The Scholar: Spring 2012

THE

SCHOLAR MAGAZINE of thE MorEhEAd-CAIN

Kelly Almond editor Eric Johnson editor and photographer* Alison Duncan designer Published by the Morehead-Cain Foundation for the alumni and friends of the Morehead-Cain For questions or comments, please contact the Foundation at: The Morehead-Cain Post Office Box 690 Chapel Hill, NC 27514 919.962.1201 moreheadcain@unc.edu www.moreheadcain.org *unless otherwise noted

Venture Environmentalism • 2 Alec Guettel ’91 is crafting a solar energy overhaul one sale at a time

A Rational Actor • 14 At NYU Stern, Peter Henry ’91 makes the case for classical economics

Francis Wong’s ’14 Argentina • 20 Scenes from a Summer Abroad

Common Plays • 28 In Boston, Steve Maler ’87 brings the Bard to the people.

For free.

spring 2012 contents

What We Leave Behind • 38 Original poetry by Sarah Bufkin ’13

Late Afternoon on the Red Line • 39 Original poetry by Sarah Bufkin ’13

Living Downstream • 40 In Kentucky coal country, Lisa Abbott ’92 finds defending mountains harder than moving them What I’ve Learned from Folk Music • 56 Libby Rodenbough ’13 on finding—and keeping—the groove A Man Obsessed • 58 In more than three decades as a writer and historian, James Reston, Jr. ’63 has chronicled the grand and the obscure. He talked to The Scholar about tackling his most sensitive project yet—a novel based on September 11th.

Dispatches from the Summer Blogs • 66 Akhil Jariwala ’14 ~ Nicola Vann ’14 ~ Max Seunik ’14

On Becoming an Institution • 72 Stepping down from her role as one of Silicon Valley’s longestserving executives, Ann Livermore ’80 reflects on three decades at Hewlett-Packard

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venture

environmentalism Alec Guettel ’91 is crafting a solar energy overhaul one sale at a time

BY ERIC JOHNSON OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA

Just two years after collecting his diploma, Alec Guettel ’91 landed his dream job.

For a guy who spent four years at Carolina leading environmental groups, that first resume line reads like an absurd fantasy: “Special Assistant to EPA Administrator Carol Browner.”

Just below: “As Special Assistant for International Activities, acted as chief aid to EPA Administrator Browner for international policy and operations.”

Guettel was 24 years old, and he had arrived at the center of the policy universe. “I really couldn’t believe I got that job,” he recalled. “[Browner] was a total powerhouse, and I just thought we were going to do so much good stuff.”

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After considering pricier space in San Francisco and Palo Alto, Sungevity set up shop in a former customs building on the sun-soaked Oakland waterfront. “I really don’t understand why humans live there,” Kennedy said, referring to San Francisco. “It’s always covered in fog.”

At the top of the agenda was Superfund, the 1980 law governing the cleanup of the country’s worst toxic waste dumps. Troubled from the start, Superfund projects were floundering by the time Browner began pushing for reform.

“It was a mess and everybody hated it,” Guettel said.

“She had Greenpeace behind her, and the Chemical Manufacturers Association. She had everybody on board.”

Browner also had years of Capitol Hill experience, having been a Senate aid and served as legal counsel to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. She knew how to navigate the arcane

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process of revamping and reauthorizing the Superfund bill, and she had the full backing of President Bill Clinton.

“And she still couldn’t get it done,” Guettel recalled ruefully. “Just because politics are politics, and it was coming up on the midterms.” In what the New York Times called “a bitter disappointment,” the administration withdrew the reform effort.

Dispirited and badly disillusioned, Guettel left the fantasy job after little more than a year. “It was really frustrating to watch and be a part of.”

And it convinced Guettel —the ardent activist and devoted student of politics and policy —that the

world’s environmental woes might be better tackled outside of government. ________________________ Oakland, California, is about as far away from Capitol Hill as a continental American can get. So it should come as little surprise that the Oakland waterfront — right on Jack London Square, alongside a lovely little marina—is where Guettel has chosen to launch a very different sort of environmental effort.

Sungevity is innovative. It’s high-tech. It stands a decent chance of pushing solar energy closer to mainstream.

And along the way, it will likely make Guettel and his business partners a good deal of money. The wouldbe bureaucrat has become a successful businessman.

BELOW: Guettel in the New York City offices of Axiom Law, the successful legal venture he cofounded to compete with established law partnerships. Axiom has no associate-partner hierarchy, very little support staff, and minimal office space. “Law firms are such a mess,” Guettel said. “There had to be an alternative, and we figured we could create a really profitable business.”

“By the time I finished at the EPA, I was pretty committed to doing start-ups,” Guettel said. “Part of my job there had been working with environmental technology companies—so we could talk about jobs or whatever it is we do in government —and I thought, ‘Well that looks cool.’”

And it does, emphatically, look cool. In the lobby of Sungevity’s offices, employees hustle past in jeans and bright orange t-shirts emblazoned with the firm’s logo, a geometric sunflower. The vibe is bustling but unstressed; maintenance workers arrive to install more phone lines, and college-age employees carry half-built cubicle walls down the hall.

Danny Kennedy, the company’s cofounder and a longtime friend of Guettel’s, served as tour guide during a September visit.

Sungevity’s thirdfloor offices are an

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architectural stereotype of West Coast green-tech, with an open floor plan and gorgeous casement windows filled with California sunshine. The employee kitchen features a full-sized pool table, and a group of denim-clad technicians were racking a fresh game at 11:00 in the morning.

Around the corner, movers and electricians assembled dozens of low-walled cubicles, preparing to accommodate the next wave of Sungevity’s growing workforce.

The company has already spilled out of its main office and into the cavernous shell of a defunct Barnes & Noble across the street.

Sungevity cofounder Danny Kennedy, an Australian native and longtime campaign director for Greenpeace, first met Guettel at a 1990 protest in London.

“We went through a whole series of truly bad ideas before we finally sort of zeroed in on Sungevity.”

“For all I know, those guys might’ve just been stealing stuff,” Kennedy said, motioning after a group of orange-clad young people schlepping computer monitors down a hallway. “Every day I’m looking at people going, ‘Hi! Who are you?’”

With his low, gravelly voice and Australian accent, Kennedy sounds wearily amused at everything going on around him. He sports a mop of curly hair atop a very furrowed brow, and it doesn’t take long to realize he is, in fact, wearily amused at everything going on around him.

As with so many great business partnerships, the tale of Guettel and Kennedy begins with an oversized penguin costume and an English pub.

It was the summer of 1990— after Guettel’s junior year of college —and international delegates were gathered in London to negotiate the first revision of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.

Kennedy, having proven himself a champion debater, was tapped by the Australian government to serve as a youth delegate to the conference. Guettel, having secured Morehead funding to travel around Europe building connections between student environmentalists, was standing outside the conference, shouting unflattering things at the delegates.

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“I was at this protest wearing a penguin suit —like a penguin costume,” he recounted. “I can’t really remember what the premise was.”

Kennedy ventured out to enjoy the commotion, and the two struck up a conversation. “Being twenty-yearolds in a foreign city, we both ended up in a pub face down about twelve hours later,” Guettel said. “We’ve been great friends ever since.”

That friendship endured through Guettel’s stint at the EPA, through his years at Stanford Business School, and through his first business ventures, including the launch of a wildly successful alternative law firm, Axiom Law. While Guettel spent a decade establishing himself as a successful entrepreneur, Kennedy rose through the ranks of Greenpeace, becoming the activist organization’s campaign director for Australia and the Pacific.

“We had always talked about starting a green technology company together,” Guettel said. “We went through a whole series of truly bad ideas before we finally sort of zeroed in on Sungevity.” ________________________ The core concept is deceptively straightforward: remote solar design.

It is the term of art for what all those just-graduated kids are doing in Oakland, staring at satellite photos of rooftops and plugging numbers into a complex set of algorithms. A Sungevity technician, using publicly available satellite images and aerial photography, can design an entire solar rooftop without getting up for a coffee break.

“They’re sizing systems from California to the Empire State, which is pretty cool,” Kennedy said, surveying

Technicians use satellite imagery and a sophisticated set of algorithms to remotely design solar panel systems. This technique allows Sungevity to e-mail a proposal within 24 hours of being contacted by a potential customer.

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a row of busy orange t-shirts arrayed in front of computer monitors. “I’m a solar geek, so it excites me to this day to see this.”

We tend to romanticize this kind of innovation, to imagine it as a sudden flash of genius— a breakthrough in the lab or a eureka moment in someone’s garage.

Sungevity has been hiring steadily over the past year. Across the street from its main office, the firm has rented a cavernous space recently vacated by a Barnes & Noble bookstore.

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Listening to Guettel and Kennedy, though, drives home the reality that innovation is most often a slow-going, grinding process. Profound changes flow from some very unsexy ideas.

“We’re not technologists,” Kennedy said, explaining the beginnings of the company. “We didn’t know

how to make a better solar panel, and other people were already working on that.”

Instead, he and Guettel set out to make solar less annoying for homeowners.

If that sounds like a modest goal, consider the old process of purchasing a solar system. For the past few decades, an eco-conscious homeowner would have to find a local solar installer.

Like any contractor, Local Solar, Inc. schedules an appointment for an appraisal. The homeowner takes an afternoon off work so that Local Solar can come by, climb onto the roof, and crawl around taking measurements. A few days later, an estimate arrives. If she decides to go for it, our homeowner has to work with Local Solar to file all of the permits and paperwork necessary to get approval—paperwork from her town, her county, and even her power company.

“Nothing about it was convenient,” Guettel said. “The experience for customers on the residential end was a disaster in so many ways.”

And to top it off, homeowners typically had to shell out the full purchase and installation price—usually tens of thousands of dollars. It takes decades for that kind of investment to pay off.

To Guettel and Kennedy, this convoluted process presented an opportunity. “There was a ton of energy and effort going into solar hardware,” Guettel recounted. “You could see with all of the investment happening upstream, prices were going to come down.”

Guettel describes entrepreneurship as the ability to see a wave building. “You might not ride it perfectly, but as long as you’re actually in front of a wave you can make something good happen.”

By late 2007, he and Kennedy were lining up Sungevity in front of a wave. Almost on cue, the price of solar panels began to plummet.

They found a third partner, a former BP engineer named Andrew Birch, and began to craft a better experience for customers.

They developed and honed the remote-design technology, hiring an Australian math whiz to create the sophisticated algorithms that allow employees with three weeks of training to predict the effects of roof slope, tree shade, and weather patterns on the output of a solar array.

Within 24 hours of submitting an address, a potential customer gets a straightforward answer about whether solar is a feasible option. (If your roof faces north, you’re probably out of luck.)

They hired teams of data crunchers to comb through nightmarish piles of state, county, and town zoning regulations.

(Quick: how many feet of clearance does the Poughkeepsie fire department require on either side of the peak in your roof? Sungevity knows.)

They located, vetted, and trained contractors and electricians to handle the installation in different markets, allowing Sungevity to scale quickly without purchasing a fleet of trucks or directly hiring an army of solar installers.

And they assembled a team of regulatory specialists to track the ever-shifting patchwork of tax incentives, subsidies, and energy programs in the eight states where Sungevity operates. Though consumer subsidies have played a role in determining which markets Sungevity can profitably enter, both Guettel and Kennedy voiced frustration at the unpredictable schemes.

“We need certainty,” Kennedy said. “If you’re changing the rules in a given market every six months or every year, building a business there is very fraught.

The technology works — it sits there on your roof for twenty, thirty, even fifty years, day-in, day-out,

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generating electricity. It’s the people running the energy markets who create all of this uncertainty.”

The biggest factor in deciding to enter a given market is the cost of traditional power sources. Sungevity has ventured into New York and New Jersey, where electricity costs are high, but not a single state in the Southeast, where power is generally coal-fired and cheap.

Guettel and Kennedy have little patience for those who decry consumer solar subsidies, noting that traditional utilities are regulated monopolies.

“The point of subsidies isn’t to be there forever,” Guettel said. “It’s to help an industry get to scale.” ________________________ In large part because of the turbulence in the market for renewables, the most critical leg of Sungevity’s business model—consumer financing —was also the most difficult to secure.

A leasing option would allow customers to skip the prohibitively expensive up-front cost in favor of a monthly payment. “I mean, who has thirty thousand dollars to drop on this?” Guettel said.

But for all of Guettel’s foresight in predicting a sharp drop in the price of solar panels, Sungevity’s consumer-friendly business model was nearly swamped by a wave he didn’t see coming.

“The leasing solution was planned from the beginning,” Kennedy recalls. “But we launched in April of 2008, shortly before the world went crazy and the financial services industry stopped doing financing or servicing.”

As credit markets froze and the economy entered a sharp downturn, few banks were willing to finance a new and unproven asset class. For almost two years, Sungevity was stuck offering cash-only sales to traditional early adopters in the California market.

Today, Kennedy counts that as a blessing. “We got to perfect our design and sales systems for a couple years,” he said.

“It’s a case of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

When the leasing option debuted in 2010, sales exploded. Volume grew by a factor of ten in a single year, and now more than 90 percent of customers opt for the leasing plan.

Partly as a result of that growth, Guettel has had to learn a new skill: applying the brakes.

Sungevity struck a partnership with Lowe’s Home Improvement, placing Sungevity kiosks inside Lowe’s stores across California. The arrangement is slowly expanding to Lowe’s stores in eight other states, giving Sungevity time to scale up operations.

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“When you have a good business and eighteen different doors are opening, saying no to sixteen of those is still the hardest part for me,” he said. “Most of my time at Sungevity now is evaluating new opportunities, and it’s hard to say no.”

Perhaps the best example of having to take things slow is the company’s recent partnership with Lowe’s.

In May of 2011, the home improvement giant selected

To help promote the Sungevity brand along the East Coast, the company bought an old delivery van and converted it into a biodiesel and solar-powered popsicle truck. It was one of their most expensive marketing decisions to date. “It worked a treat,” Kennedy said, noting all of the free news coverage the truck garnered.

“And they’re damn good popsicles, too.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF SUNGEVITY

Sungevity to be its solar provider, offering to steer customers in its 1,750 stores to Sungevity for solar upgrades.

“When you have a good business and eighteen different doors are opening, saying no to sixteen of those is still the hardest part for me.”

Kennedy’s eyes bug out at the thought. “We simply couldn’t do that right now,” he said. “We’re on a very intentional path to becoming a multi-billion dollar business, and you don’t want to mess that up by becoming the jerks who disappointed a whole bunch of customers.”

So instead of leaping at the Lowe’s deal, Guettel negotiated a phased introduction, beginning with a trial run in northern California and slowly expanding into other Lowe’s markets. In the meantime, Lowe’s bought a sizable stake in the company.

The deal goes to the heart of Sungevity’s long-term strategy, which is making the leap from quirky early adopters to more mainstream consumers. It is the reason their sales pitch focuses far less on environmental concerns than on very practical economics.

They’re not preaching solar as a means to live off the grid, but as a supplement to to traditional power.

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“People have no idea yet how fast this is going to happen.”

Sungevity’s much-touted iQuote, the online estimate a customer receives after submitting an address, looks like a brilliant bit of activism, a kind of environmentalist banner for the digital age. Why dress in a penguin suit and chant protest slogans when you can offer zero money down and drastically reduce energy consumption?

To be sure, the iQuote pushes all the right environmental buttons, showing how much carbon dioxide a Sungevity system will keep out of the environment; it’ll even calculate the equivalent car miles not driven or the number of trees planted.

But it’s telling that the green angle is never front and center; the very first thing that pops up in an iQuote is a bold-faced estimate of monthly savings.

“We're trying to talk to normal people,” Kennedy said, offering a summary of the Sungevity sales pitch.

“You know that stuff that comes out of the wall and into the plug? We can get you that —easy. And for less. Oh, and it’s green, as well, so it doesn't kill your children." ________________________ That last bit—the not killing your children part—hints at one of the more intriguing aspects of the whole Sungevity venture.

It is very much a business, with investors and bank partnerships and the

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A Sungevity iQuote—the electronic proposal sent to prospective customers— shows the potential savings from leasing a solar panel array. In this sample, solar panels are projected to generate 45 percent of the household’s electricity.

prospect of making a number of people—not least of all Kennedy and Guettel— significantly richer. But in listening to the two of them, there is an unmistakable sense of the profit motive as an afterthought.

Both men, for example, seemed nonplussed at the fact that competitors are copying the satellite design technique.

“From a missionary point of view, I like the fact that most companies are trying to rip us off,” Kennedy said. “It sort of has to be this way. We’re not going to do millions of roofs in suburbia by driving trucks into traffic [to visit houses]. We have to do it with a more efficient model, and this is the best someone has come up with so far.”

Neither of them preach it, exactly, but there is a clear impression that getting solar panels on millions of roofs is the whole point. Sungevity was born not so much of the desire to be in business—Guettel already has a successful legal business in New York, and Kennedy worked for more than a decade at Greenpeace —but of a long-held desire to upend bad energy policy.

“People have no idea yet how fast this is going to happen,” Guettel said about the growth of solar energy. “It’s a political football right now, but three years from now this is going to be the norm.”

In 1994, as Guettel collected recommendation letters for graduate school, Morehead Foundation Director Chuck Lovelace wrote to highlight Guettel’s environ-

mental work. “Few undergraduates are able to focus on and remain committed to a single cause throughout their four years on campus,” Lovelace wrote. “Alec is an exception. He made significant contributions on local, national, and international levels in environmental policy and advocacy.”

Two decades later, it’s not hard to see Sungevity as a highly evolved, market-friendly form of that same advocacy. It is easy to imagine that Guettel, for all the twists of his career, hasn’t lost focus at all.

“This is one of the biggest economic opportunities in history, the retooling of the electricity grid,” Kennedy said. “There are a lot of people who are going to make a fortune and create a lot of good.”

And even more succinctly: “Save you money, save the world. That’s the challenge.”

It is the challenge Guettel chose when he left the EPA. It is the challenge that led him to reject offers at some of the world’s best public policy schools in favor of learning business at Stanford.

“The reasons things weren’t getting done were just so illogical, and wrong,” Guettel said of his time in government. “I was afraid of looking back at the end and saying, ‘I can’t really point to anything I’ve accomplished here.’”

At Sungevity, with keyboards clattering across scores of new rooftops each day, that seems a very distant worry. ◆

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BY ERIC JOHNSON NEW YORK, NEW YORK

A few years ago, Peter Henry ’91 published “A Tale of Two Islands,” a crisp, eleven-page parable about Jamaica and Barbados.

Both Caribbean countries are former British colonies.

They have similar histories and similar governing institutions. But they responded to economic pressures of the 1970s with wildly different policies.

Jamaica nationalized industries and imposed trade barriers; Barbados didn’t. The result was modest but respectable growth for Barbados and utter disaster for Jamaica.

“Countries have no control over their geographic location, colonial heritage, or legal origin,” Henry wrote. “But they do have agency over the policies that they implement. “Pedestrian as it may seem to say, changes in policy . . . can have a significant impact on a country’s standard of living within a single generation.”

It’s not exactly a prose poem, but by the standards of economics writing, it was downright elegiac.

Decisions matter, Henry’s paper proclaimed. There are correct and incorrect answers to the world’s problems.

It was a full-throated defense of economic theory at a time when the discipline badly needed defending.

The paper was published in December of 2008, just as the global economy plunged into the worst downturn since the Great Depression. It struck a chord not just with fellow economists but with a wider audience hungry to make sense of a volatile world.

Henry’s work inspired an in-depth segment on National Public Radio’s This American Life, part of an episode on “The Social Contract.”

“This is a smart man, a man with a big heart, who meant to do well,” Henry said during the broadcast, explaining the disastrous economic interventions of

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a rational actor At NYU Stern, Peter Henry ’91 makes the case for classical economics

Peter Henry in his office at NYU’s Stern School. He took the helm of the business school in January 2010 amid continuing struggles on Wall Street and in the global economy.

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A congratulatory note from Chancellor Holden Thorp was amidst the piles of paper on Henry’s desk. “Peter — Congratulations on the NYU gig,” Thorp wrote.

Jamaica’s then-president, Michael Manley. “This is why I think it’s all the more powerful a lesson. Even in places where governments are trying to do the right thing, trying to empower their citizens, if they follow bad policies, there will be substantial long-run consequences.”

What makes a “A Tale of Two Islands” such a compelling story is that Henry didn’t just research Jamaica’s slow-motion economic collapse. He lived it.

“I lived in Jamaica for nine years before we moved to the U.S.,” he recounted last summer, leaning back in his chair on the top floor of New York University’s Stern School of Business. “My parents decided it was going to be easier to raise four kids in the United States, so we emigrated.”

“That was a really formative experience for me,” he continued. “Why is Jamaica poor and the United States rich? Economics gives you metaphors — models —to begin thinking about the answers to those kinds of questions.” ________________________ As Henry likes to tell it, he was relishing a low-key, run-of-the-mill career at Stanford when he got a call about the dean’s job at NYU Stern. “I was happily enjoying the quiet life of a professor,” he said.

“The economist’s job is to use the tools to figure out what’s going to be good for society.

It’s society’s job to take that advice and figure out what’s politically feasible.”

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That’s admirably modest, but it elides some key details. By the time Stern came calling in late 2009, Henry was one of the world’s best-known experts on emerging markets and international trade policy. His papers on debt relief, developing nations, and capital markets were widely cited.

He was also heavily involved with the Barack Obama campaign and the presidential transition, thanks to a friendship with Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee. Henry and Goolsbee were classmates at MIT, where Henry earned his doctorate after studying at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship.

“I ended up working on a lot of issues in international economics related to the International Monetary Fund, issues that were really critical with emerging markets during the crisis of 2008,” Henry recalled. “The financial crisis hit in the U.S. and in Western Europe. Nobody wanted to lend to emerging markets.”

There was also that whole business of the NPR story, various CNBC appearances, and a prestigious book contract with Oxford University Press. His life was quiet like a jet engine.

Still, the decision to leave Palo Alto and take the helm at Stern was difficult. Henry had given up the chance to work in the White House for the sake of his family—he and his wife Lisa have four young boys—

and a dean’s schedule is far less flexible than a professor’s.

“The difference now is that so much of what I do involves me being physically present,” he said.

“Meetings, lunches, dinners. The flexibility to pick up the kids from school, to coach baseball . . . it’s not as easy as it used to be. But there are trade-offs in everything. Lisa and I talked about it a long time and decided this was a trade-off worth making.”

Prestige was certainly a factor. Stern has long been one of the top business schools in the world, and Henry isn’t shy about touting its global reach. NYU has a campus in Abu Dhabi and will be opening another in Shanghai next year.

The dean’s office has a fantastic view of the 1929 art deco building at One Fifth Avenue, on the north side of Washington Square Park.

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NYU’s Stern School is in Greenwich Village, about two miles from Wall Street. The dean’s office overlooks Washington Square Park.

“We’re at a point when emerging markets are more important to the international growth story than ever before,” Henry said. “I’m an immigrant kid, an international economist—there were a number of parts of the story that I felt really fit.” ________________________ January of 2010 was, to put it mildly, a challenging time to take the lead at a major business school.

Manhattan-based Stern, both geographically and culturally close to Wall Street, was badly hit by the financial crisis. Donations fell, job opportunities for graduates evaporated, and business schools in general began to lose a bit of their swagger.

Stern retained a top spot in the global rankings— number 17 in the 2012 Financial Times MBA survey— but Henry was forced to contend with a tide of public distrust toward business.

“Society at large is really skeptical—and rightly skeptical—about what business schools are doing,” he said. “I think that business schools in general have become . . .”— here he takes an exceedingly

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diplomatic pause — “a little too transactional, and not as transformational as they should be.”

Transformation is a rather delicate thing to undertake at a world-class business school, and it highlights the fundamental tension between Henry the dean and Henry the economics wonk. For a great many students, especially in executive MBA programs, business school is a combination of resume-enhancer and networking tool. Inspiration is rarely at the top of the list for career-minded students.

Henry wants it to be.

“Education is subversive, in the most positive sense of the word,” he said. “The goal of classical education is to create a mind that will, in some sense, undermine the teacher. We need to get that spirit back into the business school environment.”

Doing that without alienating faculty, business constituents, and students will require more of those diplomatic pauses that Henry has mastered. I ask him if the aim is to toss MBA students off of their predetermined career paths. He pauses, lowers his voice.

“People will toss themselves off the path!” he says, holding his fingers beneath his chin like a yogi and then bursting into laughter. “Look, we’re not saying, ‘Don’t be an investment banker.’ We’re just inviting people to think about the world differently.”

I ask Henry if the past few years—with the spectacular collapse of the mortgage market, the near-death of Wall Street’s investment banks, and a huge shift in growth toward the developing world— has given him cause to fundamentally rethink his discipline. Is the field of economics in need of some root-and-branch transformation?

“Modern economics is not dead,” he replied, leaning forward in his chair. “Far from it.”

“Look, we’re not saying, ‘Don’t be an investment banker.’ We’re just inviting people to think about the world differently.”

If anything, Henry thinks the crisis of confidence brought on by the Great Recession calls for a more robust defense of economics as a disciplined, rigorous science. His book —out sometime in 2012—will make exactly that case, laying out data from the developing world to show how economists can help separate good policies from bad.

“The economist’s job is to use the tools to figure out what’s going to be good for society,” he said. “It’s society’s job to take that advice and figure out what’s politically feasible.”

Now as he enters his third year in the dean’s chair, Henry is finding the divide between politics and policy not quite as clean.

“I’m a researcher and a teacher who was asked to lead an institution,” he said. “And I’m fool enough to think I can do this because I haven’t tried to do it before.” ◆

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original work~ photography

francis wong’s ’14 Scenes from a Summer Abroad

argentina

Francis Wong ’14 has been running his own photography business since his junior year of high school. He collected the images below during his Morehead-Cain public service summer in Argentina. He has never taken a photography class.

A note from the photographer: The first part of my summer lasted for eight weeks, and was spent with Fundación Mediapila in Buenos Aires. Mediapila creates jobs for traditionally low-income women, giving them decent working conditions and steady pay to produce hand-sewn clothing. My internship often sent me to rather obscure parts of greater Buenos Aires to run errands for the organization, exposing me to aspects of the city seldom noticed by most visitors.

For the second part of my journey, I spent three weeks traveling around South and Central America. I explored the cities of Salta, Mendoza, and Bariloche in Argentina; Santiago and Viña del Mar in Chile; and Panama City and Pedasí in Panama.

My travels offered me the most spectacular photographic opportunities of my life. From the often-gritty streets of Buenos Aires to the spectacular Andes, I did my best to capture the unique qualities of each location.

ABOVE: Timotea. This woman, a former cartonera (a woman who sorts through street trash), works for Mediapila in the garment production process. Here she is cutting potatoes, preparing lunch for herself and the other women at Mediapila.

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Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires. Compiled from several layers of one RAW image adjusted to different exposure values.

Caballito Neighborhood, Buenos Aires. Taken from the balcony of the apartment I shared with Josh Barrett ’14.

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Colonia, Uruguay.

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Memorials north of Salta, Argentina.

Quebrada, meaning broken or cracked, refers to the mountains looming in the background.

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Milonga in Palermo Neighborhood, Buenos Aires.

Taken at a four-second exposure at f/5.0.

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Vi単a del Mar, Chile.

Taken at a 30-second exposure at f/4.0.

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Nahuel Huapi Lake, Bariloche, Argentina.

Calle Florida, Buenos Aires. Calle Florida, in the downtown area, offers a wide variety of shopping opportunities, from upscale department stores to one-dollar handmade garments.

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“My travels offered me the most spectacular photographic opportunities of my life.�

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common plays In Boston, Steve Maler ’87 brings the Bard to the people. For free.

BY KELLY ALMOND BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

Tonight’s play is being performed on Boston Common, the city’s oldest public park. In earlier eras it played host to grazing cattle and offered public hangings for spectacle. Today it is an improbably idyllic place in the middle of this big city, still springgreen in early August and awash in brilliant, welltended summer blooms. The atmosphere is flush with the romance of Swan Boats and weeping willows, patinaed bridges and early evening lamplight.

For weeks the east coast has suffered an unmoving and pitiless heat. It is expected now, and the customary concessions have been made —less and lighter clothing, iced coffee rather than hot. Tonight, then, is a bit of a surprise: 72 degrees and falling. It’s delightful and unprepared for; I hear a boy behind me call after his dad to bring him a sweatshirt.

I’m here to see All’s Well That Ends Well, one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known works. It is 7:00 p.m., one hour before curtain, and everywhere on the vast lawn that

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On Boston Common, the city’s historic Swan Boats paddle visitors around the park’s scenic pond.

makes up this corner of the Common there is the hum and mill of people laughing, arranging blankets, rifling through picnic baskets and coolers, greeting one another, scoping spots for viewing. By now there are very few open spaces left, and no especially good ones. People arrived as early as 1:30 this afternoon to claim the best of them.

I take a low seat just in front of the stage in an area marked off for reserved seating. Remarkably, though the show is being performed by Boston’s highly regarded Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (CSC), these few reserved seats are the only ones that require payment. There is no box office here, no ticket lines. Admission to this, and all of the CSC’s outdoor performances, is free.

For all of this charming atmosphere and for the evening’s entertainment, I and the 7,000 Bostonians filling the lawn owe Steve Maler ’87. Maler helped found the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company fifteen years ago on the premise that Boston required it.

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“Boston styles itself the Athens of America,” he explained. “You can’t really claim to be Athens without outdoor theater.”

But to fulfill Maler’s vision and that of his partners, outdoor theater wasn’t going to be enough. Nor was outdoor Shakespeare. Nor was even free outdoor Shakespeare (which in their view was essential). To get it right, it needed to be free outdoor Shakespeare of world-class production quality.

In 1996, the Company’s first production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was a low-budget affair that borrowed heavily for staging, decor, costumes, and actors from an earlier production Maler worked on. It ran for only a few days, but the encouraging response from the city was enough to launch what has become both a beloved summer tradition in Boston and the centerpiece of Maler’s career. ________________________ At some point we all experience it. The moment in middle or high school when, under fluorescent lighting, we are given the assignment: Shakespeare. It will be good for us. He is The Embodiment of English Literary Genius. We are handed our books, instructed to turn the page on Romeo and Juliet, or Othello, or Henry V, and we come face to face with this: SCENE: At the beginning of the Play, lies in England; but afterwards wholly in France.

Um. What?

And right there a conclusion forms for many a student: this is not for me. It’s a conclusion that often proves very hard to overcome.

“If your first experience with Shakespeare is bad,” says Maler, “we have so much work to do to bring you back.”

“Shakespeare is incredibly difficult to read, even for me,” Maler continues (and bless him for it). “When I think about how most people are introduced to Shakespeare in this country —in middle school or high school, by reading his plays—I think we’ve got it all wrong.”

To get it right, Maler suggests we must first understand how a play is different from other literary forms, like a novel or a poem.

“Unlike those things, which are products designed for the purpose of being read, the script of a play is not.

A play is more like a blueprint,” he explains. “If you’re an architect or a contractor looking at a blueprint, you can visualize maybe 95% of what a building is going to look like, but a layperson can’t, and isn’t expected to. The blueprint isn’t the product—the building is the product.

Enter Chorus.

Chor. O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention!

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels, Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire, Crouch for employment.

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“The same is true of a play. The script is not the play in the way that a novel is a novel or a poem is a poem. The script, or the written play, is a blueprint of something else—of the production of the play.”

To truly appreciate Shakespeare, Maler contends we must see his plays performed, and performed well.

And when we do, it is good for us.

“What’s miraculous about Shakespeare,” Maler says, “is that his plays are four hundred years old, but they might have been written today. They are so much of the stuff of life, they resonate every bit as much with modern audiences as with those of his time.”

He goes on, “Back when settlers were heading West in America, if they had books, they had two: they had the Bible, and they had the Collected Works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a profoundly populist writer until relatively recently, when he became sort of the domain of the intellectuals and the intelligentsia in our country, which isn’t as it should be.”

That belief has fueled Maler’s life work and made him a missionary of a kind. Finding ways to return Shakespeare (and more broadly, the theater) to the masses fills some part of his every day. It is manifest most evidently in his fifteen years’ work with the CSC.

Love’s Labour’s (nearly) Lost It is a storyline so classically human, Shakespeare might have written it.

A man creates a company from a cherished idea. He nurtures it, sacrifices for it, watches it grow. With thought and care, he takes on a partner to help advance its enterprise. And for awhile, all is well.

Until it’s not.

From 1996 to 2003, Maler devoted himself and much of his career to the advancement of the CSC. And except for the summer months when the curtain was readied and raised for each year’s production, it was largely a one-man show.

Obviously for Maler the point wasn’t merely to stage a play each year, but to stage it well—to do justice to the material and to the audience. There was stage setting, and costume selection, and lighting, and sound, and, perhaps paramount, there was casting.

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The Commonwealth Shakespeare Company offers free performances of the Bard’s plays for three weeks each summer. The plays draw audiences of approximately 100,000.

Pulling the team together to do all of this well is challenge enough for a long-established company in a traditional theater.

Add to all of this the CSC’s relative youth, the challenge of being outdoors, of creating a stage where none existed, in a theater made of grassy acres, for an audience that didn’t pay to see the show, and it was reasonable for the CSC to look for help.

“We have an insane business model,” Maler says, “in that we give our product away.”

When not working on the play itself in those days, most of Maler’s time was spent raising funds to make the whole endeavor possible. There were dreams to expand the CSC’s reach to indoor performances and summer academies, but there was neither the staffing nor the resources to do so.

In an effort to secure the company’s long-term viability, Maler and the CSC’s board of directors sought to partner with what Maler now obliquely refers to as “a larger organization.” And in 2003, they did so.

Before the conversation turns to the matter of this larger organization, Maler speaks easily, fluidly, about his work with the CSC, about the current play, his love of the stage, and the necessity of making it accessible to more people.

As he talks, he takes me on a tour of the small trailer city that comprises the backstage for All’s Well. And as we walk, he frequently interrupts his broader train of thought to point out all the myriad moving parts that make the summer’s three weeks of performances come off so smoothly.

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Maler is fun to listen to—not only because the subject is interesting, has obviously been considered at length, and is discussed eloquently, but because he has a voice like a deep well. His laugh is rich and resonant, and he has a knack for picking up a line of thought after some significant interruption and returning without pause to precisely the word or phrase he left off on. As someone who can lose her way in the most shopworn of thoughts, I’m envious— and frankly a little in awe of —this evident inner focus.

In keeping with his voice, Maler is an elegant man, trim thanks to a habit of running, and dressed in unembellished grays and blacks. His salt-and-pepper hair is close-cropped, and his rimless glasses frame a face that is serious at rest but animates quickly in conversation.

But as the topic turns from the interests that fuel him to his experience partnering with “the larger organization,” his eyes turn downward and each word becomes palpably weighed.

“We believed the partnership made sense at the time,” he begins slowly. “We were aiming for long-term sustainability for the Company, and the partnership was going to give us all of this infrastructure overnight —a marketing department, a development department, a back office —all the things that are essential to sustaining the Company over time. All of this was going to allow us to focus solely on what we do, which I thought was great, obviously.”

And for a while, it was great. Maler became a full-time employee of the larger organization, maintaining his role as artistic director of the CSC. He watched the Company’s budget grow substantially, easing the task of putting on world-class performances. The merger also opened new avenues for bringing affordable theater to the people, and this time not just to Boston.

For the first time ever, the CSC got to fulfill the dream of taking its outdoor production on the road, offering shows to Boston’s neighbors in Springfield.

But before long, Maler began to notice attitudes shifting. “I felt it building,” he says, “but it took a while —a change by degrees. There was an inner circle I was a part of that I . . . became not a part of. And I began to hear rumors that there was a sense the work of the CSC might be done more cheaply.”

More cheaply, and perhaps without Maler’s participation.

By the end of year three with the larger organization, Maler’s job as the artistic director of the company he founded was terminated, its budget slashed in half, and its number of performances on the Common cut by two-thirds.

“It was a very tough time,” he says plainly. “It was pretty much the hardest time in my life apart from one other, when I was dealing with a friend’s very serious illness.”

“The most challenging thing,” he continues softly and without the emotion the words suggest, “was seeing this thing that I’d created, that was like a child, all of the sudden being ripped away from me.”

To add insult to injury, it wasn’t something he could manage in private. The dispute between the beloved CSC and the less-beloved Citi Performing Arts Center—the larger organization — became fodder for the Boston Globe, playing out above the fold of its front page for three straight days.

“The most challenging thing was seeing this thing I’d created... all of a sudden being ripped away from me.”

It seems the Citi Center had made other, earlier management decisions that threatened various artistic traditions held dear by the citizens of Boston.

With the CSC’s Shakespeare on the Common now under threat of shuttering, a cry rang up, and the narrative of the CSC’s David to the Citi Center’s Goliath took hold.

Maler came off well in the press coverage, being cast by the Globe largely in the role of the victim, but there was nonetheless open discussion of his salary and the CSC’s budget, the Citi Center’s uncertain faith in his abilities, and the general discomfort of having one’s business become top news across the city.

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In the midst of the upheaval, Maler faced a choice.

Let go and watch the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company fold, or fight for its independence from the Citi Performing Arts Center.

He chose to fight.

“I became convinced that if I didn’t fight for it and try to regain control of it, Shakespeare on the Common would no longer happen,” he explains. “And I’m sure of that now. Or it would be happening in a context very, very different and not at the level of excellence a project like this has to have.”

“Backstage” at Shakespeare on the Common is made up of a small village of trailers that serve as makeshift dressing rooms, offices, and the like.

It was a fight he won. With a groundswell of community support, Maler regained control of an independent Commonwealth Shakespeare Company.

It was the summer of 2008.

All’s Well That Ends Well

“I became convinced that if I didn’t fight for it and try to regain control of it, Shakespeare on the Common would no longer happen.

And I’m sure of that now.”

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Since then, Maler has worked tirelessly to get the Company back on its feet during an extraordinarily challenging time for the arts. He has employed myriad tactics, from indefatigable fundraising to selecting —strategically — the popular A Comedy of Errors as its first play post-independence.

Maler describes Comedy as a “simple, silly little play” with “one set and no costume changes” (and surely no small amount of irony in the title). These attributes allowed him to produce the play far more cheaply than others—a necessity after seeing the CSC’s budget drop to one-third what it had been at the high-water mark of the merger with Citi.

After only its first year of independence, Maler and the CSC doubled revenues, an achievement all the more impressive for having occurred during the financial crisis. At the same time, the Company continues to receive rave reviews. ________________________

On this night, and I suspect on others, All’s Well That Ends Well appeared a beautifully conceived and produced performance. The stage was set minimally and cleverly (the floor included a track-like Lazy Susan— a Lazy Susan!— to expedite changes of scene and allow the actors to move more quickly). And happily, nothing about the production was weird. No directorial insecurities on display here, just straightforwardly good acting; simple, stylish props thoughtfully employed to help the audience navigate the play’s many different settings; and sound and lighting quality that —and I mean this in the most complimentary

way—never came to mind. The costumes, designed according to late-nineteenth century fashion, were also beautiful.

In short, it was Shakespeare in good, sure hands.

As an audience, we remained rapt throughout, and our long, raucous applause suggested collective satisfaction with fulsome entertainment. We had been treated to a show, and had experienced stretches of pin-drop silence, the occasional cat-call, the sudden hush, and sustained, side-splitting laughter.

The stuff of life, indeed. ◆

Maler, the founder and artistic director of the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, is on hand to welcome the sprawling crowd each night of three weeks of performances.

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original work~ poetry

what we leave behind SARAH BUFKIN ’13

He let us have the house for the summer because the dog needed to be walked and there’s always the danger of a pipe breaking and souring the oak shelves. He never said her name as we toured the quilt of rooms —though the closet spills with her heels and unworn sweaters; her initials trot across the pillowcases.

But the dog, the dog needs someone who will care, the shelves might rot. These are million-dollar homes, he told us. You can’t be too careful. Afterwards,

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we would pretend she had gone on vacation— vanished off to an island somewhere azure and blowsy with white linen. It’s easier that way, to sleep on the patterned sheets, to smile at the blond children photographed beside the mirror vanity, to snatch a chocolate from the stash in the bedside table late at night, if we pretend death doesn’t leave behind thriving closets, half-filled jars of peanut butter, Christmas card collections.

And so we dust the shelves, take the dog to the park, forget to water the pansies.

late afternoon on the red line SARAH BUFKIN ’13

A day passes like a rain drop spattering on the concrete walk, flattened so fast that you didn’t feel its cast upon your cheek before it no longer was. Flinging itself down the tunnel, the train sweeps people in and out like droplets passing across a car windshield in that crooked slide all things take to infinity. The people flinging themselves through doors closing fast, here a briefcase, the wheel of a stroller, the last syllable of a word severed by the sweeping shut of an alloy door. Skeins of lost conversations clutter the escalator, catching in the automaton of its gears as the individual stairs rise and flatten again, but then the call of a violin from above and someone loses an old receipt in the casting of the wind.

JARRARD COLE ’12

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“Coal has always cursed the land in which it lies. . . .

It mars but never beautifies.

It corrupts but never purifies.”

—Harry Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1961)

living downstream

In Kentucky coal country, Lisa Abbott ’92 finds defending mountains harder than moving them

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BY ERIC JOHNSON & KELLY ALMOND BEREA, KENTUCKY

Along Route 160, not far beyond Pine Mountain Ridge in southeastern Kentucky, the old mining towns of Benham and Lynch crowd the narrow valley.

Once among the largest coal camps in the world, the twin townships now offer a sleepy reminder of a bygone age.

Home to the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum, Benham and Lynch have been transformed into tourist attractions, trading on the faded icon of gritty, determined men venturing deep underground with headlamps ablaze.

The star attraction is the No. 31 Mine Portal, a truck-sized, half-moon tunnel where a small army of men once ventured into the mountainside, extracting coal for U.S. Steel. For $10.00, visitors can don helmets and venture into the hollowed-out earth, touring the tunnel for a glimpse of mining’s past.

ment is heavier, and our collective demand for inexpensive energy is greater. For mining companies, it is often cheaper and safer to simply knock the top off a mountain or a ridge and scoop up the coal beneath.

But that ease comes at a price.

The land around Lynch, above the old U.S. Steel mine, is still heavily forested mountainside. Extracting Lynch’s coal was dangerous and dirty, but the No. 31 Mine Portal is now a tiny surgical scar on an otherwise healthy mountain.

The Looney Creek Surface Mine is a gaping wound.

It is a vast moonscape of churned rock and mechanically terraced escarpments. It is a barren recess where a mountain used to be.

For Lisa Abbott ’91, that is too much to pay for cheap energy. ________________________

A glimpse of mining’s present is free. A few miles down the road, as Route 160 crosses Black Mountain and begins a steep run of switchbacks into Virginia, the Looney Creek Surface Mine bursts into view.

The contrast is staggering. The thousands of miners who worked the old No. 31 tunnel used jackhammers, pickaxes, and railway wagons to painstakingly extract coal and bring it up to the surface.

At Looney Creek, a few dozen workers use earthmovers and dump trucks the size of schoolhouses to bring the surface down to the coal. They are steadily removing a mountain.

There are a lot of reasons for the shift from underground mining to strip mining. The remaining Appalachian coal seams are narrower, heavy equip-

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“They’ve just simply stopped enforcing the laws.”

At the wizened age of ten, Abbott informed her mother that she wouldn’t be having children.

Children, she decided, meant you couldn’t care about work anymore. Already, Abbott felt she had too much work ahead to hazard distractions.

A few decades have passed since Abbott issued this declaration to her blinking mother, but it hasn’t been forgotten. Instead it’s made its way into family lore and is gleefully recounted when the family, including Abbott’s two young sons, gets together.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about tenyear-olds issuing precocious declarations. There’s certainly nothing remarkable about precocious declarations going the way of irresolute things like campaign promises. What’s remarkable about young Abbott’s is that it may be the single instance of inconsistency—ever—between a thing she said and an action she took.

A photo of a family hiking trip adorns a bookshelf in Abbott’s Berea, Kentucky, home— right next to a novel by Wendell Berry.

You will seldom meet a person more conversant with her beliefs and values than Abbott, nor one more committed to practicing them. “I’ll act as if what I do makes a difference,” she is quoted as saying in her eighth-grade yearbook.

By her teen years, Abbott began the work she felt compelled to do at age ten, immersing herself in environmental issues. In high school, she was a research assistant at a water quality station on the Hudson River. In college, she served as co-chair for the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC), where she helped organize the group’s first national conference.

Before her junior year, she designed her own summer internship with the Natural Resources Defense Council and completed an impressive report on the Chattahoochee River Basin. That, in turn, became the basis for a grant proposal for a clean water campaign in Georgia.

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Mountaintop removal mining is largely kept out of sight.

Access is strictly limited, and very few sites are visible from main roads. Here, a missing summit hints at the strip mine operation over the ridge.

As an undergraduate, Abbott pursued a degree in biology, expecting to build a career doing the kind of fieldwork she enjoyed during her summer internship.

But through her involvement with SEAC she discovered community organizing —as she describes it, “a way in which committed activism takes place off a college campus”—and immediately shifted plans.

While still at Carolina, Abbott attended workshops at the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee to learn more about the mechanics of organizing and to figure out how her skills stacked up against the work. Highlander is a social justice leadership and training center perhaps best known for working with Rosa Parks prior to the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

While at Highlander, Abbott became familiar with a small but sophisticated organizing group called Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC), broadly committed to social justice, but heavily focused on mountaintop removal mining.

Her first job with KFTC landed her in a remote corner of eastern Kentucky, where mountaintop removal mining was most prevalent in the state. For five years she lived and worked there alone, a full hour and a half from her nearest colleague. It was an isolated start to adult life, so she got a dog to keep her company. Her dog was soon stolen.

“It was a country song,” Abbott laughed, describing those early years. “I was robbed three times, and by

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What she did was give her notice to KFTC, get married, have her first child, and pursue an advanced degree in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton — all in the span of three years.

She didn’t stay gone long. Shortly after completing her coursework at Princeton, Abbott and her young family returned to Kentucky and settled in the charming college town of Berea. Though she hadn’t envisioned returning to Kentucky, resuming her work with KFTC was a happy homecoming.

“It’s been almost a decade since we’ve come back, and one of the biggest joys has been that I don’t have all those questions anymore,” she said. “I’m sure they’ll come back at some point in my life, but right now I’m doing what I love, living where I want to live, with a fantastic family and group of friends.” ________________________ The strip mine along Raccoon Creek, near Rick Handshoe’s home in Floyd County. Only a handful of cars are parked at the mine site; strip mining requires far fewer workers than a traditional, underground mine. (Photo courtesy KFTC)

the third time, they had taken everything —there was nothing left. I had a jar where I kept change, and it had one quarter in it because everything I had put in there before had been stolen already. They took the quarter.”

Alas for her concerned parents, neither the solitude nor the serial pilfering was enough to deter Abbott.

“I had a job that aligned most closely with my values,” she explained. “It was a job that I loved, and for five years that was enough.”

By year six, however, she began to grow restless and to question long-held assumptions. “I realized that the work just wasn’t enough anymore, whatever I might’ve thought when I was ten. And what was I going to do with that?”

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Among the more pressing challenges for groups like KFTC is that much of the behavior they seek to stop is, in fact, already banned.

As a matter of law, mining companies cannot pollute streams, cannot permanently destroy wildlife habitat, cannot fill valleys with mining waste—cannot legally do a great many of the things that are part and parcel of strip mining.

But as any speeding driver knows, there’s a difference between what is prohibited and what is punished.

And in Kentucky, that gulf is vast.

“They’ve simply stopped enforcing the laws,” Abbott said. For advocacy groups, this presents a trickier challenge.

Nothing illustrates that better than a fascinating chart Abbott assembled from state environmental data.

Under the federal Clean Water Act, mining companies are obliged to monitor nearby streams and report a variety of water quality measures to state regulators.

Among those indicators is conductivity, the ease with which an electrical charge passes through water. “Conductivity is useful as a general measure of stream water quality,” the EPA explains. “Significant changes in conductivity could be an indicator that a discharge or some other source of pollution has entered a stream.”

Lower conductivity is generally better; organic material (the stuff that’s supposed to be in a stream) doesn’t conduct electricity well, but various inorganic compounds (nitrate, sulfate, magnesium, sodium, calcium, iron; the stuff that mining runoff puts in a stream) conduct it swimmingly.

On Abbott’s chart, mining companies reported a perfectly stable amount of conductivity—just within the EPA standard—month after month, in stream after stream. In heavy rains and drought, across all manner of geological formations and stream sizes,

ABOVE: Abbott leads a strategy session of volunteers in the deserted cafeteria of the legislative building.

LEFT: Abbott and a group of KFTC volunteers talk about their protest strategy as they make their way through a tunnel at the Capitol building.

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“The issue of mountaintop removal has gotten a lot of press coverage nationally, but within the state, it’s just sort of a shrug-yourshoulders attitude.” the lines on the graph remained flat; different mines across the state were reporting identical data.

In 2010, the EPA had a change of heart and required mining companies to aim for a more stringent conductivity standard. As Abbott’s chart shows, they were more than happy to comply. Instantly, and in perfect unison, every stream in Kentucky dropped to the new standard.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Abbott asked sardonically.

And it gets more so. After a years-long lawsuit by KFTC and other interested parties, a state judge ordered independent tests of all those companymonitored streams. This sudden bout of regulatory zeal is illustrated on the right side of the chart as a kind of color explosion. Liberated from their brazen lockstep, the lines shoot upward at wildly different angles, like a covey of startled quail. This is what real water quality data looks like.

“None of them are compliant with the standard,” Abbott said. “We’re talking about 20,000 of these violations.”

The point that’s worth dwelling on here is that none of this blatantly fraudulent data was being hidden from state regulators; it was sitting in filing cabinets at the Kentucky Division of Water.

But knowing and caring are two very different things. In a sense, KFTC’s work on mountaintop removal

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wandering through to see the ornate, Beaux-Arts building with French replica staircases were quiet in their appreciation.

Assembled in the governor’s anteroom were Abbott and three volunteers from the KFTC office in Berea; a man named Rick Handshoe, who lives downstream from a mine in Floyd County; and an exceedingly tall, courtly fellow in a tan suit.

Handshoe was there because his creek keeps turning orange, and he would like someone to take an interest in the problem. The tall fellow, Wendell Berry, was there because President Barack Obama recently awarded him the National Humanities Medal, and it seemed unlikely the Capitol police would make a scene by evicting him.

Abbott and Wendell Berry just outside the governor’s office in the State Capitol. “Working with Berry is a major job perk,” Abbott said.

amounts to an extended plea for Kentuckians and their elected officials to care about the damage in plain sight. ________________________

Berry is an oddity in Kentucky, a man regarded as a civic treasure for decrying the general direction of society. He has written more than forty books of poetry and essays, mostly about mankind and our conflicted relationship with nature. He owns a farm in Henry County, and he has publicly described the government of Kentucky as “a wholly owned subsidiary of the coal corporations and of any other corporations that bid high enough.” Still, everyone in the Capitol seemed to adore him.

For most of us, the iconic images of modern political protest are ’60s-vintage. There are banners, loud marches, plenty of chanting, maybe even some arrests.

“Protest” calls to mind a dramatic affair.

After Berry visited the White House last year to collect his National Humanities Medal, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway was kind enough to send a congratulatory note. He invited Berry to call on him if he could ever be of service.

So it was a little jarring to see Abbott and her colleagues quietly seated in the waiting area of Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear’s office, turning down offers of coffee and candy from the governor’s diligently polite staff.

Berry promptly took Conway up on the offer, requesting a meeting for Handshoe and KFTC to discuss the orange creek issue. Berry has been an ardent supporter of KFTC, offering his lanky frame and understated gravitas wherever it might do some good.

It was June 23rd, a Thursday, and the legislature was not in session. The State Capitol in Frankfort had an empty, hushed feel. Even the handful of tourists

The half-hour meeting wasn’t scheduled until the afternoon, but Abbott and her volunteers had no intention of wasting a trip to the Capitol on a short,

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ABOVE: Rick Handshoe holds a sign about the mine runoff polluting his Floyd County creek.

closed-door session. So there they all were at 10:30 in the morning, patiently waiting for Governor Beshear to return to his office so that he might be urged to hear Handshoe’s petition.

“Two state agencies have said, ‘You know what, Rick?

We don’t respond to calls about orange water anymore,’” Abbott explained. Handshoe had been through this routine before, the last few times the upstream mining operation released wastewater into his creek.

“Now they’re just throwing up their hands and not responding at all.”

Even though it was as quiet as a library in the governor’s office, a half-dozen people sitting around and looking aggrieved was enough to attract the lone reporter prowling the Capitol building on a languid summer morning. It is to KFTC’s everlasting luck that the reporter was Ronnie Ellis.

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Ellis’s mere presence in an out-of-session, news-free Capitol attests to his status as a dying breed in journalism. Few news outlets can afford a full-time reporter in the statehouse, and fewer still employ a multi-decade veteran like Ellis.

He serves as the Frankfort reporter for Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc., and his stories get picked up by local papers and websites across Kentucky. He wandered in wearing a sport coat and an open-necked shirt, sat down next to Handshoe, and began taking notes.

Whether out of boredom, genuine sympathy, or a deep-seated belief in the journalist’s creed of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, Ellis decided to lend a hand.

He called the governor’s press secretary and found that Beshear had already returned— through a side door —and would be exiting again shortly, with no intention of seeing the aggrieved citizens in his lobby. A small press conference on an unrelated matter was scheduled to begin just down the hall.

This presented a choice for Abbott. Be content with a mild-mannered sit-in here in the governor’s

lobby, or use the press conference as a chance to make some news?

“The issue of mountaintop removal has gotten a lot of press coverage nationally,” Abbott said. “But within the state, it’s sort of a shrug-your-shoulders attitude.”

Abbott took a quick poll and found that the group was not inclined to shrug and go home. ________________________ To give Governor Beshear his due, the brief in favor of coal is as compelling as it is succinct: we need it.

The United States has the largest proven reserves of coal in the world, and almost half of our electric power comes from burning it. On this, industry supporters and environmental activists agree: we are the Saudi Arabia of coal.

The coal lobby has developed a catchy slogan to drive the point home: Coal Keeps the Lights On! It is so pithy that it fits on a license plate, which you can see within a few minutes on any eastern Kentucky highway.

Drivers wishing to show their support for coal can get a jet-black specialty plate —“Coal Keeps the Lights On!” running in bright yellow across the bottom — through the state’s Motor Vehicle Licensing System.

It costs $44.00, including an automatic $10.00 donation to the Kentucky Coal Association.

The prevalence of the plate hints at another of KFTC’s challenges: support for the coal industry is deep and sincere among many Kentuckians, especially those in elected office.

“The powers that be in this state are firmly aligned behind the status quo,” Abbott said. “The coal industry dominates at every level of state government.”

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As a result, KFTC spends a lot of time and energy prodding reluctant Kentucky officials to enforce federal laws. Environmental lawsuits tend to become case studies in federalism.

During the 2011 session of the Kentucky legislature, the state senate easily passed a resolution declaring Kentucky a “sanctuary state from the regulatory overreach of the United States Environmental Protection Agency,” apparently in the belief that coal companies are suffering an excess of regulation.

This was in response to the EPA’s renewed efforts to enforce the Clean Water Act. Under federal law, the Army Corps of Engineers can issue a permit allowing strip mines to dump thousands of tons of waste— all of the non-coal parts of a mountain—into neighboring valleys. As the EPA describes it: Mountaintop mining is a form of surface coal mining in which explosives are used to access coal seams, generating large volumes of waste that bury adjacent streams. The resulting waste that then fills valleys and streams can significantly compromise water quality, often causing permanent damage to ecosystems and rendering streams unfit for drinking, fishing, and swimming. It is estimated that almost 2,000 miles of Appalachian headwater streams have been buried by mountaintop coal mining.1 1 EPA Press Release. “EPA Issues Final Guidance to Protect Water Quality in Appalachian Communities from Impacts of Mountaintop Mining / Agency to provide flexibility while protecting environment and public health.”

7/21/2011. http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/bd4379a92ceceeac8525735900400c27/1dabfc17944974d4852578d400561a13!

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The Corps of Engineers has historically taken a laissez-faire attitude in issuing these permits, and the EPA has rarely exercised its authority to review them.

The Obama administration sought to change that, pushing the EPA to more closely assess the environmental impact of valley fill.

“The EPA is, for the first time, making some efforts to enforce existing laws that have been on the books since 1977,” Abbot said. “It’s not a new law; they’re just saying, ‘let’s take this seriously.’”

This has not gone over well among industry supporters.

“They are career bureaucrats who sit in their ivory tower in Washington, D.C., and decide what the science should be,” said David Gooch, president of the Kentucky Coal Operators and Associates, during testimony last year before the state legislature.

Inside the State Capitol, Rick Handshoe, left, and a pair of KFTC volunteers hold signs cataloging alleged damage from eastern Kentucky mining operations.

In Kentucky, that represents a mostly bipartisan sentiment. Governor Beshear is a Democrat, and his 2011 State of the Commonwealth speech earned one of its strongest ovations in response to a demand for Washington to butt out.

“The folks who are working on mountaintop removal in Kentucky are the people who are drinking the water, living with the dust . . . ”

“Coal provides 90 percent of our electricity and— because our rates are low — has helped us build a robust manufacturing industry,” Beshear said.

“But all that is in jeopardy because Washington bureaucrats continue to try to impose arbitrary and unreasonable regulations on the mining of coal. To them I say, ‘Get off our backs! I will fight you for the right to cleanly and safely mine coal.’”

That kind of rhetoric—pitting hardscrabble, salt-ofthe-earth, coal-loving Kentuckians against meddling environmentalist outsiders—particularly galls Abbott.

“That charge gets bandied around a bunch because it’s effective,” she said. “But it simply isn’t the case.

The folks who are working against mountaintop removal in Kentucky are the people who are drinking the water, living with the dust, people whose children have asthma because they live near the coal prep plant. If you look at the people protesting in the governor’s office, they’re the people who live with this day-in and day-out.” ________________________

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Abbott’s upbringing is about as far from that of those she works with as you can imagine. Raised in New York, she was a celebrated student at the prestigious Groton School in Massachusetts.

She came by her commitment to social causes honestly, crediting her parents and unique childhood on the pastoral campus of Millbrook School where her father was headmaster with instilling in her “a deep sense of responsibility to live as an engaged, questioning, compassionate, and equal citizen of our global world.”

It’s the kind of earnestness that might, in less selfaware hands, trend toward tedious. So it’s important to note that while Abbott is serious-minded, she hardly takes herself seriously. With an easy laugh and nimble sense of humor, Abbott is more a calming presence than a rabble-rouser. And while deeply committed to acting on her beliefs (she drives a Prius), she isn’t in your face about them (there are no bumper stickers on it).

When asked about an op-ed she wrote for The Daily Tar Heel in protest of the first Iraq War, she responds with a sheepish laugh. “I think I’ve grown a little bit. I don’t think I’m quite as self-righteous as I used to be.”

For all her devotion to environmental causes, it seems an unlikely dream for a 22-year-old to leave Chapel Hill for an isolated life in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, much less so for a Groton School Crocker Prize recipient and Morehead Scholar. Did she ever worry that she was giving something up to become a community organizer?

“I never have,” she responds simply. “I absolutely love the life I lead. I try pretty hard at what I’m doing, yes.

But I don’t see what I’m doing as somehow noble or sacrificial. I’ve gotten to work with some of the most courageous, smart, caring people I’ve ever encoun-

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tered. I live in this really neat town with an amazingly diverse community of friends. And I get to talk to Wendell Berry once a week. And that’s pretty neat.

“I think I’m one of the luckiest people I know,” she assures. “I’ll let you know if I meet someone who I think is luckier than I am.” ________________________ Back in the Capitol building, Abbott made a decision.

If Governor Beshear was going to stiff-arm Rick Handshoe and his orange-water problem, then KFTC would make an appearance at the governor’s afternoon press conference.

Suited dignitaries gathered in the press room just down the hall from the governor’s office, waiting to see a trade representative from Taiwan present Governor Beshear with a $20,000 check for flood relief. The KFTC members filed in quietly and made their way to the back. Berry sat down closer to the front and began taking notes—“I like people to know

I’m paying attention,” he explained later—and a volunteer unfurled a small poster (“Water Trumps Coal”).

The facial expression of the Taiwanese trade representative progressed from genial to confused to deeply displeased.

An excerpt from Abbott's 1992 application to the Southern Empowerment Project for additional training in community organizing before beginning her job with KFTC.

The governor and his aides kept their camera-ready smiles glued in place, and Ronnie Ellis failed to suppress a grin.

There was no shouting, no chanting, no interruption of Governor Beshear’s remarks about the generosity of the Taiwanese people. But as the press gaggle ended and Beshear made his way to the door, Rick Handshoe was waiting.

Polite but persistent, he made his way to the Governor and pressed a thin sheaf of papers into his hand. Beshear thanked him and walked down the corridor, glancing at the detailed autopsy of

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“Each of us, whatever course of life we take, needs to pursue our lives as if our actions matter.”

Handshoe’s dead creek. The Governor ducked into a side door and was gone.

This, for KFTC, is a victory. The afternoon’s meeting with the attorney general was downgraded to a brief sit-down with an assistant AG— he cautiously promised to “make the attorney general aware” of KFTC’s complaints —and Ronnie Ellis wrote a fine story about the glaring failure of state government to do anything whatsoever about polluted mine runoff in Floyd County.

Last year, KFTC moved its Berea office from an airy downtown house into a charmless strip mall. Since then, Abbott has spent a fair amount of her time working from home.

Abbott wasn’t quoted anywhere in the article, which is a deliberate element of KFTC’s strategy. “One of the bedrock principles of KFTC is that our staff don’t speak on behalf of the organization,” Abbott explained. “If anything is going to be said in the name of KFTC, it’s going to be said by volunteer leaders.”

That stance is both a defensive measure, helping to diffuse the charge of KFTC as a bunch of meddling outsiders, and part of the long-term goal of building civic know-how in politically isolated regions of Kentucky.

“It reinforces that the organization’s mission is really and sincerely leadership development,” Abbot said.

“It helps people find their own voice and build the skills and confidence to speak out on the issues that are affecting them.”

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Abbott and Wendell Berry making their way down the sidewalk after a long day at the Capitol.

And so it was Handshoe who emerged front-andcenter in Ellis’s coverage. “These are good tax-paying people,” he told the reporter. “We may be from the hills, but we’re supposed to be part of Kentucky. We don’t feel like it.”

Abbott has not. In a 2010 speech marking the 100th anniversary of Carolina’s Campus Y, Abbott urged a crowd of UNC students and alumni to avoid the sense of paralysis that can take hold in the face of a seemingly indifferent world.

Despite Ellis’s best efforts, few outlets picked up the protest. Handshoe’s creek continued to turn orange without turning into a scandal, and Beshear cruised to reelection a few months later with almost 57 percent of the vote.

“Each of us, whatever course of life we take, needs to pursue our lives as if our actions matter,” she said, hearkening back to her own eighth-grade promise and the guiding principle of her life. “This is, I think, an operational definition of hope.”

“It’s not that people don’t care,” Ellis said, explaining the tepid response to stories like Handshoe’s.

“They’ve just given up.”

It’s a good one. And in eastern Kentucky, Abbott’s hope is making the mountains just a little bit harder to move. ◆

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what I’ve learned from folk music

BY LIBBY RODENBOUGH ’13

Reprinted from the October 2011 issue of Campus BluePrint

I suspect that the words “folk music” conjure one of a number of images in your mind. Perhaps it’s a handful of grungy hippies crooning Kumbaya around a campfire, some decrepit hillbillies clogging on a crumbling porch in the Appalachian backwoods or even (for those of you really worldly college students who have been beyond our national borders) a band of vagabonds with strange, foreign-looking instruments making strange, foreign-sounding noises.

Well, pat yourself on the back, you ethnomusicological scholar, because that’s exactly what folk music is.

That and a lot more. It’s people singin’ and dancin’ and playin’ together in the spirit of a common tradition. It’s an animated, acoustic homage to the lives and rituals of our predecessors.

That might sound a bit too schmaltzy or fuddyduddy for your taste, but having dedicated the last year or so of my life to both learning how to pick and shuffle at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago and to Irish fiddling in pubs across the Emerald Isle, I feel compelled to make a case for the stuff. Here are but a few life lessons I’ve learned from my adventures in folk.

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It’s always better when we’re together (or says folk demigod Jack Johnson). Folk music is an inherently communal activity. Even solo “folk artists,” or the good ones, at least, are happiest when joined by other voices.

I saw American folk revival hero Pete Seeger, now a sprightly 92, this summer at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island. The man has been performing for seven decades, and yet his fundamental objective today is exactly as it was in the 1940s: to get his audience singing along.

This is the gist of folk music: finding something we can all agree on. And in the complex microcosms of political, racial, and cultural diversity that are American communities, we would do well to better appreciate areas of common ground.

Respect your roots Though no musical tradition can survive without innovation, folk music emphasizes paying tribute to those who came before, and not only in the sphere of musical performance. Folk songs immortalize all manner of heroes, from naval captains to labor organizers to dear ol’ Granny.

Libby Rodenbough ’13 (with the violin) plays with Chapel Hill Americana group Mipso Trio as they shoot a music video in UNC’s Forest Theater.

welcome news for the non-virtuosos among us). An earth-shaking lead guitar does not a good jam make.

In the university world and in American society at large, we often use hierarchies of personal achievement to evaluate the quality of our lives, where perhaps instead the happiness and success of our communities should be the yardstick.

Don’t lose the groove

Cultural history is one of our most invaluable resources, providing us with a wealth of figures to emulate— and, of course, plenty of grisly cautionary tales. Speaking in broad generalization, the western world tends to view history from a distinctly socio-political vantage point, and folk music reminds us that our cultural history can be equally, if not more, instructive.

Fewer spine-crushing solos; more complementary fills Folk music recognizes musical virtuosity, but it reveres a good ear and a sense of empathy. Egos don’t last long, especially in a field that has never been exactly lucrative. To earn genuine respect, a folk musician must know when to back off and how to make somebody else look good (this is particularly

The great thing about collective music-making is that you can and should depend on the group to absorb your blunders. So don’t cry over that errant F note; hop right back in as soon as you feel the pulse again.

As long as you’ve got the community playing along around you, there’s no need to sweat the minutia of individual notes.

A lot of us seem to have the mantra “DON’T MESS UP” running incessantly through our brains, but I will make the bold claim that every last one of the world’s best and brightest have dropped the ball on occasion. The ones who pick it right back up again —or maybe even allow someone else to pick it up for them — are the ones who start getting at the core of living.

Before I descend entirely into Mr. Rogers-esque philosophical rambling, I’ll give it a rest. Suffice it to say, I have grown to have great respect for both folk music and the theoretical principles derived, however loosely, therefrom. I’m not claiming that folk music isn’t cheesy; only that most of us could use a little less self-importance, a little less stress, a little less seriousness, and a lot more cheese in our lives. ◆

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a man obsessed In more than three decades as a writer and historian, James Reston, Jr. ’63 has chronicled the grand and the obscure. He talked to The Scholar about tackling his most sensitive project yet , a novel based on September 11th.

The printed manuscript of The Nineteenth Hijacker stacked neatly on Reston’s coffee table.

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BY ERIC JOHNSON CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND

For a long time, James Reston, Jr. ’63 resisted the idea of becoming a writer. As the son of famed New York Times editor and columnist James “Scotty” Reston, the younger Reston wasn’t interested in making journalism a family business.

“Certainly, through my first couple of years at Chapel Hill, I rejected all of that,” Reston recalled during an interview at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

“I didn’t want to go in that direction at all.”

It wasn’t until his junior year, studying abroad at Oxford, that he began to reconsider. Writing and defending two essays each week for his Oxford tutors, he found that the work suited him well.

After graduation, he served as a speechwriter for Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, followed by a stint writing political essays for the Chicago Daily News. During the Vietnam War, Reston volunteered to serve in in a U.S. Army intelligence unit, which afforded him the time to write his first novel.

To Defend, To Destroy was published in 1971.

“I was stationed in Hawaii, and on weekends I would fly off to outer islands and hole myself up in hotel rooms and try to write,” he said. “That’s how I got into the writing business.” Fifteen books later, he’s still very much in the writing business, though he now holes up in a cozy home office decorated with framed covers and illustrations from his books.

Reston found his calling in nonfiction, and he has written on an eclectic range of topics — an exploration of cult leader Jim Jones, a celebrated biography of Galileo, a memoir of his experience raising his daughter Hillary, who suffers from a severe neurological disorder.

He is most widely known for his role in the 1977 interviews between British journalist David Frost and former president Richard Nixon. Reston served as the lead researcher for Frost, uncovering new material about the Watergate scandal and helping turn the interviews into a legendary moment in political history.

Reston chronicled the experience in The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews, and he served as a consultant to the Broadway play Frost/Nixon and the 2008 film adaptation. “What a trip that was!” Reston said, referring to his work on the film.

In recent years, he has made a name for himself in the policy world by connecting his histories of the Crusades to current events. With titles like Warriors of God, Dogs of God, and Defenders of the Faith, his books on conflict between Muslim and Christian civilizations made him a sought-after commentator on American policy after September 11th, 2001.

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The desk where Reston does most of his research and writing. His basement office gets a generous amount of sunlight.

For his latest project, Reston decided to tackle some of those same themes in fiction. He has spent the past few years writing The Nineteenth Hijacker, an imagined account of September 11th and his first novel in more than three decades. He hopes to see it published this year.

recently by the co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton. Lee is a wonderful man— a bit of a raconteur —and I filmed a conversation with him a few years ago about 9/11.

“It’s a real roll of the dice for me,” Reston says. “I’ve done it without a contract, something I haven’t done since 1974. But it’s something I really wanted to do.”

He mentioned that the 9/11 Commission never had the time —or possibly the inclination —to look into the individual lives of the 19 hijackers. There was one in particular that really interested him, and my ears perked up at this.

In his first interview about the book, Reston explains what drew him to such sensitive territory and why he finds value in crafting a narrative from tragedy.

The hijacker he was talking about was the Lebanese man who took the plane down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania—flight 93. His name was Ziad al-Jarrah.

The Scholar: You’ve described your literary career as a series of obsessions, where you spend years becoming immersed in a particular subject. How did 9/11 become one of those obsessions?

TS: Why the focus on him? Why not the other eighteen?

Jim: I’m a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center here in Washington, and that was run until

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Jim: He was particularly interesting, and in many ways separate from all of the others. He was Lebanese, he came from a very fine family in Beirut and was close to his family even to the very end. He also had a

“The idea of a choice between strong family ties and a strong romantic relationship or this sense of conviction about a larger cause appealed to me immensely.”

very deep romantic relationship with a woman in Germany, and that kind of thing was very much against al-Qaeda rules.

Perhaps most interestingly, he almost pulled out of the operation in July of 2001.

TS: That does sound like a solid premise for a book.

Jim: As an author, the idea of a choice between strong family ties and a strong romantic relationship or this sense of conviction about a larger cause appealed to me immensely.

I thought, “Well, that’s a good subject for me, and I’ll do it as nonfiction.” Then I come

to find out that much of the material surrounding the 9/11 hijackers is still classified. So it just couldn't be done in any other way but to imagine it.

TS: Are you concerned about negative reactions to fictionalizing 9/11? The critical reaction to other novels that have touched on 9/11 has been decidedly mixed.

Jim: From an author’s standpoint, I think you’ve got to get beyond the big event before people really want to open their mind up to it. When I published my first novel in 1971, the Vietnam War was not over.

And in some ways, I think that book was published too soon.

Now, with 9/11, the situation seems to have turned around with the death of Osama bin Laden. It’s as if we’ve won it now. We’ve brought it some kind of closure . . . I hope.

TS: With so much of the official record still off-limits, what kind of research could you do?

Jim: Well, I went to Beirut and I talked with the uncle of this guy, Ziad. And I went to Hamburg; Ziad’s trajectory was through Hamburg, part of that Hamburg cell that included Mohamed Atta.

The journalism that is the best on this is largely German, and it’s because of the Hamburg cell. A lot of the writing and research that has been done in Germany leads you to the conclusion that 9/11 was really the result of about eight individuals.

The brilliance of the 9/11 operation, and the immense luck from the standpoint of Osama bin Laden, is that these individuals in Hamburg —four young men from a sophisticated, westernized, graduate-student background — wanted to satisfy their obligation for jihad. It was not all about training camps in Afghanistan, but about finding these little cells of bright, westernized individuals.

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So I did those trips, and of course the 9/11 Commission Report itself is very useful. There’s a lot of fascinating material in there. You have to master all of that before you really start digging elsewhere.

TS: How did you find people to interview? And how did you get them to talk about a subject so profoundly sensitive?

Jim: This is really a standard problem for a journalist: How do you get people to talk who really have a difficult story? I’ve been around Washington for quite a long time now, and I’ve got some good contacts.

There was a woman here who became my fixer in Lebanon, setting up my interviews. In the case of this particular story, Ziad’s uncle had become a kind of

press spokesman. He was the one who agreed to interviews on behalf of the family.

In talking to him, I found that they’re in total denial.

Ziad’s family don’t believe he did it; they think he was a victim. They think maybe he was going on a vacation to California or something like that. So they’re in total denial.

TS: How did you react to that? Was it hard for you to hear them deny it?

Jim: That crime is so incredible, and so awful, I think the normal human reaction is one of denial. But I did, when I got back to Washington, mail them a copy of the 9/11 Commission Report.

Handwritten notes from Reston’s agent and editor.

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TS: How did the research shape the plot?

Jim: Well, the lover in Germany, Ziad’s girlfriend, became a principal character. We see the life of Ziad al-Jarrah through his lover, who professes not to know anything about the 9/11 plot. Though they were in a long relationship, Jarrah supposedly never told her anything about it. She had her suspicions.

And so the construct of the book is such that the action really happens after 9/11. The real woman received a posthumous letter—this is actually true — that Ziad had written the night before the operation as a farewell to her. So what I have imagined in this book is that he not only wrote that farewell letter, but that he had been recording his recollections about how this whole thing had been happening.

Lining the walls of his home office, Reston keeps mementos from the Frost/Nixon interviews. He served as one of Frost’s lead researchers for the high-stakes interviews with the former president.

In my book, seven days after 9/11 she gets this packet not only with his farewell letter but with these tapes in which he has told her his whole story. Then it becomes a question of whether she turns this over to the police.

This is personal for her —she wants to know what’s in it, what’s on the tapes, and it becomes a kind of cat-and-mouse game between her and the police.

She knows that if she turns the package over, she’ll never see the tapes or hear Ziad’s explanation. So it becomes a sort of complicated construct where we hear his story through the lens of the lover and the relationship between her and Ziad.

TS: Were you able to speak with her before writing the book?

Jim: No; she was long since lost to history.

To begin with, the German police put her into protective custody and she was always barred from the press. Then she dropped from sight, and nobody knows where she is. I wrote her a letter, but it was returned.

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“It’s a real roll of the dice for me . . . But it’s something I really wanted to do.”

Reston in his home office in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

So I have completely created her character, and in some ways that’s a good thing. If she had actually talked to me, and then she didn’t like the way she was portrayed, then you could get into legal difficulty.

But I can now say that this is completely made up out of whole cloth.

TS: What’s the value in taking a story like this and turning it into a human-scale narrative? Do you think people are going to rebel against the notion of humanizing a 9/11 hijacker?

Jim: Well, the comfortable thing in America is for us to leave these people as stick figures and monsters, not as human beings. If we leave them as stick figures

and monsters, then we don’t understand anything about how this kind of bestial act could take place.

I want to know, what’s the whole evolution of the mindset that could lead a very attractive guy with a lot going for him through this arc, from Beirut through Hamburg to Florida and into the mud of Shanksville, Pennsylvania? We need to try to understand what that process can be like, what's the motivation, what touches that, what leads one to violence of that cataclysmic nature.

That would be my argument. We need to understand these people if we’re going to protect ourselves. ◆

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Akhil Jariwala ’14 Yorita, Honduras. June 15, 2011 We were going to help them prepare their first ensayo de maiz. This would serve as the first step in a long community-driven research project to help the farmers determine which corn and bean varieties would best suit the soil, temperature, and humidity of their land.

Marvin brought with him twelve different corn varieties, a measuring tape, and some yellow cord for the plotting.

Watching Marvin instruct the community was magical.

I literally saw him transform these farmers —who had worked with the same tools, land, and methodology their whole lives—into experimenters and scientists.

dispatches from the summer blogs Each summer, scholars working abroad manage to overcome spotty Internet connections and a lot of jet lag to offer fascinating dispatches from around the world.

Here are a few excerpts from the summer blogs of 2011.

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To start, he unrolled his long yellow cord and had them measure out and stake two 20m-long ropes to mark the vertical boundaries of the ensayo and five 5m-long ropes to help mark where they would put the individual corn seeds. Between surcos of three corn seeds, Marvin had them leave exactly 40cm of space, and between columns of corn varieties, exactly 80cm.

Everything was marked on the ropes to establish a grid, and I was impressed by how systematically the campesinos began to work once they understood the process. They measured the distances between seed holes with a measuring tape instead of with the number of footsteps. They used the same number of seeds for every single hole. They used land in the middle of the plot instead of the very best or the very worst. The whole task took two hours, but we left

the Huracan CIAL with much more than just two repetitions of an ensayo de maiz. We left them with a set of skills to make their lives better.

Los catrachos are probably the most hospitable people I have met in my whole life. When we got to the Huracan plot, the women quickly got us three parasols so that we would be comfortable out of the sun. When one of the CIAL leaders saw me eyeing the fruit trees, he had some of the children climb them and get us a bag of perfect, luscious mangoes. The people of Huracan refused to let us leave without feeding us a delicious lunch. The people here may not have a lot, but they offer what they do, and that is something we could all learn from.

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Nicola Vann ’14 Almasu Sec, Romania. June 8, 2011 A thunderstorm has just begun outside. We’re listening to it inside our little room. Poufy, the neighboring corgi-mix-mutt-like-dog is hiding under the car. We just fed him some.

I had a challenging conversation earlier. I was explaining University and scholarship within a conversation about the radically low salaries of many Romanians and various hardships surrounding money and education. The students asked me what I was

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studying at University and I told them Theatre. I got this surprised head shake from one of the teachers.

I guess I understand: when I have so much set up for me to be successful and secure, why would I study something so impractical?

This is something I’ve felt insecure justifying even in the United States. I believe so strongly in theatre as an art, as a therapeutic adventure for both those creating it and witnessing it, and as an important and developing part of society and culture. But it absolutely is a career, and particularly a field of study, met with criticism. Yet I wish I could explain that yes, yes, you could never study theatre and still be incredibly adept at it. Or you could study it forever and never begin to understand it. But if you do study it, you will learn some of the most influential things you may ever learn about people, emotions, bodies, environments, and cooperation; not to mention you develop quite a decent work ethic.

I can’t explain to these teachers who struggle on their salaries that I do understand how incredibly fortunate I am, and that I learn this more all the time. It is a privilege to be able to study something that guarantees me very little practically, but everything intellectually and spiritually.

John Adams once said (this quote hung on the wall in my high school Calculus class somewhat ironically) “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, tapestry, and porcelain.”

It is because I am so fortunate that I would not be able to forgive myself if I did not at least try to do what I really want to do. But this is hard to explain.

Particularly if you do not speak the language. ________________________

Max Seunik ’14 Bamako, Mali, June 13, 2011 “Where are we going?” I asked my host-father Moussa as we clambered into the back of his beat-up Jeep, closely followed by his daughter Assitan and wife Myriam.

“To see a spectacle,” he replied.

We drove from Kalaban-Cora across the Pont-desMartyrs and through Bamako, the city sweltering under a reddish haze and choked with the smells of fuel exhaust, garbage, and sewage. Myriam and Assitan chatted amiably in the backseat in Bambara, and I sat with my arm out the window gazing at the people and places as we drove by, reflecting on my first week here in Mali.

“So . . . uhh, where are we?” I inquired of Moussa as we ascended the ridges that surround Bamako and the road went from paved, to packed gravel, to nothing more than a suggestion. The scene became increasingly rural.

“On our way to a village outside Bamako; they are celebrating the town’s founding — Myriam does vaccinations there.” Myriam, a nurse, nodded from the backseat—“You’ll meet my colleagues!” she added with a laugh.

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the air. All manners of dancers took the floor— scores of men with a variety of props (everything from a Santa hat to a fake Burberry scarf) pounded their feet against the earth, soon joined by women, and then whoever wanted to dance. My personal favourite was an old woman dressed in bright neon colours, who got right in the middle of the festivities and went wild.

Exiting the car we made our way through the crowd and found seats ringing a large circle of packed earth.

In the center of the circle, a group of three men stood pounding out a rhythmic beat on large drums engulfed by swarms of the town’s children —laughing, jumping, and spinning in circles around the drummers.

The circle of earth was bordered by many onlookers, the entire village assembled as mic-checks were made, outfits were donned and instruments tested. Within the hour, the mayor of the village arrived and everyone settled down to watch. During this time, Moussa had been conferring with one of the villagers, who urged him to make sure I stayed for the entire performance, which would conclude well into the early hours of the next morning. The villager looked at me, gesticulating wildly with his hands and talking in rapid streams of Bambara. Moussa translated, “He’s telling you that there will be many spiritual things—unexplainable things: at midnight three mystical serpents shall appear.” I tried to probe further, but Moussa raised his hands and resigned himself, “I am a city person, I know not of these things.”

Then the music started.

Over the next hour, the beats from an assortment of drums large and small, the klak-klak-klak of curious wooden bowls ringed with beads and the shrill wavering notes of the wassoulou singers filled

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After the dancers had tired themselves out, the music changed —taking on a more “tribal” tone. Soon, a dancer appeared clad entirely in mud cloth with a bulging stomach, sporting a fearsome painted mask with golden horns affixed with the idol of a naked pregnant woman. The dancer wildly circled the ring of spectators, flailing his limbs and emitting bizarre whoops and screams. The beat of the drums increased in speed and volume, whipping the dancer into a crazed frenzy until he collapsed on his knees near a spectator, one hand clamped on his bulging stomach.

The dancer shook and heaved and pulled a long, red cloth from his loins and presented it to the spectator, an old man. Moussa leaned over to me, “Now, he must dance.”

Sure enough, the man took the red cloth and paraded into the middle of the circle and danced as energetically and in time as if he had been in training himself.

He returned the cloth to the masked dancer and sat back down to applause from the audience.

The only thing I could think was: Please don’t choose me.

I was spared —the dancer took the red cloth and retreated from whence he had come.

Next came a bizarre bird-like creature led on by a man with a pipe. The same pattern as with the fertility-dancer —the beats would start out calm and gradually increase in speed and intensity until the dancers were going absolutely insane.

The bird soon retreated and a the crowd quieted.

Then, from both sides of the ring, two masked

dancers came streaming in, red ribbons flying from their hands. They circled the crowd, with hands up to their eyes as if they were searching. Searching . . . searching . . . but for what? Simultaneously, they both turned towards where I was sitting and descended upon me.

One of the dancers squatted at my feet, while the other begin to pull red cloth from beneath the shirt of the first one, extricating the cloth and handing it to me. Hesitantly, I took the cloth. I looked to Moussa; he gave me a raised eyebrow. “You must dance. It is the way,” he said. Desperately, I looked to his wife Myriam on the other side of me. She was already bent over in laughter.

So, red cloth in hand, I rose from my seat, slowly proceeded to the centre of the ring, and I danced.

Stamping my feet in tune to the music and raising the cloth high above my head, and swishing it around as I had seen done, I expected laughter from the 1,000-strong crowd; me, a big white guy, so obviously foreign to this environment, attempting to imitate their tradition.

But instead the crowd began to clap.

In unison, they clapped to the beat of the drums, increasing the fervour and speed until I could scarce keep up.

Joined by the two dancers, we spun around the circle for what felt like an eternity stomping and kicking and moving until the claps had turned into applause.

Sweating, I returned to my place.

As soon I had taken my seat, the villager who had told me about the mystical serpents leaned over and whispered to me in halting English, “You . . . you have achieved maximum fertility.”

I expected to experience many new things during my trip to Mali—but I will admit that an increase in fertility was never one of them.

P.S. I didn’t get to see the serpents. Because of the poor road conditions, unfortunately, we had to leave early. Next time? ◆

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on becoming

an institution

Stepping down from her role as one of Silicon Valley’s longestserving executives, Ann Livermore ’80 reflects on three decades at Hewlett-Packard

BY ERIC JOHNSON PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

At Hewlett-Packard’s Palo Alto headquarters, just down the hall from the executive suite, there sits an office-sized shrine to company history. From floor to ceiling, behind a wall of protective glass, row upon row of beige and grey milestones mark HP as one of the granddaddies of the technology industry.

To the left, a collection of square-edged computers that grows smaller as the dates below them grow larger. To the right, a selection of early printers that look more like seismographs.

The whole display is lightly garnished with vintage floppy disks.

And outside the door, arrayed in a display meant to entice passersby into this corporate mini-museum, are the calculators.

“I actually didn’t know much about the company other than the calculators, which is what they were famous for back then,” says Ann Livermore ’80.

Back then was 1982, the year Livermore earned her MBA from Stanford Business School and embarked on one of the longer, steadier careers in an industry not much known for continuity.

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Ann Livermore’s office is in the surprisingly modest executive suite of Hewlett-Packard’s Palo Alto headquarters.

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At the time she sat down with a recruiter from HP, the company was making its first foray into the uncertain field of personal computing. HewlettPackard’s first consumer PC—the HP-85, with a black-and-white screen the size of a piece of toast — had been introduced in 1980, just two years before.

But it wasn’t technology that interested Livermore.

“HP was very famous for teaching people how to manage—how to manage a business, how to manage people,” Livermore said. “I thought I'd be here for three or four years, learn a lot, then go someplace small.”

That was almost three decades ago. Instead of ending up someplace small, Livermore stayed with HP as the company grew into the eleventh largest firm in the Fortune 500, bringing in $126 billion in worldwide revenue in 2010.

The ball caps atop Livermore’s bookcase give a sense of her life priorities.

Livermore, as head of HP’s enterprise business, was responsible for about half of it.

“I’ve been here 29 years,” she said, surveying her surprisingly modest office. It had been just over three months since the company announced Livermore’s retirement from day-to-day operations, awarding her a seat on the board. Livermore looked around at the business tomes and company knickknacks lining her bookshelf. “I'm starting to think about getting myself out of here.”

It is clearly a bittersweet thought for Livermore. By any definition, she has had a remarkable run at one of the world’s best-known companies, overseeing a division with more than 200,000 employees and spending well over half her time traveling to HP outposts around the world.

She has been on the shortlist for CEO more than once, coming closest to the top spot in 1999 before the company’s board settled on Carly Fiorina. She has been a regular on the Fortune magazine list of the world’s most powerful women, and she’s had a nearconstant stream of offers from other companies.

“When you live in Silicon Valley, you always have opportunities,” Livermore said, deftly underplaying the intensity of the headhunting. A 1999 Businessweek story took a less effacing tack, asking right in the headline “Is Ann Livermore the Hottest Property in the Valley?”

At the time, Livermore had made headlines by daring to say what everyone already knew was true —she

“I thought I’d be here for three or four years, learn a lot, then go someplace small.”

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Business and management books—along with awards from her three decades with Hewlett-Packard—line the bookshelves in Livermore’s office.

“I think part of the reason I stayed here was that the company grew,” she said. “It changed a lot.”

wanted to be CEO of Hewlett-Packard. When she was passed over for Fiorina, the business press was hoping for drama and predicting a quick departure for Livermore. What they got instead was an impressively smooth working relationship, a pattern that continued under Fiorina’s successor, CEO Mark Hurd.

“When you look at why people leave a corporation, the number one reason is their boss,” Livermore said.

“I worked for people I really liked and learned from.”

Despite the occasional bout of professional temptation —she won’t name names— Livermore has stuck

by HP. “I had enough different opportunities within the company, enough different moves so there weren't many years or even months when I was really bored,” she said.

Her rise at the company coincided with the shift of computer technology from a novelty to a necessity, and Livermore played key roles in helping HP navigate the industry boom.

Much of that growth would come overseas. During our interview, Livermore talked about a recent visit to Costa Rica, where HP has almost 8,000 employees in a services and research center, and she was preparing for a trip to visit customers in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris, and London.

Before globalization became a buzzword, it was a largely untested business strategy for companies like HP. Livermore recalls making her first trips to China in the late 1980s, and choosing to open a software development office in India long before Bombay became Mumbai.

Today, HP derives only about a third of its revenue from the United States. Asked about the growing unease toward globalization on the part of many policymakers in the developed world, Livermore didn’t offer much comfort.

“In a world where communications and the delivery of many services can be done over the Internet, you can provide services anywhere in the world from almost anywhere in the world,” she said. “The whole concept of geography has begun to disappear.”

“The work goes where the best people are, and that ties back to education.”

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From Ann Martinelli’s 1978 report to the Morehead Foundation following her internship with DuPont: “The businessman is faced with an environment over which he has limited control.

The salesman can have a good product, good services, and a good approach, yet his volume of sales may be low because of other factors, such as general economic conditions and his customers’ financial positions and limitations.

“Being able to adapt to variable conditions is a key to success in a business.

However, one must not overlook the importance of hard work and determination.

The old axiom about hard work being rewarded has some truth to it. Hard work plays an integral role in most success stories.”

wisdom through the ages Ann Livermore, interviewed in August 2011: “I think careers always end up being some combination of luck and hard work. Some people are just downright lucky for where they are and when.

There’s a certain amount of that. But even behind the lucky people, there’s a hard work component, too.”

listed her top three placement locations as Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Los Angeles. “Frankly, the romantic connotations of California are the primary reasons for the ranking of my choices,” she confessed in tidy penmanship. “I have never traveled on the West Coast and am therefore eager to do so.”

After a few decades as a Californian, the romance hasn’t faded for Livermore.

“I still believe that the Bay Area is one of the most wonderful places in the world,” she said. “The willingness to innovate and tolerate new ideas, wacky things.

It just has this respect for new, wacky ideas.”

Just down the hall from Livermore’s office, the company keeps an exhibit of old product lines. Long known for its calculators, Hewlett-Packard introduced its first personal computer in 1980.

“The work goes where the best people are, and that ties back to education.”

That feedback loop between business and education is what Livermore most lauds in Silicon Valley, and she holds it up as a model for other states. “We want attractive locations and costs and intelligent employees, and states want jobs,” she said. “When you look at what makes Silicon Valley work, it’s the core technology companies that are here, but it’s also the universities —Stanford and Berkeley and Santa Clara.

It all ties back to education.”

And though she is quick to note North Carolina’s attractiveness as a business location, the Greensboro native is unlikely to move back east after she retires from her day-to-day role at HP. In her 1977 application for the Morehead Summer Enrichment Program, 19-year-old Ann Martinelli

There are plans for a sailboat sometime in the near future, and perhaps a safari. Livermore will also be keeping plenty busy with her role on the board of UPS, where she has been a director since 1997, and as a board member for the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford.

And, of course, there is her spot on the HP board.

The company recently ousted CEO Leo Apotheker after less than a year, replacing him with eBay veteran Meg Whitman. In the fast-evolving technology sector, industry mainstays like HP face a constant challenge to stay relevant and recruit new talent.

“It’s not very often that you can be an operational executive for a long time and then shift to the board of directors,” Livermore said. “To have one of your first things be a set of strategic choices as big as we’ve had —it’s been interesting.”

And if there’s one thing Livermore has taken away from her long tenure in the corporate world, it’s that you have to stay sanguine when things get interesting.

“Some people think you should have every step planned,” she said. “That’s just not the way it worked for me at HP. The world doesn’t really operate that way.” ◆

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. . . all useful Learning shall be duly encouraged . . .

The Constitution of North Carolina, Article XLI December 18, 1776

ELIZA KERN, CLASS OF 2012

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www.moreheadcain.org