Activities

If you are not doing anything Wednesday at 3 you may find it profitable (in the highest sense) to tune into the webinar SUSTAINING GROUNDS, produced by myself with the help of Boston University student Axel Blumberg.  What does that title mean?  If you are a business, or an institution, a hospital, a school, anything with some land around it, those grounds of your facility need to be sustained.  They need to be protected from peril, first of all, and that’s the first thing we will talk about. Some time ago I had the luck to hear a presentation by the National Fire Protection Association’s urban/wildfire interface expert, Michele Steinberg. It was a great presentation and it had information in it about how to make your facility safer.  It was once true that you only had to worry about this in the arid West. But global warming is causing wildfires to happen in places where they didn’t happen before. 

That’s the peril part.  The promise part is what you do to take care of your grounds. Are you using gasoline-powered equipment?  These often two-stroke engines are the most polluting kind. The workers are often breathing some of that toxic gas.  It is contributing to air pollution.  Its use causes spills and wastes. Once you mix gas and oil there’s no good recycling option for what results.  It is easy for people who don’t like the noise of gas-powered lawn care to pass restrictions on their use, and I am one of those advocates.  But it is not easy for companies to transition to electrical lawn care, or for inhouse grounds care staff.  We should invest in a transition that starts with education, allows time to phase in new practices, and offers help with the change.  One who has figured out how to make it work is George Carrette, who founded Ecoquiet Lawncare, and who is a member of the American Green Zone Alliance.

This is the paradox of each day, full of peril, full of promise.  Maybe we get through ok if we fend off one and embrace the other.
 
Here’s the flyer – the link to register:
https://bostonu.zoom.us/meeting/register/JCxXzwA8TKWYMxinKAsmTQ#/registration

It will be recorded and posted at www.bu.edu/rccp at some point in the near future.

Purpose and Context

​“THESE are the times that try men’s souls”, is how Thomas Paine began the pamphlets he wrote to fortify the spirits of the new Americans (The American Crisis, 1776).  The threat of destruction by British troops thrust a choice before everyone.

Now, it is the American president who has forced a choice on every American.  It is not a visible challenge like the British troops.  But when he threatened the destruction of the ancient and great Persian civilization, he put a question mark on every American citizen – does this man represent you?  Are his violent promises yours?  Is that the face you want your America to present to the world?

During Paine’s time “we” – the Americans newly made - were standing for the opposite of the idea that those in power should use that power against others. We stood for the idea of what was later called “self-determination”, which is a way of thinking about groups of people that lets them be, which leads to peaceful relations.  He wrote:

…my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method which wisdom could invent.

Does that America still live and breathe and have a voice?

Purpose and Context

​With heavy heart I recall the passing of a beloved friend, who made a major contribution to the evolution of a better way of governing ourselves.  I had the luck and privilege to work with George Frantz during the nineties when an effort was taking place at both state and federal levels to improve how we do environmental regulation: to provide assistance, and not just enforcement (and to use that assistance to prevent harm, not just clean up messes after they have happened). 

This evolution of governance is unfortunately not that well grasped by the public, because some administrations used voluntary programs to replace enforcement, but that doesn’t work.  (Also, purveyors of toxics have worked to squelch efforts to reduce their sales).  But there is no question that assistance, and working in partnership with the regulated community, can be extremely effective if you first introduce it as a complement to enforcement.  In time things improve and you can reduce enforcement, but not right away.   

Back when this new movement was just starting, (late '80's, early '90's), the big question was, how do you create friendship between warring camps?  At that time environmental agencies were regarding all businesses as potential polluters and companies were regarding the agencies as a threat to their survival.  How do you bridge that giant gap?

Without people who can, you don’t get out of the starting gate and all your fine ideas live only in your files. You need people who can earn and keep the trust of other people.  George Frantz was a master practitioner of that art and from my lucky seat in this movement, I was a witness to some of the career of this key player, this principal demonstrator of the value of the all-important thing I call relational governance. 

I don’t want George (known as Tock to his family) to be an unsung hero of this forgotten and very rich period in environmental policy.  

Recommended Reading, Law for Sustainability

During this season of constant assault I took some refuge in Zaakir Tameez’s Charles Sumner, Conscience of a Nation,[i] which reminded me that although nature produces people who create and perpetuate toxicity it also produces those who face it head on and do not surrender to it, and thereby open a society to the evolution of a better future, by not suppressing that inner voice that whispers about what’s right and wrong.

In the face of extreme ugliness in his country Sumner continued to see its beauty.  The Constitution his abolitionist friends denounced as a pact with the Devil he saw as a promise of a better world, and his work to make that happen enabled Lincoln and Congress to bring us the “rebirth of freedom” of the constitutional amendments remaking the nation from a caste to a democratic society, after the Civil War.  (On the remaking of the U.S. as a caste society, see current news about this Administration’s actions, plans, attitude).
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Bob Dylan had a big effect of sparking conscience when he first hit the scene - the whole uproar about his turning to electric rock seemed to be the resentment of those who wanted him to be their leader, but he was not Sumner, he was and is something else we can only call Bob Dylan, and the good side of that is that we have to figure things out for ourselves (giving us the chance to realize our potentials as individual thinkers instead of being unthinking followers).  The intellectual ferment over injustice, which has caused such panic on the right, is something that each individual must figure out for themselves, but we all look to other people around us – which can cause confusion in relationships. An ethical standard on the way to universalization exists in many forms of manifestation, including the reflection of it in the backlash against it that we are experiencing now. 

My students today see a future blighted in many ways, yet out of more than sixty this past Fall semester to a person none seemed frozen, too overwhelmed to pick up the puzzles of how we fix the world. Each one demonstrated a kind of positive energy in response to the world’s hollowing out. Our theme has been that environmental, public health, public interest work is more important than ever.  These students are by no means a representative sample. Only a certain type of person takes a class entitled “Developing Sustainable Environmental Responsibility (DSER)”, or “Law for Sustainability”.  But they are a powerful indication that there are reasons to hope for the continuing powerful resonance of conscience, for facing problems with practical optimism seems to give them more energy. I hope more teachers will explicitly call for moral fulfillment and not just skills training.  They will find what comes forth comforting and helpful.

The positive force of morally impassioned young people feeds my life-long faith in democracy, even as it is challenged now.  It may be that because the pursuit of power over others plays itself out in such ugliness that the human potential for creating a better world ends up winning, because it is constantly fed by hope, and when it prevails, it brings beauty, peace, prosperity, rather than continuous struggle and damage.

Purpose and Context

​Tomorrow I meet the students in my class Developing Sustainable Environmental Responsibility (a responsibility you can sustain and which is enough to get us to sustainability).  I try to imagine how they see the world. When they were young and first understood the concepts of the United States and the Presidency, it was Obama who they saw exemplifying what this meant.  The United States was a force for reason - even if faulty, even if the things it did sometimes made little sense, it seemed like we were trying to help.  We had environmental laws.  We ;had international allies.  We honored agreements, and we honored diversity, believed in equity, and wanted everyone to feel and be included.  These young people, I tell myself, must feel as if we are all falling down a high mountain.

I feel that way but I also remember when this nation began that climb up that mountain in earnest, and how it was fueled by disgust and anger and a fierce loyalty to the truth and what’s right.  I remember when the country got up on its hind legs and barked and kept barking until even Richard Nixon had to move.  We can do it, and we can do it again.

It helps to read in the New York Times (print, Op-Ed) today that pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson has found that “few Americans live at the extremes…only 13 percent of Americans hold views that could be categorized as “strong liberal” and only 11 percent as “strong conservative”.  Years of looking at polling data has convinced her that “People in the American center are likely to be heterodox in their viewpoints.”  They take some ideas from the right and some from the left, and in her view it is “paired with a belief that as broken as things are now, there is hope things can get better in the future.” It helps me to think of people as more complicated because that makes it harder for evil leaders to divide us. It makes me think that arguments are important, as this indicates that most people are in the center, and most people are choosing what to think rather than choosing which herd to be corralled with.

That encourages me to have hopes for engaging when there is any opportunity, and attempting to use reason. I will try to frame it that way for my students, so that they can then spend their own time, as I have spent so many hours in mine, imagining things worth saying to people who really ought to hear them.