In Conversation With Ernest Callenbach & Joseph Petulla,
Part 2

Since we published Part One of this interview, Earth Day 1999 will have come and gone, gasoline prices have skyrocketed, a few of us are recycling more, but little else seems to have changed. The solution for our pocketbooks and our planet, according to environmental experts Ernest Callenbach and Joseph Petulla, is really quite simple: CONSUME LESS. Drive less, eat less meat (or go vegetarian!), have fewer children, reuse and recycle. Spend more time with friends and family instead of more mindless spending. Replace the culture of consumption with the consumption of culture. A simple message, yes. But subversive because it threatens the American Way of Life.

Ernest (Chick) Callenbach first published Ecotopia in 1975, a compelling vision for a sustainable future. Former academic editor and environmental educator, Callenbach is the author of several titles, including Living Cheaply With Style and his latest book, Ecology: A Pocket Guide (see p. 62).

Joseph Petulla has written over a dozen books on philosophy, religion, and environmental studies. He is founder of the Master of Science in Environmental Management program at the University of San Francisco.

Is their environmental message still timely? How can we effect significant change? OPEN EXCHANGE invites your letters and comments, which we will publish next issue. (From OPEN EXCHANGE MAGAZINE, May-June 1999)

—Bart Brodsky, Publisher

Bart Brodsky: Despite so much sophisticated environmental education, there seems to be a disconnect. My eleven year old daughter gets interesting pamphlets about the rainforest and saving endangered species, but that doesn't stop her from wanting to go shopping at the mall. If there is any connection to be made between consumption and environment, Mom and Dad have to make them and reinforce them against all the countervailing consumerism that's put forth everywhere. And in terms of cars, you hear commercials, "Move up to Cadillac. You deserve a Cadillac. They've even got Cadillac SUV's now! I thought it was a joke when I first heard about it. You can drive in ultimate elegance now while you're going off road, sort of like camping in your tuxedo. Let's explore the implications. What kind of underlying value changes are required to get us from where we are now to where we need to be.

Ernest Callenbach: One of the troubles is that an industrial society dissociates people from more or less everything, including their own selves, but particularly it dissociates them from goods. You see a cup, like I'm holding in my hand here, and you think, "It's just a cup." You go to Macy's and you buy a cup and you think that this transaction is all there is that's going on. But, of course, if you stop to think—if your daughter stopped to think, she'd have the same sorts of reflections—that that cup was made in a factory somewhere, that the clay was dug up, that the energy which was used in forming the clay, firing the clay, making the glaze and so on, all came from somewhere. And all those processes have environmental impact. You can really look at environmental damage as proportional to income. The more money you make, the more wreckage you cause to the natural order. The guy from Jerusalem was right when he said it: Poor people get through the ecological needle more easily than the rich.

BB: Yet modern culture is built on the divine right to earn more money, and spend more, and that's our definition of success. We can afford a Cadillac; therefore we should own a Cadillac.

EC: We have a way of pushing these costs out of our consciousness. They're elsewhere. And one of the basic rules of ecology is that there is no "elsewhere." Things don't go away. They're always connected to us, and they always come around, indubitably, to us. So if we're going to survive, it's very unlikely that industrial society can go on as we are now. The process of neglecting the consequences of things is fundamentally not realistic. It builds up huge debts from nature which we try to ignore. And sooner or later nature calls in these debts and says, "Hey, the balloon payment is due." And crash, bang, down it will come, if we don't learn how to run more on interest on our capital, if we don't learn how to recycle materials as well as nutrients, if we don't learn how to recycle everything, and if we don't learn how to minimize our impacts through energy use and everything else, we are going to be in deep, deep trouble. We're already in deep trouble. We like to think that the world is in good shape because you look out the window in American suburbs and everything is hunky dory. They're not hunky dory even outside that suburban window if you take into account what is happening to the natural order. They're not too good psychologically if you really get to know how the people live out there, what's going on in their lives day by day. They're certainly not too good for the wildlife that used to live there.

BB: And medically, we're now getting reports that Parkinson's Disease may be a result of pesticide exposure, in great measure, from our manicured lawns, as well as from our commercially grown produce.

EC: Right.

BB: Then what is the future of the automobile? What kinds of cars are we going to be driving in a sustainable future? Gas? Electric? Alcohol? What are they going to look like?

EC: The kind of propulsion is not really the main question to ask. Richard Register, the founder of Urban Ecology and now running Eco-City Builders, is right when he says, "What you need is access by proximity." Any kind of access by mechanical object is going to be problematic for dense urban living. The car, no matter what drives it, is a 19th century contraption. It's a substitute for a horse, adapted to wide open spaces. That's why in most car ads you never see a second car. All the others (on the road) have been vaporized! And yet, we allow ourselves to watch these things instead of jumping up and saying, "Come on, give me a break!" But there would be a lot of vehicle types that would be less destructive than internal combustion engines. The Toyota company is now manufacturing a car called the Prius, which is a hybrid car the kind that Amory Lovins has been touting lo these many years. It has a tiny engine which gives off very few pollutants and drives electric motors on the wheels. So it's an electric car which generates its own electricity. You can gas it up any place, go across country if you want to. It gets 65 miles to the gallon and sells for $17,000 starting next year. These cars are much simpler mechanically than our current cars, so they should have far less maintenance.

JOSEPH PETULLA: Fuel cells might even be better. They don't have any cylinders or carburetor, just thin, square plates pressed up against each other A fuel like methane is forced through these membranes, and atoms are split into electrons and protons. The electrons are used to generate all the power. It's essentially an electric vehicle, but there's no storage battery.

EC: Things are not burned in a fuel cell, so it doesn't have the emissions problem.

BB: With a car that efficient and durable, where are GM's big profits going to come from?

JP: There's plenty of profit to be made.

EC: Look at the iMac! (all laugh)

BB: The Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, seems to be very anti-environmental regulation, though not necessarily anti-environmental. They argue that we should be able to go from here to an environmentally responsible future with more free enterprise, not less. How do each of you feel about that?

JP: The notion is so utterly ridiculous that anybody with half a brain should be able to see through it. Free enterprise means that we get more and more freedom to do whatever we want. And that's exactly what's gotten us into this trouble. Since we seem to have this cultural desire built into the system, and you have to have a lot of money to fulfill these desires, we satisfy individuals but not the common good....

BB: And yet, Chick was talking earlier about involving capitalists in being more responsible. Paul Hawken, in his book The Ecology of Commerce, argued that responsible capitalists could help create an environmentally sound future. Are capitalists going to be responsible only at gun point? How does that all fit together?

EC: Look at the corporate charter, as Richard Grossman has been doing. A corporate charter is essentially the DNA of a corporation. It sets forth the purposes that a corporation is to fulfill to remain a legal entity. And the purpose that a large corporation is to fulfill is to make money for its stockholders. If officers of the company, in some way, for ecological reasons or otherwise, fail to maximize profits for the shareholders, they can be booted out or sued, or both. And this happens fairly often. I am writing something now called "Corporation As Parasite." I'm trying to look at the corporation as an organism. Corporations capture us to do what they are chartered to do. Paul Hawken is a wonderful man and has a lot of great ideas. And although he's been a businessman, his business experience was in privately held companies and did not really acquaint him with the intransigence of corporate rules...

JP: Like downsizing, so that you can make more money.

EC: ...So, if you look around for companies that do good things, they are in general ones like Patagonia, Esprit, and other privately owned companies where if the owners feel like doing something good they can do it. It's their money. This is not true of a publicly held corporation whose ownership is widely diffused on the stock market. There is a possibility that when a state reissues a corporate charter, for example, to Maxxam, Mr. Hurwitz's company which has all but obliterated the Headwaters forest, we could say, "fine, we will issue a charter to operate as a lumber company in the state of California, but there's one or two restrictions. The major restriction is "Thou Shalt Never Clear-Cut. Not At All." And Hurwitz might say, "I'm not going to do business in California. I'll do business in other states that are less demanding." But the chances are that a lumber company operating under that kind of charter could indeed make a sufficient amount of money for its shareholders and its officers and so on...

BB: As have some of the family owned lumber companies in Northern California, before they were bought out.

EC: ...Yes, and it's time to try this, I think. Next time a corporate charter comes up in a reasonably decent legislature—maybe California when Hurwitz's charter comes up for renewal—we could try this thing. That would be structural reform. The other stuff that Hawken is talking about would be voluntary reforms, and we all know from our own lives that they tend to slip.

JP: Your suggestion is a very good one. But it misses the point that even those legislatures are owned by the corporations. It's very difficult for any politician to get elected unless they have millions to run a campaign...

BB: Isn't that why third parties like the Greens have not gotten far in this country? You've got both Democrat and Republican legislators bought and paid for by the corporations.

JP: Right. The corporations don't care who votes for their bills. Elected officials can't vote their conscience and stay in office, or they don't get the money.

BB: Once again, it's up to the people to get ahead of their leaders and say, "This is what we demand." We have to be very clear about their mandate.

EC: And start kicking butts. There is one very interesting Green Party development taking place in this county. In New Mexico the Greens are a relatively strong third party, much stronger than in any other state. They're taking an uncompromising position because of the corruption of legislature—let's not flinch from that word "corruption," because American legislatures are almost totally corrupt on national and state levels. The Greens want proportional representation, which will not solve all problems, but will loosen up the political representation and enable parties to fulfill the role here that they fulfill in Europe, which is to be easier avenues for new ideas to get into the legislative process. And the Greens are big enough so that they can deny victory to the Democrats. So they've said to the Democrats: We're going to play hardball politics just like you big boys do. Until you pass proportional representation by a majority vote, we're going divide the vote and bump you off. This means that they're willing to send some unbelievably rotten Republicans to Washington for awhile, but they're willing to do that because the thing to be gained is so immensely important. I agree with that. If we could have one state with proportional representation, it would be a noble experiment, seeing whether we could loosen up the stranglehold that corporate interests have on our legislatures.

BB: Well, let's be optimistic about change. We hear about incremental change on the one hand and on the other hand some kind of punctuated progression only by way of apocalypse. But there is a third way of change. We also have the possibility that some institutions will be collapsing all around us while other institutions will be growing up to take their places. It will be like any environment, where you have, say, dead trees over here and new living ones coming up. So the individual will be able to move and shift from something that isn't working out to something else that is. Maybe he'll stop working at IBM and start some home business. Whatever it may be, change need not be all that traumatic. It won't necessarily mean complete dislocation as we move toward a sustainable culture. Getting to specifics is the key here. Berkeley is a city where you can live without a car, but I don't know how you'd rebuild Los Angeles, for example.

EC: The funny thing is, people in LA drive less than in Northern California per capita, and one reason is that LA is more decentralized. There are more towns like Glendale and Torrance where people live, work, shop, and do what they have to do without leaving their immediate neighborhood.

BB: Let me throw out a tougher question now. Earth has currently about 6 billion human inhabitants, and Chick, you once said we seem to be heading toward 11 billion sometime early in the next millennium. The consensus of many environmentalists is that our planet can hold only about one billion and sustain a European lifestyle, using maybe half the resources per capita that Americans currently enjoy. Some deep ecologists say that that figure is much less than one billion. Of course, you can get some arguments over these numbers. There are environmental reactionaries who say that the planet can sustain some 20 billion or more people. However, most environmentalists would say that even 6 billion is too many. So, isn't any reasonable goal of the environmental movement population reduction? How do you deal with that political bombshell?

JP: Also, you have to put into that calculus the fact that Americans have far fewer people than China, but we use 20 times more materials. We spend 20 times as much on things and cause 20 times more waste.

BB: And yet the goal of some of the Chinese leadership is to give their populace an American lifestyle, which would be disastrous.

JP: Yes. So it isn't only population.

BB: We're looking into an abyss here, aren't we? How do we walk backwards away from it politically?

JP: I don't think that population is a different question, really, from all the others that we've been talking about. It all has to do with how we're going to live, and population is one important component. But it's not a matter of cutting down on population so that the Chinese can spend 20 times more than they do now. That will just make things 20 times worse than now.

EC: Population is the issue that there's always plenty of debate about, because there are so many different interests and so many different perspectives. Since I gave the 11 billion figure, most population estimates have been revised downward. Countries like Thailand have reduced their birthrates. America is a high growth rate country, partly through immigration as well as through native births. But it's possible to be a bit optimistic in terms of pure numbers. Look at the industrial countries of Western Europe, Japan, and the formerly Catholic countries of Italy, Spain, and Quebec, where actual populations have been declining once abortions became available. In these very advanced countries where life, let's face it, is very civilized, even when compared to the United States, people turn to other satisfactions besides having a lot of children. We hope that this will spread. We used to talk about the "demographic transition," where if people got rich enough they would stop having so many children. There are quite a few countries now where people have gotten substantially richer but that hasn't apparently been happening. So, we are still getting a lot more people in the world. The  population is supposed to reach something like 8 billion before we level off. There are pockets, though—and California happens to be one—where population is rising very sharply. One projection has us doubling our population by 2050. Imagining doubling the number of cars? There's no place to put them. Recently I was watching a documentary about downtown Shanghai and during one lengthy shot there were probably 10,000 bicycles going past. Of course, if all these people had been in cars they wouldn't have been moving at all. So when we talk about the Chinese industrializing as we industrialized, it's probably just not possible. There's probably not enough land in China for that many cars, unless they undo their agriculture in order to make room for cars.

JP: They'll probably use mopeds, like they do in Italy. They'll get around faster because they're moving into a faster culture.

BB: Did you see what (former Chrysler Chairman) Lee Iacoca is pushing now? Electric bicycles!

EC: A bicycle has the advantage over any car by taking about a 20th of the space. To get beyond the car culture, I think the political solution is to create an "eco-industrial complex," like the military-industrial complex. There's no reason why somebody like Bechtel couldn't build a decent ecological city to all the specifications that someone like Richard Register or I might prescribe, if the money they made on it was big enough. So, if you can get Congress to lie down in bed with people like Bechtel, and get them to build new cities instead of nuclear plants or air fields or all the other things they build, we could go a long way toward reducing the impacts of our lifestyle on the planet. It may still be that even 6 billion people is too many. The idea that we may be able to live quite well with one billion has been kicked around a lot, but nobody has any idea, really. We'll clearly only find out by going there. But we ought to congratulate countries whose population drops or whose industrial output drops. Rising GNP is bad! We ought to give praise to countries whose GNP is falling. My friend Michael Phillips wanted to give Japan an international award during their current recession. Through their declining industrial activities they were wrecking the world less. That's a lovely thought! (all laugh)

JP: That's true.

BB: Yes, but the right wing in Congress is still attacking China over their birth control policies. Certainly there are questions over abortion and female infanticide, but at least China was taking steps to control their population. Don't they deserve some congratulations, too, for moving in the right direction?

EC: Well, they probably did do some inhumane things that probably were not necessary. The countries I mentioned before have accomplished a cessation of increase and the beginning of a drop without any really nasty stuff. The world is full of women in every culture who wish to have fewer children. If we could help them to have fewer children, population would begin to decline. The right wing of this country has been putting spokes in the wheels of United Nations population control programs in various ways. You know, what's paradoxical about this is, presumably, all these right wingers don't want greater Chinese or Mexican immigration, and yet they seem hell-bent on keeping them multiplying.

BB: There's an old country song that expresses this sentiment: "Every Sperm Deserves a Name." (all laugh)

JP: It's interesting that population seems to go down where wealth goes up. Where people seem to equate their own financial well-being with having less kids, the population rates go down.

BB: Up to a certain point, wealth is good in controlling population growth. But as Chick was saying, each of us has something like 20 times the impact of someone in a non-western nation. My politically correct, single child family has created a child that's going to have the impact of a woman having 20 children in India.

EC: Paul Ehrlich had this wonderful equation that everyone ought to be taught in fourth grade:

I = P x A x T

Impact equals population times affluence, or appetite, times technology. People who use a very destructive technology like cars are much more destructive than people who use a technology like burros. All three of these factors are important.

BB: So what can we do personally to lower our impact?

EC: Here's what you can do personally. You can have less children. Children are wonderful, adorable beings and they are our future and I have two of them myself. But we have to face it that children become consumers. The second thing that you can do is to not have a car at all, or at any rate to drive as little as possible. Get the benefits of exercise and keep down road congestion by walking or bicycling. Pay more attention to your surroundings by walking or bicycling. People "driving through" are just driving through. You can't be a citizen while you're behind the wheel. And the third thing that you can do that has a very, very big impact is to either become a vegetarian or eat less meat. Because meat production—cattle, pork and sheep—is very destructive to the environment, either directly or indirectly through water use primarily. Pork production under industrialized circumstances is a manure factory from an ecological perspective. John Muir called sheep four legged locusts. So those are the big three things. You also ought to recycle, because you can get the steady-state thing going that we were talking about. Dave Brower used to talk about the three C's, the three evils: cars, chain-saws, and cows.

BB: Both of you have this remarkable ability to take complex material and write about it in journalistic English. What other environmental resources do you recommend to our readers?

JP: If you look under "sustainable society" on the internet, at least 50 selections come up. And there's a new book called Going Local which tells people how to set up ecologically sustainable local businesses.

EC: There's a group called the New Roadmap Foundation, from the people who wrote Your Money Or Your Life, a guide to financial independence using simple living as a route to get there. Their web site is newroadmap.com, and they have cross-references to a lot of other literature.

BB: I'd also like to suggest that people support local food co-ops, getting fresh, organic, locally grown vegetables, and to some degree getting out of the agribusiness loop and supporting bioregional farming. Now, before we adjourn, let's touch on some of the spiritual dimensions of the environmental movement.

EC: As I was working on the little Ecology book, I was constantly struck by the parallels between ecological scientific thinking and Buddhism. Just recently Wes Nisker has come out with this wonderful book, Buddha's Nature, and it goes into this in more detail. In the long run, ecological reform is probably a spiritual matter about what is a fit way for us human beings to live here on our planet. And this calls on us to rethink our relation to the universe in very profound ways. The industrial capitalist metaphor for what we are is "Work, work, work... buy, buy, buy." But we know that that's not all there is to life by any means. We each have three score and ten allotted to us, more or less. How are you going to spend this time? Are you going to spend it working and consuming, or are you going to spend it in ways that are meaningful? How much of your life energy are you sacrificing in order to buy that Lincoln SUV? How much of your life time—which is the only thing you have when you are born—is poured into this consumption? In Your Money Or Your Life, their idea is that you should carry around a little book, and every time you spend a nickel you should write it down, and you should make a graph...

BB: A consumption diet, eh?

EC: Yes, and what's funny about it is that without any moralizing, people do cut down their expenditures. People say, "my god, why am I spending a dollar and a quarter on this piece of trash." And then it creeps up the monetary scale to include dishwashers. As Wes Nisker says, "Maybe I like dishwashing. Maybe it makes me feel good. Maybe dishwashing is a spiritual experience" rather than an occasion to go out and lay down your credit card.

BB: My editorial shorthand for this is "replacing the culture of consumption with the consumption of culture." Culture is relatively inexpensive. You can go to libraries and museums and peruse the great works. You can spend time with friends and, if you've got the inclination, do your own cooking, enjoy gourmet food without paying restaurant prices. And if you're blessed and live in a college town, you can do all of this walking, without depending so much on cars. You can collect experiences and friends, and that's a lot cheaper than some of the things that advertisers want you to collect.

EC: Less maintenance. And we need to cultivate reverence, too. That's at odds with all the attitudes we have under the industrial consumption society. There's no reverence in going to Macy's, laying down your card, and carrying something away, let's face it. Reverence happens when you're in contact with real nature, real people, real stuff out there in the universe. The connection with the living world is when we get these very strange and wonderful reverent connections. And that is what we ought to be about.

JP: Living simply is a religious concept, East and West, too. My first interest in ecology started about the time I read E. F. Schumacher (author of Small Is Beautiful). The simple life is the ecological life, mostly because it means cutting down on stupid desire and consumption. The monastic people first tried to show that this was the heart of their religion: living simply, farming, praying, and spending time together in community. That pretty much sums it up.

BB: I had planned to ask you both for a message to OPEN EXCHANGE readers, but that's it! Again, let me thank you both for your time, and let's make every day Earth Day!