Interview with Denis Hayes

Carsten Henningsen: Denis, thanks for talking with us today. We would like to hear your thoughts on Earth Days past and present, environmental politics, corporate responsibility, and individual green behavior. To start with, what is most significant to you about the changes from Earth Day 1970 to 2010?

Denis Hayes: Wow, Carsten! That could be the whole interview right there. The whole world is different, in practically every way.

The single biggest change in terms of Earth Day itself is a shift in emphasis from national concerns to global issues, especially climate disruption.

Although we called it "Earth" Day, most of the 1970 protests actually focused on local and national issues rather than on the whole earth: Air pollution. Water pollution. Toxic wastes. Freeways slashing through inner city neighborhoods. Lead poisoning. DDT. The solutions were mostly national legislation-and we swiftly passed an astonishing raft of far-reaching new laws.

Today, the most compelling environmental issues are global, including climate disruption, the epidemic of extinction, the future of the world's oceans, population way beyond the earth's carrying capacity if everyone were reasonably prosperous, and worldwide resource limits like peak oil. These are harder for people to get their heads around than a toxic waste incinerator next door. Earth Day has responded, in part, by going global and starting to create a global community on the web. Earth Day will be observed in 175 nations this year.

CH: We're not seeing much action from political leaders on these global issues. What was different back in the early 1970s?

DH: To start with, candidly, we took the opposition by surprise. There had not previously been much of an environmental movement. There was a conservation movement supporting fishing streams and birds, and there were thousands of issue-specific groups, but they possessed no sense of common values. When "environmentalism" emerged as a coherent movement, capable of winning elections, it took the opposition a while to get its act together.

Today, our opponents have no trouble building multiple-hundred-million-dollar disinformation campaigns. The U.S. Senate, which led the first wave of environmental legislation, has now become the graveyard of environmental bills. Senate races are so extremely expensive that environmental groups find it impossible to compete with the oil industry and coal industry and electric utility industry. And that was before the Supreme Court decided that American politics needs even more corporate money.

Additionally, of course, it is extremely difficult to design enforceable international agreements. Sovereign states are very jealous of their perquisites-none more so than the most serious climate offenders: the U.S. and China.

CH: What will it take? Do we need more environmental degradation? Will the earth have to experience possible irreversible tipping points?

DH: It generally requires a pretty nasty surprise to generate a significant political response. I'm thinking of 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. By the time climate disruption is that intense in America, the die will have already been cast.

My sense is that there are two other possibilities. It might come out of a generation of politicians that rises above petty partisanship, outdated ideologies, and narrow concepts of national interest to act boldly on behalf of the biosphere. 2500 years after Pericles and 200 years after Jefferson, I'd love to believe this is likely. But I don't.

The other possibility is that a powerful movement, drawn from science, industry, labor, agriculture, the arts, religion, youth, and the elderly will recognize the threat to the species and rise up demanding action. There is no biological phenomenon more constant than the drive to protect and preserve the species. A huge number of people are deeply worried today about what we are doing to the planet. Check out the crowds at Avatar! But they feel hopeless.

CH: You included industry in that coalition. Do you think business can really be part of the environmental movement without undermining and greenwashing it?

DH: There are exceptions to what I'm about to say, but in general major change occurs when a leadership generation dies and is replaced. It is difficult to remember how robustly anti-environmental the business leadership of America was in the 1960s. Today, most corporations are led by people who took part in the first Earth Day.

Environmental issues are more complicated today than they used to be, and most corporate CEOs are better educated than most political leaders. And they often have superb scientists working for them who understand both the environmental challenges and the opportunities.

I know that my grandchildren will probably still have to fight the leaders of Exxon and Peabody and the other troglodytes of the corporate world. But, for example, the leaders of most of the companies of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development are as green as the average member of the Sierra Club.

CH: Back in 1973, Herman Daly wrote "The Steady State Economy." It seems his wisdom is finally being heard by some in the investment world today. The resistance to needed action is perhaps rooted in an incomplete understanding of economics. We know that the economics of unlimited growth in a finite world eventually leads to ecosystem collapse, but the framework of our modern economic system depends upon the assumption of exactly that-unlimited growth. What are your thoughts on how economics, investing and the ecosystem services that support our livelihoods can become balanced and sustainable?

DH: Herman is a friend and mentor. His ideas about disaggregating the economy into sectors that could grow perhaps forever (software, entertainment, wellness) and those that, despite dematerialization, would face physical limits on a finite planet informed my own thinking at a key point in time. But, despite the rise of a handful of academic centers for ecological economics, I don't think we are as far along as you do. To take one small data point, "The Steady State Economy" has still never been reviewed in any mainstream economics journal! It is not even taken seriously enough by conventional economists to be worth criticizing. That said, he is right, and all the things that economists have been ignoring are now getting to be larger than the "internal factors" around which they built their discipline in the years when human impact had not yet obtained the power of a geological force.

On the narrower question, I'm heartened by the increased success that is being enjoyed by shareholder initiatives. As you know, I was a founding co-chair of CERES 20 years ago, and I'd hoped these impacts would be achieved more swiftly. But better late than never. The Global Reporting Initiative is taken very seriously today, and the recent 52 percent of the vote received in the Idaho Power proxy fight—and the company's subsequent decision to begin to abandon coal—may be a true tipping point for responsible shareholders.

CH: Environmental awareness has magnified exponentially over the past 40 years. To this end, many people have embraced "the low hanging fruit" i.e., bringing their own bags to the grocery stores, replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs, etc. While good intentioned, it seems like too little, too late. As we enter in the second decade of the 21st century, what guidance should Earth Day bring to the general public?

DH: I agree with your general point, but I will use it to close the loop back to your very first question, rather than to criticize personal behavioral changes.

Fairly profound behavioral changes will be necessary to build a sustainable society—and for the most part these changes will be very good things for us. More physical exertion and healthier food will help combat our epidemic of obesity, for example. Even the little actions that can be seen as mostly symbolic help tie people to value systems. That's why every religion uses them! Catholic women are supposed to cover their heads when they enter the church whereas Catholic men are supposed to take off their hats. The French l'affaire du voile over head scarves for Moslem women has been rocking that country for 15 years! Symbols can seem silly but they can be emotionally powerful. And even trivial actions, multiplied by six billion people, can make a huge collective difference.

On the policy front, we acted first on the "low-hanging fruit." That was common sensical. It is much easier to arouse people when their children are being poisoned than it is about two lines crossing on a graph at some point in the future, even if the latter will lead to disastrous results for the planet. But now the lines on some of those charts have converged.

My hope for Earth Day, at this juncture in history, is that-through the employment of social networking, instamobs, tweets, mobile apps, and whatever the next digital connectors turn out to be, the 175 nations participating in Earth Day 2010 will make important strides toward creating a true global consciousness. We need to care passionately about the well-being of people around the world. And we need to cherish and protect all of the interrelated web of life on our home planet.

CH: Thanks for all of your great work and happy Earth Day 2010!

The information provided herein represents the opinion of the Denis Hayes and is not intended to be a forecast of future events, a guarantee of future results, nor investment advice.

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