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What’s done is done, and we can’t change the past, so we’ll just move on to the question of the day. What now?
Perhaps a story first. In 2004, Adam Werbach, the former Sierra Club president, went all in on defeating a Texas oilman US president who had started an illegal war and cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives. When John Kerry, the climate champion challenger, was handily defeated, largely on hearsay about being unworthy of one of the multiple medals he’d won fighting in the Vietnam War (a war that the Texas oilman draft-dodged), Werbach went inward to reflect, and concluded that the environmental movement as it was, was dead. Werbach drew the ire of many in the environmental community for the speech he gave in December of 2004.
Werbach started something new. Rather than campaigns to help preserve wildlands (which he’d done successfully with Grand Staircase Escalante) or protect watersheds (which he did with the Yosemite Valley while in the employ of the city of San Francisco), Werbach went out to meet people where they were. The grand, grand majority of people might care about the environment, but very few of us rank it as their top or one of their top political issues, as we’ve now clearly seen for the umpteenth time. Werbach and his company started working with people of all stripes and backgrounds, meeting them where they were, and translating sustainability into something that mattered for them. The program was called the PSP, or Personal Sustainability Project, and his company was hired to teach it to millions of employees across the country at a variety of companies. He was able to plant seeds with millions of people that would likely never have received a high level of engagement on the topic, and show them how great sustainable living is — and why it is important to them. Many of those who participated in the PSP program used it as a way to quit smoking. Others used it as a way to connect with co-workers and share meals in zero-waste containers. Others reduced their paper use. Every metric was tracked, across millions of employees and multiple companies, and the cumulative impact was beautiful to see. I was there, as an employee of the company, helping spread this love of the greener life, and seeing first hand the power it had.
Sometimes, getting derailed is helpful to garner a different perspective and come at a problem from a new direction.
So it is that the so-called “butterfly effect” will be in full swing. We have no idea how many Adam Werbachs there are out there, recoiling at the loss of the US federal government as a proactive ally in the fight against climate change for the next few years. We all have choices about how best to apply ourselves and continue to make a difference. One thing is abundantly clear historically, and that is the party in power and its supporters tend to get complacent, while the other side motivates. The seeds of this week’s election were planted a long time ago. The Koch brothers famously launched their Kochtopus network to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about climate change with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The effort yielded incredible results. The Kochtopus and its allies infiltrated higher education with strings-attached endowments and handpicked tenured professors that continue to pollute the minds of leaders. They took over media companies big and small. They collected reams of data to microtarget voters and sway public opinion.
It is my hope that this is a wakeup call like no other, and that a billion Adam Werbachs will emerge with solutions big and small.
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