Ecology and Revolution

Toward the end of his powerful life 
Martin Luther King called for a radical revolution of values.

 
Are revolutions needed for conservation of the Earth?

Dr. King, Gandi, and Thoreau called for revolutions. They were partly successful.

The account below describes how influences from Martin King, Henry Thoreau, and Jane Wood underlay the genesis of the still young but influential Chicagoregion conservation community that arose in the 1970s and 80s.  This is a personal essay on values and strategy.

A nature nerd as a kid, I attended the Wendel Phillips Parker Nature Training School and later the Daniels School of Forestry and Conservation each summer until my second year in high school. Then adulthood began creeping in, as I got odd summer jobs. But when the Sixties came, I left nature and jobs behind and devoted my life – night and day – to civil rights, peace, and liberations.

Initially, we “Sixties activists” opposed war, racism, our parents, “the establishment,” the Republicans, Democrats, capitalism, communism, and repression of all kinds, including, for that matter, sexual repression. We thought we could make a revolutionary new world, without all the bad things.

As history unfolded, millions of us marched, rallied, closed down most college campuses in protest at various times, and, to various degrees, supported war resisters, Freedom Riders, Students for a Democratic Society, Viet Nam Veterans Against the War, the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Organization, the Mobe (Mobilization to End the War), Wounded Knee protestors, the grape boycott of the United Farm Workers Union, women’s liberation, and gay liberation.

We opposed the draft, monopoly capitalism, big corporations, nuclear power, corrupt unions, despotic police, and the complicit media (most of it)(fake-ish news).

The line I recall best from the Pentagon Papers was possibly from Defense Secretary McNamara (I don’t remember it perfectly and don’t know how to find it). But close enough, it went something like:

“In the end, the biggest cost of the war may be a distortion of the social and political structure of the United States, which may last for generations.”

We hoped it would. We believed that “distortion” meant: lack of respect for authority, a re-birth of the American dream that would lift all out of poverty and would replace competition and greed with teamwork, and people judged by the content of their character.

The hated president Richard Nixon repeatedly urged us youth to stop protesting war, racism, and corporations and to instead direct their energies to the environment. That soured the people I knew on ecology.

During those years, the one piece of “environmental” literature I remember handing out was a sort of comic book that summarized ecological problems, pointed the finger of blame at big corporations and corrupt politics, and ended with drawings of armed guerrillas under the banner “Ecology Grows Out Of The Barrel Of A Gun.” That line paraphrased Mao: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” First, we overthrow the establishment, then we can help the planet. Our grasp of longer term politics was badly superficial. 

At the time John Kennedy was shot, I disdained him, as a traitor. When I heard the news, I was heading off for a protest against his growing war in Vietnam. My emotions about the assassination were clouded with guilt. To some degree, I mourned the person I had rejected. When Martin Luther King was murdered, people like me felt that the politics of sanity and rationality were gone for good. Revolution is raw power. We imagined that we’d engineer a revolution that took the mostly bloodless form of the ones in Cuba and, later, in Poland, Iran, and south Africa. That is, the whole country would finally agree with us, except for a few die-hards, who would mostly flee, and a general strike or some such process would allow the freedom and justice generation to take over. Perhaps with no shooting, I hoped. But can that happen as they kill or disable our best leaders as soon as they are recognized?

I did feel, and many people felt (sort of along the lines of that warning in the Pentagon Papers) that I had been warped, and our Movement was warped. Sometimes warped is the best you have to work with.

I had gone to the march where King gave his “I have a dream” speech. Yes, the speech was compelling. But I reserved a mental protest. Partly, it seemed to me that black people were then demanding to be like white people, and that goal seemed degraded to me. Black music was better, black political leadership and many African-American values, as I perceived them, were better. Becoming like the Establishment seemed in many ways like a step backward, but the oppressed have the right to define their own demands, so I supported and marched. In the last year of his life, King struggled to expand the dream into revolution of values.

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Martin Luther King

April 4, 1967

As leaders were assassinated, jailed, or retreated into self-important sects – those of us who had become full-time activists had to make choices. Some briefly went underground as terrorists – in retrospect, tantrum-istically. Many headed to law school, got jobs in labor unions, became college professors or carpenters – typically with the self-justification that they would use the powers they gained for what we all believed in. Were they defecting into the establishment? Many maintained their vision and ideas impressively, but “the revolutionary Movement” fizzled. Some once-idealistic people I knew descended into depression and killed themselves. Some joined cults, Transcendental Meditation, faith healing, etc. None that I knew made Nixon happy by becoming “environmentalists.”

For myself, after a lot of run-ins with police agents and agent provocateurs, I felt mentally unhealthy, paranoid, and in need to escape. There was a brief period (around the time of Nixon’s impeachment) when agency leaders tried to dodge going down with Nixon’s ship by revealing their spy files to those spied on. With little confidence, I wrote for my files. To my surprise, by return U.S. mail, I got thick files on me from three agencies (if I remember right the FBI, CIA, and military intelligence). Although heavily redacted, they revealed much – and confirmed that my “paranoia” wasn’t simply a mental problem. But I decided that I needed and deserved “a break” from extremes. After some hesitation, I returned to my roots and wrangled my first respectable-seeming job, with the Illinois Environmental Council. My deal was that I would be paid $95 per week, which I would have to raise myself. I insisted that I not be assigned work on “birds and bunnies” issues but would focus on corporate polluters and corruption.

Then, oddly, in my “spare time” I organized a grass roots, Sixties-style, “participatory democracy” group to conserve the birds, bunnies, tender plants, and the whole ecosystems of some local prairies. The combination of that job and that avocation led to the beginning of a career with the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission – which was, yes, birds and bunnies but also an uncompromisingly idealistic institution, in fact, so much so, that the forces of bureaucracy (as it seemed to me) fired the director and our whole staff three years later.

Then America came to my and the ecosystem’s rescue. The well-funded and entrepreneurial Nature Conservancy hired me to continue “whatever it was that I was doing” that had so good a reputation among conservationists and in the media.

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is an establishment organization. I became part of “the establishment” - but with little “selling out” – or so I thought. In time I’d be meeting and strategizing with Richard M. Daley, “the green mayor” as I dubbed him in Chicago Wilderness magazine, the son of the very Mayor Richard J. Daley whose forces had beaten, arrested, spied on, and detested my kind of people. I became good friends with Wendy and Hank Paulson (he, later CEO of Goldman Sacks, president of The Nature Conservancy, and U.S. Treasury Secretary) and many others in the same circles with Wendy and Hank. 

I owed a lot of my Nature Conservancy success to Jane Wood. Despite my introvert, nature-nerd background, I turned out to be very good at organizing communities and building a movement or constituency. I learned that from Jane Wood, who found me after college, as I lived in New York City (and was part of the Sixties radical media group called the “Newsreel Collective”). While I worked for no pay to make and distribute films about civil rights, peace, and community control – a slumlord was trying to kick me and my neighbors out of our inexpensive apartment building. Housing activist Jane Wood came to our rescue, teaching me and a couple of my Hispanic neighbors how to organize a tenants group. I later learned she was legendary. At the time, she just appeared out of nowhere, paid attention to us, and taught us. She empowered leaders, coached strategies, and radiated ethics and confidence in the face of apparently hopeless odds. I’ve felt her generous spirit ever since. 

My history of living on very little stayed with me. I did what I thought right and didn’t worry all that much about internal politics. Less corporate and “more grass-rootsy” – I became seen by some as not an overall TNC-team-player. But others saw me as a national leader, and I survived there fifteen years – and then another fifteen years at the National Audubon Society. I did pretty much what I believed in, the whole time. If they didn’t like it, they could fire me. Mostly they liked it. For a while.

I remember one Illinois Nature Conservancy board chair trying to rescue me from myself, as he saw it. Did I really want to spend my life as I got older leading prairie burns? I pointed out that I was teaching the next generation of burn leaders. Yes, he said, but wouldn’t you like to rise in the organization? “Some people like to control things, for the good,” he pointed out. Didn’t I want to move up from “Director of Science and Stewardship” and become overall state director – the guy who hires and fires people like the kind I now was?

No, I did not. Part of the problem was that I knew I wouldn’t enjoy (or be good at) the director job, which is part lawyer/MBA, part accountant, and largely getting donations from insanely wealthy donors. (Some people find it fun.) He was certainly right in one regard: the national and state boards decided on our overall directions, and they were changing TNC away from the core of what I believed in.

My true calling was building community which included that revolution of values. I found and empowered generous volunteer leaders. The heart of the community was those leaders (along with a few dedicated staff people in a few agencies). Volunteer leaders were finding and promoting part-time escape from the rat-race of consumer and career competitions. We spent our time collaboratively saving nature side by side with like-minded people, of the kind you want around you every day.

Looking back, I thanked Henry Thoreau, Martin King, and Jane Wood. Happiness for me was freedom to dream, envision, and do good stuff.

Some influences go through media and books, like Thoreau inspiring Gandhi who inspired King who inspired Mandela. Some influences are personal. I got from Jane Wood what I seem not to have been able to get from books and TV. (Our tenants group had largely female leadership, which the national organizations didn’t then have. Our strength was interpersonal and collegial.)

I had needed that cheap apartment (and little part time jobs) to be a radical activist. Getting used to living on little turned out to be my salvation. What turned out to be key, when I came to focus on my conservation mission, was the freedom to do the best work I could find (or dream up) for little or no pay. Then, without expecting it, my Jane Wood organizing ability led to a reputation for effectiveness – and unexpected jobs. When agencies started offering me salaries, I still spent hardly any of it. Consuming didn’t appeal.

On one level, Barak Obama represented parts of what MLK was heading toward. But he also represented Wall Street, the elite, and consumerism. Trump did too. Though I’ll always vote for the best candidate that has a chance to win, the “true revolution of values” doesn’t seem to be emerging from either party. 

Today I often find myself wishing I could offer young people help and insight on how to spend a life in conservation. There could be great numbers of ecology jobs – after the revolution of values. Today they are limited. Get hired, if you can. Or volunteer: Work a regular job that you can be happy in without “living on the edge of your resources.” Then thrive in the volunteer world. Be true to your best self. Don’t enslave yourself in consumerism.

Revolutions without guns have happened before and are much needed now. Communities of happy and mutually supporting people can expand and inspire. Some hopeful people once carried posters reading "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" Perhaps that slogan could be "What if people lived for generosity and happiness - rather than wealth and dominance?" Okay, it would have to be catchier.

Wikipedia quotes George Lakey on non-violent revolution:

• Stage 1 – Cultural Preparation: Education, training and consciousness raising of why there is a need for a nonviolent revolution and how to conduct a nonviolent revolution.
• Stage 2 – Affinity groups or nonviolent revolutionary groups are organized to provide support, maintain nonviolece, organize and train other people into similar affinity groups and networks.
• Stage 3 – Confrontation: Organized and sustained campaigns of picketing, strikes, sit-ins, marches, boycotts, die-ins, blockades to disrupt business as usual in institutions and government. By putting one's body on the line nonviolently the rising movement stops the normal gears of government and business.
• Stage 4 – Mass Non Cooperation: Similar affinity groups and networks of affinity groups around the country and world, engage in similar actions to disrupt business as usual.
• Stage 5 – Developing Parallel Institutions to take over functions and services of government and commerce. In order to create a new society without violence, oppression, environmental destruction, discrimination and one that is environmentally sustainable, nonviolent, democratic, equitable, tolerant, and fair, alternative organizations and structures including businesses must be created to provide the needed services and goods that citizens of a society need.

Well, maybe. Interesting certainly. But the assumption here is that what's needed is an overthrow of the government ... led by a relatively small number of people. In the U.S. we can change the government if most people want to. But how do we get to that "most people"? The restoration of nature - as a component of revolutionary change - has the advantage that it's self-motivating. It can be a community that grows. Good people stick with it for decades, and they become trusted leaders among neighbors. They can become influential in local politics, in part because elected leaders like to work through organized groups. 

To save the living ecosystems of the planet, people of the world have to come together in caring. Leadership is needed. It will take form in different ways in different places. Organizations of volunteer stewards and citizen scientists can continue to grow and be an important component of what needs to emerge. 

Yes, the people of the Earth need a radical revolution of values, shared widely, focused on positives that will release us from militarism, economic exploitation, pollution, consumerism, and prejudice and subjugation of many kinds. Those forces cheapen life and drive planetary degradation. We need wider recognition that competition for money and power does not dependably produce good, beauty, or happiness. People are ready for a liberation of human potential to live beneficial and rewarding, happy lives.