Reflections on a New Century: Michael Glantz and Maggie Fox

Michael Glantz, Senior Social Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Former Head of Environmental and Societal Impacts Group

Boulder Magazine: We’d like to get your thoughts on the issues we’ll be facing in the next century and millennium.
Michael Glantz: It’s not often you wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, but I did: “Earth Year 2001: Cleaning Up the Planet for the Next Millennium.” Let’s forget about Earth Day in 2001 and make it Earth Year. Earth Day, which is celebrating it’s thirtieth anniversary in 2000, is going to be a big party, which creates awareness—kids draw trees and things like that. But that one special day has become like Christmas: a week before you scurry around buying presents, a week after you remember it and then you don’t think about it again for the next fifty weeks.
The year after the year 2000—Year of the Party, the millennium ad nauseum—like the day after the party, is the time to clean up. There ought to be a way to sustain interest in the environment, in the idea of each world citizen becoming an environmental committee of one. Perhaps we would focus on an ecosystem or environmental problem each month. Each person do what he or she could do, whether it’s an elderly person recycling the newspaper or a kid picking up and recycling an aluminum can, and not feel guilty about what is beyond their control. That’s the gist of Earth Year.
I’ve had this idea for a few years and in late September the concept was accepted by the Cousteau Society, endorsed by Mrs. Cousteau herself. Earth Year 2001 has some weight now, so I’m trying to energize the globe!

BMAG: What have you wrestled into shape so far?
Glantz: The Cousteau Society is interested in marine affairs, but there’s also the air and the land. So I’m trying to figure out how to get foundations that would support each of those parts, or find one foundation that could support the whole.
In the U.S. it could be relatively easy. We could regionalize efforts through dominant companies such as Microsoft in the Northwest, Hewlett-Packard Company on the West Coast, Goldman Sachs Funds in the Northeast. Even organizations that are kind of Greenwashers—they paint themselves green when they really aren’t—might put their money where their mouths are. A lot of times tokenism can be turned into real commitment.
About three or four years ago I bought the domain name “earthyear.com,” so we’ve gotten started. But I do some work in what I call the Fourth World, the bottom half of the Third World—places like Vietnam, Mozambique, Dagestan, parts of Russia. These areas of the world aren’t tied into the Internet. I’d like them to take action, to participate within their own countries, but they need help. They need some cash.

BMAG: As NCAR’s only senior social scientist, what types of things do you focus on?
Glantz: I look at the interaction between atmosphere and society, not just the way drought, floods, frost and severe storms affect people, but also what we do to the atmosphere: putting garbage in it, air pollution, acid rain, ozone depletion, global warming. I started working on El Niño in 1974, when even scientists weren’t interested in knowing much about the phenomenon aside from its physical characteristics. But if you can forecast El Niño in advance, people can be prepared.

BMAG: Are you optimistic about the public’s responsiveness to Earth issues?
Glantz: I think the public at large is pretty responsive, and an increasing number of corporations are also becoming more responsive. But they have to be watched. We have rules and regulations for people who are usually good, but sometimes run red lights or do other things they shouldn’t. Corporations also need rules and regulations to keep them in line and engaged in protecting the environment.
The biggest problem is environmental empathy. Most people can’t relate to the terrible environmental conditions in other countries. A drought in North America means oranges cost twenty cents more per pound, but in Mozambique a drought is life and death. Americans don’t empathize, we sympathize: “Hey, sorry! Too bad! But I wasn’t born in Mozambique.” We have to figure out how to help that Fourth World help themselves.
I’d like people to be empowered to realize that the planet is something we can clean up. We don’t have to wait for someone else, because the next generation is actually going to do it. It starts with an aluminum can at a time. Cleaning up the planet for the next millennium sounds more forceful than cleaning up the planet for the century or the next decade. But it’s the same thing.

BMAG: How can people get in touch with you about Earth Year 2001?
Glantz: They can call me at 303-497-8119 or they can e-mail me at glantz@ucar.edu. The web site is www.earthyear.com.

Maggie Fox, Senior Regional Representative of the Sierra Club

BMAG: Share something with us that strikes you as important in the new century and millennium.
Maggie Fox: There has not been enough recognition of the shrinking world we live in and the impact on the people who live in it. With the birth this year of the six-billionth child, we’re getting closer and closer together. We have to reconsider our life on the planet in terms of our expectations about physical space, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food products we consume, the whole notion of how we live on the Earth. For years we’ve known that our planet is fragile, but the new millennium is showing us much more directly how fragile it is, and how much more careful we need to be.
I don’t actually think that we have unsolvable environmental problems, but the hardest thing is to get people to see them as solvable and recognize they need solving.

BMAG: Are you able to stay optimistic in your efforts to encourage people to work toward solutions?
Fox: People always ask me how I keep my optimism because the Sierra Club has never won a battle or an environmental debate. We’ve simply bought a stay. I mean, we do win things all the time, but something happened in my very first two weeks on the job in 1983 that taught me an enormous lesson. I was graciously asked to address the board of directors at the Sierra Club’s annual meeting. The board’s roster included people like David Brower, who’d been at it for decades! And I thought, “I can’t do that!” I was a punk! Brand new! But that same day a little notice crossed my desk from the Bureau of Reclamation with proposals for federal dams within Grand Canyon National Park. The Bureau had initially withdrawn lands for three dams in anticipation of needing them at some future date. They’d already built Glen Canyon and were now asking for comment on reestablishing the land withdrawal on the other two, Hualapai and Bridge Canyon. Potentially building two new federal dams inside a National Park. I sat there holding that piece of paper thinking “Here’s my speech.” The people on that board of directors were the ones who’d originally fought the Flaming Gorge battle in the 1950s, who had stopped Bridge Canyon and Hualapai dams from being considered in the initial go-around. I wondered how they would feel about the fact that the Bureau of Reclamation wanted to withdraw the land for 25 more years, to make sure that it was available in case they needed to build a dam inside a National Park—downstream of Glen Canyon! So I read the notice to them and opened my remarks by saying, “Well, I guess I know why I’m here. It’s called vigilance. Eternal. And because of you, I have work to do. If you weren’t there and hadn’t done what you did, there wouldn’t be anything left to say.” There was chuckling and eye twinklings, and then we filed comments with the Bureau saying, “Are you KIDDING?!”
My point is that environmental battles are never won. One could argue that of course the United States government is never going to build a dam in a National Park. Really? Are we so sure about that? Yeah, if we keep ourselves vigilant.

BMAG: So, getting back to the question about optimism...?
Fox: I am purposefully optimistic! I don’t allow myself not to be. Because the next battle still has to be fought. Whatever you’ve won has to be won again. It’s about vigilance. I suppose you can be pessimistic, but that’s not the world I want to live in. Pessimism means you just stepped out of being engaged. We have choices about how we respond and my choice has always been to respond by saying, “It’s our fight. It’s our choice. It’s our world. We can choose to be engaged, or not.”
As human beings we have the capacity to resolve—in a technological and a human sense—all of our problems. Whether or not we will remains a question. That’s our challenge. I’m keeping myself turned in that direction.

BMAG: Name a few environmental issues we can chew on locally.
Fox: First off, there’s a lot of wild land left to be protected. Some of it is true wilderness as defined in the Wilderness Act of 1964. There’s also a lot of wild land that may not be appropriate for a wilderness designation, but it qualifies as open space. Protecting those lands needs to be front and center in our agenda because I believe we can’t survive as a society without wild lands. We don’t just need them for scientific reasons—clean watersheds and wildlife habitats—but for spiritual reasons.
People seek churches and wild lands for spiritual reconnection, and we have to protect those places to continue our species in a human sense. We need them so we can continue to have the will to resolve the kinds of conflicts that come up when people get pushed together into smaller and smaller spaces. Ultimately, these conflicts can become very serious. We’re not going to survive as a culture without wild places to buffer the brutality of human contact.

BMAG: Any final thoughts about the century ahead?
Fox: I recently gave a talk to the Society of International Dispute Resolution, trying to explain to the people who sit at the head of this collaborative process that I don’t view one way of resolving conflict versus another as more positive or negative. You can go to court or to Congress or initiate a ballot issue or sit down in a collaborative process with others to protect a canyon. There isn’t just one right way.
What I was trying to say to them, and what I want to say to people who are reading this, is that we all need to be doing what motivates us, what keeps us engaged and focused on solving the problems we have with our natural world and with each other. In the long run it doesn’t really matter what forms we operate under as long as we stay active.