intended by the communicator.35 In other words, rather than convincing conservative-leaning Americans that climate change was real and happening, the film and similar efforts to get the word out contributed to an increasing perception that the news about global warming was exaggerated.36
Given this political climate, perhaps Gore would not be thought to be the best messenger to speak with a Tangier resident about climate change, yet that was precisely the setup when Eskridge was invited to ask a question of Gore at the televised town hall in the summer of 2017. As the mayor of Tangier, Eskridge could have used the opportunity to ask why the government wasn’t investing in communities such as his or to ask for a commitment from climate change activists such as Gore to raise awareness about Tangier Island’s plight. But tellingly, Eskridge had a different question. After explaining his background as a crabber with fifty years of experience on the water, he said, “I’m not a scientist, but I’m a keen observer. And if sea level rise is occurring, why am I not seeing signs of it? I mean our island is disappearing, but it’s because of erosion and not sea level rise and unless we get a sea wall we will lose our island. But back to the question, why am I not seeing signs of the sea level rise?”
Gore, perhaps assuming that Eskridge was just trying to give him a hard time, took the bait. He asked the mayor, pointedly, to what Eskridge attributed the disappearance of the island. When Eskridge replied that it was due to erosion caused by wave action and storms, Gore then asked, rather skeptically, “So you’re losing the island even though the waves haven’t increased?”
Yes, said Eskridge. He explained that erosion had been a constant part of life on Tangier ever since its formation. “If I see sea level rise occurring, I’ll shout it from the house top,” he said. “But I’m just not seeing it.”37
Watching the exchange as an outsider, it is striking how the two men seemed almost to be talking about completely different things. I brought that up in an interview with author Swift, who lamented the lost opportunity for Gore to explain the difficulty of using anecdotal observation to perceive something as slow moving as sea level rise. As Swift told me, “The biggest problem in terms of the Tangier view assimilating with that of science is that a Tangier waterman has a different way of collecting data. Instead of the model favored by science, a Tangierman goes out on his boat every day and looks at the water. And that anecdotal style of data collection leads him to a completely different set of conclusions. Namely, he’s trying to gauge incremental change over the course of decades from the pitching deck of a tiny boat offshore.”38
But just as Eskridge’s limited perspective made it impossible for him to see the sea rising up to swallow his island, neither could Gore see that the man in front of him was asking him a valid question. Thus, instead of attempting to answer it, he told a parable about a man who, stranded in a flood, asked for the Lord to save him. As the flood waters rise, the man continuously rejects help from others, saying that “the Lord will provide.” The man ends up drowning, and Gore concludes: “And I think that we have heaven sent, so to speak, enough solar energy in one hour
to provide what the entire world uses for a full year. And from wind, we get 40 times as much energy as the entire world needs. We have the tools available now to solve this crisis. And whether you attribute what’s happening to Tangier to what the scientists say it’s due to or not, I’m assuming that if you could get cheaper electricity from the sun and the wind, that would be a pretty good deal for you, right?”39 Yes, agreed Eskridge, and the town hall moved on to other matters. But the exchange was unsatisfactory at best. When Eskridge asked why he couldn’t “see” climate change, what kind of answer was he looking for? And although it was clear from the parable that Gore wanted Eskridge to think differently, what, specifically, did he want him to do differently? The average Tangier resident uses less energy, lives in a smaller home, and drives far less than the average American.40 Perhaps the approximately 220 voting-age adults living on Tangier are not on Team Climate, but they also represent less than 0.00003 percent of Virginia’s population, thus making any attitudes of the islanders unlikely to determine the fate of any future energy policy in the state, let alone nationally. Furthermore, pointing out that green energy will lead to cheaper electric bills might not be very relevant to a community whose home is threatened with disappearance.
From “Please Just Listen to Me” to Something Else?
In 2007, Gore, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to spread the science of climate change, the first time the prestigious award had ever been focused on science communication. In the words of the committee, Gore was “the great communicator,” “the single individual who has done most to rouse the public and the governments that action had to be taken to meet the climate challenge.”41 For many, he continues to be viewed as a central messenger for the environmental movement, even
making guest appearances on popular television shows such as 30 Rock, where he played humorously exaggerated versions of himself as a heroic environmentalist running off to save animals in trouble.
But for others, the fact-based appeals to address climate change have fallen short. In 2020, climate change and environmental issues were the two most polarized issues in the United States, surpassing traditional fighting fodder such as immigration, health care, and guns.42 Although more than 75 percent of Democrats considered climate change to be a top priority, less than one-fourth of Republicans agreed.43 And as climate change has become more associated with liberal politics, bipartisan efforts to address it in policy arenas have dried up. Some conservative lawmakers who became concerned about climate change pushed back and suffered mightily as a result. For example, Representative Bob Inglis, a Republican from South Carolina, set out to convince his party and constituents that the science of climate change was real, only to lose his seat in 2010 in a landslide defeat. Two years later, another Republican policy maker, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, followed suit by losing his seventh term to a challenger who called climate change “junk science.” These defeats were widely discussed in the media and sent a clear message to other Republican policy makers that climate change was not an issue that resonated with their voters, and if they wanted to get elected (or reelected), one had best steer clear.
This polarization has led to political impasses for getting much done in terms of climate action, not just in the United States, but internationally. As a result, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere continues to increase, and the global temperature continues to rise. In 2006, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was at about 380 parts per million, whereas in 2024, we were exceeding 422 parts per million.44 And although the latest round of negotiations at the UN Climate Change Conference provided avenues for the countries of the world to
transition away from fossil fuels, the agreement is nonbinding and lacks the funding and mechanisms necessary to implement change.45
It is this lack of political will and public concern that Don’t Look Up sought to spotlight, made clear at the end of the film when Dr. Mindy loses his patience and goes on a televised rant. “We should have deflected this comet when we had the fucking chance!” he cries. “But we didn’t do it! I don’t know why we didn’t do it.”46 In the film, it was too late to change course. The “Please Just Listen to Me” model of science communication failed, big time, just as it is not getting things done in real life. Is this the end of the story? Should we all just throw up our hands and focus on spending time with our loved ones, eating nice meals and comforting ourselves with the thought that at least we tried to get the word out?
We could. But that would be a bit of a cop-out. Spreading sciencebased attitudes and behaviors is much more complex, and much more interesting, than the “Please Just Listen to Me” approach would lead us to believe. To explore this idea, let’s turn to India, which up until about fifteen years ago was one of the last bastions in the world for polio.
