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Jun 24 2,895 comments
Film and Documentary, From the Navigator, Interviews, Resources, The Great Showcase

Plastic, Plastic Everywhere: Our Oceans, Our Mistakes and Our Champions

Midway: Plastic Island, a photo by Manuel Maqueda (Midway Journey flickrcreativecommons)

It is September 2009 and Jan Vozenilek is on Midway Atoll staring at the corpse of a decaying albatross. This is why he is here. Nowhere on this island will he find a more striking, a more perfect image. The remains perform two tasks: announce the prevalence of plastic matter in the Pacific Ocean, and the devastating effects it has on the interactive species and ecosystems of the area.

Jan Vozenilek and one of Midway's dead albatross. (Midway Journey flickercreativecommons)

‘Ah,’ Jan think sadly as he sets down his camera and sits beside the swollen mass. The rot is fresh still, seeping. It has been a long day already, and the sun is near setting. Jan takes a moment to acknowledge this death, this one little death among thousands, before he begins the arduous task of carefully documenting it.

The Albatross

Boasting one of the longest wingspans of all extant birds, the albatross enjoys a noble reputation. It is a glider and plays upon oceanic wind currants effortlessly as it scours the water below for prey. The albatross must, after all, hunt deftly and quickly, saving its energy for the long flight home. Back upon its island shores the albatross loyally feeds its lone chick.

The family rituals of the albatross are a patient task. Taking a full five years to reach maturity, the albatross still has years to wait before its lifecycle of mating begins. The young bird must introduce itself to a colony, learn the rituals and ‘language’ of the colony before it can perform the basic steps of the mating dance. Eager as a teenage boy, the albatross’s desire is tempered by its inexperience. Only once it has taken in the lessons of its elders will it catch the eye of a mate.

The albatross pair will dance as a sophisticated duet, elaborately mimicking and perfecting each other’s movements. Only the most well suited couples will in turn mate, the others continue their search for a companion. Once the birds couple, they mate for life, forever recognizing their own movements in their partner’s dance.

The pair will lay one egg a year and spend a second ushering the hatchling to its fledgling state. It proves an arduous task, protecting, teaching and feeding the chick until it can fledge.

In the old poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the albatross is considered a good omen, bringing good weather and fortune to the Mariner and his sailors. When, in an act of great folly, the Mariner kills the albatross, the crew’s good fortune comes to a tragic end. The confused and angered crew forces the Mariner to wear the dead albatross around his neck, a remembrance of his mistake.

“Ah! Well a-day! What evil looks

Had I from old and young!

Instead of the cross, the albatross

About my neck was hung”

Not since then has the albatross been so significant, such a harbinger. At least until now.

The Widening Gyre

As Jan Vozenilek studies the carcass of the dead albatross before him, he notices it is young. “A fledgling,” he thinks to himself. He shifts his camera angle to get a better shot of the beak and eyes.

A team member points to Midway Atoll on a globe. (Midway Journey flickrcreativecommons)

On Midway Atoll the dead albatross is almost a more common sighting than a live one.  The epidemic is caused by an infamous trash gyre, a mass accumulation of plastic in the Pacific know as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or GPGP. The span of plastic particles adrift is rumoured to be twice the size of Texas. In certain areas water samples have yielded more plastic on a parts-per-million basis than plankton. A remarkable feat, or rather, tragedy for this area.

“Plastic, plastic everywhere” the poem would now read. The water is teeming with shards of everyday plastics from bottles, food packaging, lighters and toys.

A collection of Great Pacific Garbage Patch lighters. (Midway Journey flickrcreativecommons)

When I spoke to Jan in mid June, he was preparing for his second visit to Midway.

“The last time we were on Midway there wasn’t a single live albatross left….This time we are including the baby albatrosses. It will be profound to actually seem them and meet these little guys.”

The presence of plastic has completely disrupted the albatross life cycle on Midway. The adult birds are attracted to the brightly coloured plastics circulating in the garbage gyre, which is caused by constantly moving ocean currents. Returning to their nests with a mouthful of indigestible plastic pieces, the adults feed their chicks, mouth to mouth they transfer the catch.

The chicks eventually die of starvation, their bellies bulging with a collection of unchanged, unmoved plastic particles. The pieces are brightly coloured and in the final stages of decay they shine like a ball of confetti, a miniature firework set neatly within the bird’s frame.

Albatross remains reveal the plastic culprit that led to their starvation. (Midway Journey flickrcreativecommons)

“They tell us that 60% will die because they won’t even make it off the island, the starve because their bellies are full of plastics. If they do make it off the island they can’t take off from the water and they just drown. This is what we will witness when we get there. A good amount of them are able to fly away, but most of them won’t.”

Jan adds, “At this time of year there is actually a sign in one of the bays where the young birds land that says ‘no swimming.’ That is because there are so many sharks there, waiting for these birds to drown.”

The birds are weak and become flightless, weighed down by malnourishment and heavy plastic. This has evoked new ecological patterns, with sharks accustomed to this easy prey the plastic moves up the food chain.

“Our goal is to go back again two or three times to film the babies in their different stages of development so we have the full story of what happens at that critical moment when parents come back and regurgitate toothbrushes and cigarette lighters. It is important to capture this.”

There has been some controversy and skepticism surrounding the authenticity of the footage that was captured during the last Midway trip.

The team surrounds the remains of a decayed albatross. (Midway Journey flickrcreativecommons)

“People were saying there is no way that all that plastic could fit into the body cavity of a bird. That broke my heart. We have a strict code of ethics: we are not allowed to add or modify the shot in anyway.”

So now the Journey to Midway team, which includes photographer Chris Jordan and his writer wife Victoria Sloan Jordan, returns with renewed resolve, determined to expose the process in its entirety.

Jan understands the disbelief, however. He experienced it himself.

“I have always been, I don’t know if you would call me an environmentalist, but I’ve always been passionate about this world and protecting nature. If you asked me where my favourite place is, it is working alone in the forest, that’s the happy place.

So when I had the opportunity to meet Chris Jordan at a conference about a year ago and we spoke about this issue that’s where the connections was made. I was invited to join the expedition. I didn’t know what to expect so I did some research. But never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that it was going to be as bad as it was, leaving this life impression on me.”

Jan Vozenilek. (Midway Journey flickrcreativecommons)

I asked Jan if that is something that is easy to communicate and does he have an audience for it.

“Actually, yes,” Jan says pleased. “We worked hard right away during the last trip, putting up the footage we collected on YouTube and the audience grew really quickly.”

Halfway into their time on Midway Jan got an unexpected email: “I got an email from a group in the Okanagan, asking if I could share my experience with the people there when I returned. To be honest my heart sank. I chose a profession where I didn’t have to speak publically. I liked being behind the camera.”

But Jan will tell you, he hasn’t turned down an invitation to speak yet.

“I had this profound experience when I was up early one morning. I was filming this dead albatross and his feathers were blowing in the wind and then this squall came up and it began to pour. The rain was flooding in sideways and I had to scramble to collect my equipment. It was then that I thought to myself, ‘how can I be so selfish? People need to know this. All of these products came from us.’ It was this weird profound moment.”

A common sight on Midway. (Midway Journey flickrcreativecommons)

When Jan returned from his trip he began sharing his experience, despite his fears. Putting together presentations on the topic, Jan mapped out the route of plastics, showing the great links between local waterways and ocean shores.

“I linked this trash to our own backyards.”

Accumulated plastic washed up on the shores of Midway. (Midway Journey flickrcreativecommons)

In total Jan has spoken to over 1500 people. “I’ve tied in solutions as well, which I think is important. It is important not to overwhelm people. I try to find a balance and not to leave people in that shocked space. I know what it is like to walk up to an environmental table at an event, my brain just shuts down. I feel so overwhelmed by all of these problems. So I’ve been trying to target a clear message: single-use disposable plastics.

I want people to know they can make that one change and see the connection. They can go on with their lives and I haven’t overwhelmed them.”

Jan speaks mostly to elementary and high schools, which suits him well.

“My other passion is education and kids and this is really a kid project, it’s a natural fit. The more research I do the more I realize they are our target audience. They have to be educated at an early age. They have to make better choices than I made, than our parents made.”

Speaking to a middle age school audience can be daunting though, and Jan was feeling intimidated before one presentation. “I was terrified because I heard the middle school age crowd can be really tough.”

But Jan makes his presentations accessible, giving practical examples from his own life. “At this school I shared a little story of what I do in my own life to make a difference.”

Jan recounted an experience he had recently had in a mall food court. “The Chinese restaurant caught my eye so I went over and my very first question was, ‘do you have anything that you could put this food on that is better for the environment?’ The woman said they provided paper plates instead of Styrofoam. But when the woman began dishing out the food, she put it on a Styrofoam plate and when I asked, she admitted that she actually didn’t have any paper plates.

I said ‘no thanks’ and told her about the effects of Styrofoam on the environment. I told her I would come back when they had something better for the environment.”

To Jan’s surprise, the entire audience burst into triumphant applause. Not bad for such a tough crowd.

“We gave them this power, this hope and choice. I don’t know it its just the rebellious nature of the group, but in the end, you are giving them the power to make choices as individuals.”

But, Jan admits, “this is all new to me.”

Before leaving the school, Jan saw two students staring dumbfounded at the vending machine. “I’m trying to buy something not wrapped in plastic,” one of the students said looking towards Jan. Eventually the student decided to not purchase anything from the machine. This episode happened, luckily, in front of the group of teachers Jan was speaking with.

“It was really worth my time being there that day. That’s how the torch gets passed.”

And the passing of the torch will continue as Jan and his teammates prepare for their return journey.

“In terms of the next part of this project, going back, we have a sort of pipeline of people who care about this. Between Facebook followers and the Plastic Pollution Coalition, its been exciting to see this grow and go back through that media”

“That’s actually one of the key factors that inspired Chris Jordan to go there in the first place. There wasn’t anything available on the Internet to see what was happening out there. People spoke about this floating island of trash and they thought you could dock your boat there and walk on it.”

But the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is more insidious than this. It is a consistent circulating patch of plastic shards, debris and particles that are dispersed throughout the water, shallow in some places, deep in others. The larger pieces may be easy to pick out, but as the plastic breaks down it begins to mix with the water on a particulate scale. Because of this, it is beyond any known clean up method.

The plastic to varying degrees becomes food for many species, not just the albatross. Small and large fish species, crabs and other birds all feed on the plastic matter. In this way the plastic floods the entire food chain, right through to the species we commonly eat.

As Manuel Maqueda, a writer and social media expert who joined the team on Midway, puts it in one of his blog posts, “And like the albatrosses on Midway, we carry the garbage patch inside of us.” (www.midwayjourney.com)

Like the Ancient Mariner, we wear our folly literally, a new take on an old curse.

Hope 2.0

“You would think one of the world’s remotest islands would be the cleanest,” Jan muses during our phone conversation.

“Probably the most moving thing on Midway is the stark contrast between the death and the life. Amongst all of these thousands of decaying albatrosses all over the island are other bird species that are flying up in the air, in the trees. The place is still teeming with life. While we were on our bikes the white terns would hover overhead and make chirping sounds, almost like angles. It was almost spiritual, this hovering overhead, giving us strength.”

Jan photographs a white tern on Midway. (Midway Journey flickrcreativecommons)

The team plans to make a documentary about their experiences on Midway Island.

“It was amazing to see this, alongside this species of bird that is basically going extinct. We want to have a scene in the movie about this experience – what does hope 2.0 look like? Where are we going from here, when, in just a short sixty years since plastic has been around, look what we’ve done?”

Plastic shores. (Midway Journey flickrcreativecommons)

I asked Jan is he was feeling apprehensive about returning to Midway.

“That’s a good word for it. Yeah, I am excited to return again, to see it again. But I am afraid of what I am going to see. We’ve been talking about this with Chris in the last few weeks, the psychological impact Midway has. I know what it did to me last time.

I look at the world with a whole new set of eyes. I was the one who liked to go to Starbucks for a frappuccino, with a plastic cup, lid and straw. Now I see what happens.”

Bright blue plastic, defiant in Midway's sand. (Midway Journey flickrcreativecommons)

Jan’s awareness, and his outspokenness about this issue, is bringing people out of the woodwork. He is experiencing firsthand the growth of this movement, a movement to ban plastics from shopping centres, municipalities and regions. It is a movement to personally avoid single-use disposable plastics and to eventually move to non-plastic and reusable alternatives.

The Journey to Midway team is preparing to travel back to Midway on July 1st, 2010. They will be continually updating their blog with photos and video footage.

But the torch doesn’t stop there. This is a movement that is largely dependent on viral exposure and they need all of the media attention they can get. So while you are checking in on the team’s progress, be sure to share the news. After that, look into your local policies on plastic use, use reusable bags and cups, buy bulk and reuse your plastic bags.

If we have created such a mess in the last sixty years through carelessness, imagine what the next sixty years could produce if we were thoughtful, diligent and careful.

Resources:

www.MidwayJourney.com

www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org

Midway Journey on Facebook

Twitter: @midwayjourney

Jan’s Wordpress Blog

Jun 07 0 comments
Books, From the Navigator, Interviews, Resources, The Great Showcase

The Jury is In, Actually: James Hoggan on the Campaign to Deny Global Warming

James Hoggan author of Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming

The first time I met James Hoggan was in March 2010 at a panel discussion entitled “Climate Change and the Media: Scientists, Scribes and Spinmeisters” hosted at the University of Victoria by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS).

James was decidedly out of place on that panel. Alongside him were Lucinda Chodan editor-in-chief of the Times Colonist, Victoria’s local newspaper, Tom Pedersen, dean of Climate Studies at the University of Victoria and Peter Calamai, lead reporter for the Toronto Star.

Recently, Mr. Hoggan published a book that sent waves through the scientific and journalistic communities in North America.  Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming has had both “climate change experts” and reporters aghast and pointing fingers. Just one of the reasons behind the panel discussion taking place at UVic in March.

But Mr. Hoggan is neither a scientist nor a journalist. He does not specialize in climatology.  He doesn’t teach journalism or vie for the journalistic integrity of the CanWest news world.  So, what was he doing there?

As a leading Vancouver PR guru, James Hoggan specializes in spin. Well, not that he uses those rakish tactics himself, you see. Sure he knows the ins and outs of corporate public relations spin as well as the rest of them, or perhaps even better, but he is morally opposed to it. And besides: it’s bad for business. All of this is helpfully outlined in more detail in Hoggan’s other book: Do the Right Thing: PR Tips for a Skeptical Public.

And doing the right thing is exactly why Hoggan was invited to sit in on the climate panel at UVic. Recently in print, and hitting the climate racket with riotous force, is Hoggan’s Climate Cover-Up. The book is a culmination of years of journalistic sleuthing and the collaboration of reporters regularly contributing to Vancouver’s famed DeSmogBlog. (www.desmogblog.com)

Hoggan, founder of DeSmogBlog, in partnership with journalist Richard Littlemore, set out to discover why, despite undisputed consensus within the scientific community, there was a raging ‘debate on climate change.’ What Hoggan discovered was that this phony debate was the careful creation of PR architects and media experts, who, in short, were doing the wrong thing and doing it with oil and gas funds.

“This is a story of betrayal, a story of selfishness, greed, and irresponsibility on an epic scale. In its darkest chapters, it’s a story of deceit, of poisoning good public judgment – of an anti-democratic attack on our political structures and a strategic undermining of the journalistic watchdogs who keep our social institutions honest” Hoggan begins in the book’s preface.

“It is ultimately a story that drove me and those closest to me to outrage and to activism. And although it is not my purpose to make you angry, I hope that you may through the coming pages, come to understand the sense of indignation and injustice that brought me to write this book.”

What Hoggan uncovered is a public relations scandal not seen since the inglorious fall of the tobacco barons and their louche campaign to hide the ills of second hand, or airborne, cigarette smoke.

I began reading Hoggan’s Climate Cover Up when I was about 106 pages into Lawrence Solomon’s 2008 The Deniers: The World-renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud* *And Those Who Are Too Fearful To Do So.

I had begun reading Solomon’s diatribe against global warming ‘orthodoxy’ to do my due diligence on becoming informed on both sides of the climate debate. But what I was to soon realize, through Hoggan’s book, is that this is exactly what the ‘Deniers’ wanted me to do.

The quagmire of climate science and public opinion is somewhat akin to the sordid pairing of sustainability and consumer responsibility. Somehow, in the ruckus, the consumer has become responsible for corporate industrial waste, toxins and unrecyclables. It has become our moral obligation and duty to ourselves, our bodies, and our children, to recycle, to perpetually ‘green’ our lifestyles.

But all this offsetting of responsibility onto the consumer accomplishes is the continual deferral of stricter industrial regulations and heavy corporate taxes. It is a strategy designed to obscure the issue at hand: industrial scale polluters and government inaction.  As long as we feel like it is our responsibility, and it can be solved through bi-weekly recycling programs and green consumerism, the industrial heyday will continue.

In much the same way, the duty to understand and resolve climate change and the more general issue of sustainability has been offset onto the individual, who, for the most part, has minimal scientific discernment. The complexities of climate science are often too much to cram into the measly side column of, say, The Province and so the more difficult issues are reduced down to their simplest and inexact components.

This leaves the “debate” victim to the sharks of the PR world, the media spinsters and the occasional scientist, gone rogue and willing to pocket oil and gas money for an exchange of credentials. The news audience, unwittingly and often too easily assuaged, is an easy target for the denial machine.  Heck, we almost want someone to tell us that climate change is a giant hoax and that we can go on with our Hummer road trips plans and yes, we’ll take that latte to go.

This, unfortunately, is not the case as any reputable climate expert will tell you. But where are these experts or reputation, Hoggan asks? And where are the journalists of integrity, bringing the undisclosed truth to their hungry and dependent readers?  Where indeed?

These are some of the questions Hoggan provokes in his book, alongside his tale of the CO2-stained tailings of oil and gas funds which have found their way into the pockets of some of the world’s most prominent ‘deniers.’

In a recent interview at Mr. Hoggan’s downtown office, I asked him, “So, what can we do to counteract all of this confusion?”

“Demand more of leaders,” came as a quick first response, “political leaders and particularly people in the media.” Alleged climate experts should be questioned about their credentials and qualifications and perhaps more importantly about their funding.

Currently in both Canada and the United States grassroots organizations under certain circumstances do not have to disclose their funders.  This allows donors to give charitably without publicly advertising their affiliations or partisan leanings.  In this instance, it also serves as a discrete conduit for large corporate givers to flood the alleged grassroots movement with oil and gas funded representatives.

“We need to demand politically that there is a change in this policy…these people should be stripped of the right to hide their funding.”

Aside from the policy overhaul, Mr. Hoggan also had this to recommend: “I also think, and this is probably the most difficult piece of advice but I don’t know that there’s any way around it, is that the real anecdote to propaganda and misinformation is understanding.”

So who is on Hoggan’s recommended reading list?  Elizabeth Colbert as aperitif with Andrew Weaver for the main course.  To those in need of more still, he recommends realclimate.org.

“Today, along with poverty and population growth, there is no bigger issue than climate change.  It is the biggest environmental issue of our day” and so, Mr. Hoggan insists, “this is something that is actually worth spending time to learn about.”

For those of us on the lookout, he adds one last caveat: “Keep in mind that you can never overestimate the capacity of [the Deniers] to be deceitful.  It shocks me what lengths they are willing to go to.”

Reading Climate Cover-Up amounts to a lesson in vigilance, vigilance of the mind, of the perspective, of the opinion.  We live in an information-saturated age where even the fittest are outrun by the sheer volume and quantity of published information.  What Mr. Hoggan reminds us of is the importance of the challenge.  The difficultly of acquiring straight information should not discourage us, but only strengthen our resolve.

If it is shocking what lengths the denial campaigners are willing to go to, well, then, I want to be down right scandalous in my efforts.

Jun 03 0 comments
Books, From the Navigator, Interviews

Seeing Green with Seireeni

Green Monday by Elizabeth Queen of All Things flickrcreativecommons

We are creatures of habit.  As consumers, in our purchasing habits and our engagement with the market, we deftly replicate old behaviours.  We develop brand loyalties and deep attachments to practices, our daily bread becoming a customary ritual.

This, unfortunately, has made it difficult, nearly impossible, for new, alternative brands to compete in the retail market. Everything from environmentally harmless soaps to bourgeoning forms of renewable energy remain peripheral at best when up against their old and trusted predecessors.  Environmentalists and sustainability activists have been known to groan at the title ‘alternative’ which has come to signify most things green, local or non-toxic.  The frustration with this title is that it seems to normalize all that is un-green, imported and toxic.  It is time for the alternative to become the norm, they say.

One figure working to push the envelope for all things eco is Richard Seireeni, a smooth talking, chic attired, friendly-eyed marketing master.  Richard is one of the figures working to usher in the Green Revolution, lending credibility and visibility to conscious brands.  He has even written a new book describing what he has uncovered as the network existing amongst ‘ecopreneurs’ where they rely upon mutual support, coverage and advertising for market success.  Richard has given this network the descriptive title of “The Gort Cloud” which includes a rich mixture of green businesses, environmental foundations, sustainability news agents, consumer report groups and popular websites.

The Gort Cloud from www.gortcloud.com

Richard’s book, The Gort Cloud: The Invisible Force Behind Today’s Most Visible Green Brands, was released in early 2009.  At a recent conference at Vancouver’s UBC campus, I saw Richard deliver a lecture, via Skype (to cut down on travel emissions), on this new concept.

When he began to research the market strategies behind some of the most recognized eco labels, Richard noticed one unique and seemingly impossible thing: they had no marketing budget, the paid nothing for advertising campaigns.  Soon enough Richard was uncovering the vast and largely online network connecting the green community, touting its latest products, research and innovations, The Gort Cloud.

What is greatest about Richard’s efforts to expose the inner workings of the sustainability marketplace is the accessibility it lends to green brands and to the dedicated purveyors of them.

When efforts to become sustainable are elusive, time consuming and expensive, the process undermines itself.  However, for all of us truly interested in making a difference, we must remember that the small and the new are usually in no position to battle the strong and the well-established.  I like to think of my research into products, foods, clothing as deliberate acts of sustainable consumption.  Not that we can consume our way out of unsustainability, but we can make better choices, incrementally, daily.  This is what I like to call ‘intentional living.’

It is easy to live and engage with the marketplace unintentionally, but we are fast learning that a responsible and thoughtful interaction with our environment, economy, and political society are necessary for the important and beneficial shifts we need to move towards more sustainable living.

The need for more awareness of…dare I say it…’alternatives’ is important for this movement.  Richard Seireeni, as a brand and market expert, is doing his part in making this awareness a reality.  For this reason our Expedition Guides nominated Richard to be an interview candidate for The Canada Expedition.  Read on to find out what he thinks about sustainability and human potential:

Guides: Richard, you have been selected by our group of Expedition Guides as a potential expert in the area of “Liberating Human Potential.”  Can you talk a bit about your work and how it relates to human potential?

Richard:  As a brand and communications expert, I set out to write a book about the brand development and marketing experiences of America’s leading green companies. The hope was that these experiences would encourage other eco-conscious entrepreneurs to follow in their tracks. In the course of this research, I stumbled across a vast, interconnected green community that my subjects were using to the get word out. I call this network The Gort Cloud. The use of this network to market earth-friendly products and services removes the traditional barriers to mass marketing and enables anyone with a great idea to gain access to customers at relatively low cost.

Guides: What link do you see between liberating human potential and sustainability?

Richard: Both the Industrial Revolution and the Internet Revolution enabled the rapid growth of new ideas and incubated the talent to cook up those ideas. The Age of Sustainability is doing something similar. It is creating a market for innovation and innovators.

Guides: What do you see as key to liberating human potential individually, in groups, organizations and politically?

Richard: It’s hard for individuals to work in a vacuum. The interconnected green community provides the support to help individuals achieve their potential. This can include technical help, investment money, PR outlets, certifying agencies, or distribution partners.  It’s all out there to help ecopreneurs find success.

Guides: How can an individual best contribute to liberating human potential?

Richard: The goal of sustainability is a community endeavor and requires everyone to participate and to share. Individuals can achieve their potential by drawing from the experiences of others, but it is a two-way street. Everyone must give back and share.

Guides: From a systemic approach, what can we do to promote the equality of opportunities?

Richard: I’m not sure we have to do anything. The system propelled by the Internet is creating its own opportunities, and I would guess that these opportunities come with fewer inequalities than in the past. That said, bias is a human condition that is not necessarily cured by joining the sustainable community.

Guides: From a philosophical approach, how can we implement ‘philosophies of sustainability?’

Richard: First, we must be rational. 100% sustainability is not a realistic goal unless we commit mass-suicide. Every morning that we get up, we cause problems. The goal is to be incrementally better than we’ve been before – to include environmental and social impacts when considering return on investment by corporate leaders or a product choice by individual consumers. Impacts must be made tangible to consumers so they make the right choices.

Guides: Can sustainability be described as an issue of cultural norms? And if so, what cultural norms need to change for us to move towards a sustainable future?

Richard: It’s hard to tell a mother on welfare to buy organic broccoli at $2.49 per pound when she can buy a complete (un)Happy Meal for her kids for about the same price.  So, yes, sustainable choices have a cultural component, which must be addressed to get sustainability into everyday practice for everyone.

Guides: If you were to critique The Canada Expedition’s four pillars of human sustainability, (which are 1. stabilize climate change, 2. develop an eco economy, 3. prevent and resolve political violence and 4. liberate human potential) what recommendations would you make?

Richard: These are lofty goals and in some ways so lofty as to be difficult to wrap your head around. For instance, I have had a problem with the term ‘climate change’ because it conjures up a problem so vast as to be beyond the effective power of any one person. I prefer the much earlier description of the problem as ‘over-population’. We understand quite clearly that too many people competing for limited resources is the core problem, and we can choose to limit our individual families to 2 children or fewer. This is a description of a problem with a solution we can address with an individual action. How do I stop climate change?  It’s much more difficult to envision the effective solution.

May 17 0 comments
From the Navigator, Interviews

Milt Lauenstein – Violence Prevention Luminary

Milt Lauenstein of BEFORE

When he answered the phone in his Massachusetts home in the early afternoon of April 29th, the first thing I noticed was the kindness, the approachability, in Milt Lauenstein’s voice.  You never know with these violence prevention types, they can be hard as steel at times.  In this case I find myself taken aback: Milt is surprisingly at ease and humorous, for such a heavy hitter.

I asked Milt if he could give me a bit of a biography of himself to give some context to his varied and irregular life.  He responded, “What time does your work day end?”  I laughed while he apologized for his humour, “that’s just the way I am,” he says and although I can’t see him, he is smiling.

Milt Lauenstein has had enough, and interesting enough, experience to fill volumes, having grown up in St. Louis, studying engineering at Purdue, joining the navy, economics at Tufts and a year spent in Europe to study painting.  That’s just Milt warming up.  Penniless after his tryst with the European art scene he returned to Chicago to study management which was the beginning of a long career for Milt as a corporate executive.  But, Milt admits, he isn’t really one for a steady job, which he hasn’t held since 1976.

Although Milt’s formal career ended in 2000, he has arguably worked harder since.  That is because, instead of learning the bosa nova in a Californian retirement resort, Milt has decided to devote his remaining years to waging peace, to the large-scale prevention of political violence.  When I asked him about the enormity of this task he said at the time he knew it would be a challenge but “didn’t seem impossible” and I can hear his smile coming through the line again.

Milt wanted to see if he could do something to reduce organized political violence in the world.  By no means a humble undertaking.  I asked Milt about the roots of this passion, trying to get at the back story.

“When I was young man I read about the history of Peloponnesian wars. What I noticed is that the leaders in ancient Greece behaved like leaders behave now, sending young men out to die.  Mankind learned very little how to prevent war and what is more, how to prevent stupidity.  When I got out of the business world this was the problem I was interested in.  I said to myself: lets see if we can reduce warfare.”

The first thing Milt did, not knowing anything, really, about violence prevention, was call his friends.  “I called around and asked, ‘does anyone know anything about war and political science?’”  It was not long before Milt connected with some major players in the violence prevention field.

Initially Milt began funding research projects with various experts, including Dr. Ben Hoffman, founder of The Canada Expedition.

Determined and resourceful, Milt read over 150 books on the topic of violence and related subjects.  When you speak with him, you get a sense of his insistence, his resolve.  As much as he read, however, and as much funding as he poured into research projects, he wasn’t satisfied.

“A good deal was known about the cause of war.  It wasn’t about gaining more knowledge but about using what knowledge existed. I began to think my research was doing much good either: the world is no more peaceful now after what I had done.”

A few years, and a lot of collaboration, later, Milt had a team landed in West Africa’s Guinea Bissau, a country they had worked with a team to select, based upon its propensity for violent conflict.  On the verge of elections, Guinea Bissau had been singled out as one of the world’s most war-ready fragile states. Milt and his team were dedicated to addressing the emergency before it erupted into unnecessary violence.

“It is a lot more effective to work to prevent the outbreak of war than to try and resolve situations like Darfur,” Milt adds.  That is the crux of violence prevention: getting practical solutions implemented to avoid catastrophe rather than sending in relief teams to pick up the pieces.

“What it most important is that people aren’t being killed by the thousands,” a sober reminder of the stakes Milt is considering in this work.

In the case of fragile Guinea Bissau, the projections for violent conflict were grim and despite some startling set-backs for their work, such as the paired assassinations of the country’s president and military leader, the country has not devolved into hostilities.

When I press Milt about this success he says, deferentially, “I think we’ve done some good.”

Some good indeed.

Beyond the implications of Milt’s tremendous bravery, duty and financial commitment, there is something else there too, which I think is the incredible story of a man who decided to make a difference.  It’s the kind of self-sacrifice that makes for inspiring stories, especially when this story’s protagonist is so unassuming.  With no previous training or experience, Milt took upon himself the challenge of making the world a better place.  In this regard we all have something to learn from him.

The Canada Expedition has a team of Expedition Guides who are dedicated to the topic of Preventing and Resolving Political Violence.

They had the chance to put a few questions to Milt:

Guides: What is conflict prevention or the prevention of violent conflict, if you will?

Milt: Conflict can be constructive. What is destructive is violence. My interest is in the prevention of widespread political violence within or between fragile states. By prevention, I mean taking action (as opposed to advocacy) that will maintain peace.

Guides: Critics often charge that you cannot prove that prevention worked and even then the only examples of success that exist are of smaller-scale initiatives like preventing violence from erupting in one particular village.

Milt: The first statement is quite true – it is not possible to prove a contra-factual. The second is not true. While there may be more small-scale examples than larger ones, there are also large-scale ones. As High Commissioner on National Minorities, Max van der Stoel clearly prevented the outbreak of widespread violence in perhaps as many as a dozen countries. A couple of years ago, several groups contributed to containing violence that had broken out in Kenya. BEFORE and others have contributed to preventing widespread violence in Guinea-Bissau and Guinea in spite of coups and assassinations.

Guides: Are there any examples where prevention efforts have undoubtedly been proven to prevent the eruption of a full-blown war?

Milt: See above.

Guides: Some say that in looking back through history we see that humans are instinctually violent while others say that meeting basic human needs through changing existing political structures can lead to peace.

Which is a more important focus for preventing wars: people or structures?

Milt: I believe that within each of us, there is an instinct that sometimes manifests itself in violence. I also believe that there is an instinct to cooperate and to live in peace with our neighbors. Over time, the vast majority of human beings have lived cooperatively and peacefully together. Institutions, such as a police force, can be effective in reducing the extent to which people resort to violence. So can mediators. One reason that violence has been so common in the third world is that many countries lack the institutional structures to maintain peace.

Guides: President Obama has recently placed greater emphasis on the Mid-east peace process in the hopes of ending the long-running conflict there.

Are all wars preventable and/or resolvable or will humans always be faced with a number of wars that will just have to run their course?

Milt: Whether wars will ever be ended forever is not an answerable question. Clearly, wars can be and have been prevented. Good data shows that the incidence and severity of wars have declined in recent decades. There has been peace in Western Europe for 65 years, for the first time in centuries. What is important is that the incidence and severity of war can be reduced.

Guides: Some people say that we should “give war a chance” because third-party interventions can at times actually worsen the situation and indeed some recent research has been done that seems to support this notion.

How do we know that by preventing a war or ending it prematurely through a third-party intervention that we’re not actually worsening the situation?

Milt: Misguided efforts to prevent war can exacerbate situations. A lot is known about how to prevent war and more is being learned. Experienced, wise people, aware of the possibility of doing harm, can reduce and have reduced the probability of war. Don’t let perfection stand in the way of the possible.

Guides: What is the single biggest challenge to this work? How can that be overcome?

Milt: The combination of opportunities to profit through violence, corruption, and the inability of weak governments to maintain peace. Maintaining peace over a long term will give societies time to build the institutions and to develop economically so as to be able reduce the likelihood of violence.

Guides: What can concerned citizens do to prevent the outbreak of war in general and of violence in specific regions that they’re interested in?

Milt: Vote for peaceful policies, contribute money, and participate in work to prevent political violence.

If you are interested in learning more about violence prevention at Milt Lauenstein’s work, you can check out the BEFORE website at www.beforeproject.org.