Spring is upon us. Every year at this time we find an excess of people taking out ads paying lip service to “going green” or “saving the planet” or reminding us “For all of us here at the Apocalypse Corporation, every day is Earth Day” and associated claims.
Given our economic and political circumstances here in the U.S. let us hope some of this sentiment resonates and sticks in people’s hearts and minds, not put away once the season passes like we might do with a box of holiday ornaments.
I don’t have to say that sustainability is a serious issue: what it means and how quickly we can individually and collectively grasp its important implications affects our ability to carry on in a world awash in human abuse. Given the scale and breadth of our evolutionary history the challenge is daunting.
Elsewhere on the NESEA blog Joel Gordes is discussing the important definition of sustainability as articulated by the Brundtland Commission. I want to put forward some observations that may add some insight to the topic; not so much as a comment on Joel’s subject, but to branch off in a different direction.
For example, MIT’s John Ehrenfield states that sustainability is the possibility that life can continue forever. It’s an embarrassingly simple statement, but realizing that possibility seems impossibly complex.
The Brundtland Commission definition (“meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”) and its 1987 report “Our Common Future” suggests what needs to happen globally to accomplish such a state of affairs. But beyond generalities and government-style recommendations, it offers scant advice as to how to actually undertake the massive social, economic, and environmental transformation required.
I don’t believe anyone truly understands sustainability. On the other hand, there are a number of people who by their experience and life’s work and from their perspective offer ways that society can move. Their examples are important puzzle pieces from which we can learn. I don’t believe that the movement to sustainability will ever be led by a single charismatic figure as has been the case for many social and religious movements. We certainly need leaders and thousands of good case studies to hold up for inspection. It’s probably also safe to assume that only in a democratic society will we hope to achieve a sustainable society.
So as a springtime exercise I offer up ten perspectives from ten brilliant people. This is not a David Letterman “top ten list”, but rather a gathering of names that should be important to everyone who cares about the subject. These are presented in no particular order. Perhaps you could produce a different grouping:
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Here we are 22 years later and the message brought by Harlem Gro Brundtland (b. 1939) and her United Nations Commission in 1987 has yet to reach very many of us. But it is key. She is a former Prime Minister of Norway, and has served as the Director General of the World Health Organization. She now serves as a Special Envoy on Climate Change for the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Rachel Carlson (1907-1964), founder of the contemporary environmental movement, author of Silent Spring, advocate of nature and environmental ethics. She is a remarkable study in courage.
Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), ecologist, forester, pioneer in land and wildlife management, author of A Sand County Almanac. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
John McConnell (b. 1915) is responsible for a long list of accomplishments all strongly related to global awareness,peace, religion and science. He is the founder of Earth Day (and the Earth Flag), and an early drafter of the United Nations Earth Charter.
Dr. Karl-Heinrich Robert (b. 19??) is one of Sweden’s foremost cancer scientists who, in 1989, initiated an environmental movement called “The Natural Step.” In 1984, Robert won the Swedish Hematological Association Research Award. He headed the Division of Clinical Hematology and Oncology at the Department of Medicine at the Huddinge Hospital from 1985 until 1993. Robert has authored numerous scientific publications concerning leukemia, lymphoma, lung cancer and their clinical implications. His research on damaged human cells provided a platform for his interest in environmental questions. Later, with Dr. John Holmberg, he developed first order principles, the four so-called “system conditions,” for ecological sustainability.
Dr. Donnella H. Meadows (1941-2001), founder of the Sustainability Institute, was a 
professor at Dartmouth College, a long-time organic farmer, a journalist, and a systems analyst. Along with Dennis Meadows and others, she authored The Limits to Growth in 1972, examining the consequence of interactions between the Earth’s and human systems; a pioneering example of whole systems thinking on a global scale. Through her writing and speaking, Dana helped people understand global systems with long delays and complex feedbacks, while also inspiring many to think about individual choices in daily living.
Wangari Muta Maathai was born in Nyeri, Kenya (Africa) in 1940; the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree, and in 2004 she became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.” It was while she served in the National Council of Women of Kenya that she began a grassroots organization with women groups whose main focus is the planting of trees in order to conserve the environment and improve their quality of life. Through the Green Belt Movement she has assisted women in planting more than 20 million trees on their farms and on schools and church compounds.
Ray Anderson (b. 19??) former CEO of Interface Global, the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpet. In 1994, while preparing remarks on Interface’s environmental plans for a company meeting, Ray read The Ecology of Commerce – an experience Ray has described as an epiphany, a “spear to the chest” awakening to the urgent need to set a new course toward sustainability for his company. Coupled with Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, the book changed Ray’s life and set Interface Global on its pioneering journey towards sustainability. Ray was quick to recognize the necessary connection between sustainability and organizational learning – an under-appreciated reality.
Janine Benyus (b. 1958) is a life sciences writer and author of six books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature in which she names an emerging science that seeks sustainable solutions by mimicking nature’s designs and processes. She now writes popular books in the life sciences, consults with sustainable business leaders and talks about the genius that surrounds us while living in her natural habitat – the northern Rockies.
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So that’s the list. Is yours different?
And by the way, the oil painting reproduced near the beginning of this post is titled “The Table” by Pierre Bonnard, and it is dated 1925. You can see the original and many others at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition of Bonnard’s work through April 16. If you go, I would ask you to think how Bonnard’s view of the world (he lived through World Wars I and II in France) relates to the concept of long-term survival and sustainability.
Finally, here is a cautionary if not humorous springtime poem from Amherst’s Emily Dickinson (1830-1886):
A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown,
Who ponders this tremendous scene–
This whole experiment in green,
As if it were his own!
WLS 04-01-09
Bill has done an admirable job of compiling a list of luminaries that have formed the modern environmental movement. They are all role models that ought to be studied in school—and maybe they are. I do, however, feel the need to add one to Bill’s list and I hope you all forgive the length but he is one who is far leser known today than the others and thus needs some explanation. For those of you who know me, he is the reason why I am what I am and why I think the way I do—so blame him. With that let me introduce you to Dr. Albert E. Burke who I very briefly mentioned in at least one blog but here is the real genius of the man:
Yale Professor Brought Science, Insight To Early TV
By JOEL GORDES and HELEN BURKE
November 23, 2008
Environmental journalism is still a relatively new phenomenon; most newspapers and television stations didn’t begin regular coverage of environmental issues until the 1970s or 1980s. Not so in Connecticut, thanks to Albert E. Burke, Yale’s former director of graduate studies in conservation and resource use.
In 1950, the young professor from Cheshire was concerned about the content of the new medium, television. He was worried that the radio comedy shows of the 1940s would prevail — we should have been so lucky — and he wanted to include programming about the world around us.
He determined that his Yale geography class could be taught on the air as “educational programming,” and so it was. Many folks still remember the beginning of his show: women walking in one line across a vast landscape of arid soil, balancing pots upon their heads as the rhythmic and haunting “Mars, Bringer of War” from Holst’s “The Planets” thundered in the background.
Burke stood in front of a globe and a map and challenged his viewers to think. Newspapers took notice immediately and called him an “essayist.” Later, as he and television became better known, he was commonly referred to as a political commentator. But frankly, it was hard to label Burke, because there was no one quite like him.
So who was he? Burke was the first to use television to show the close relationship between the environment, natural resources and their importance to our own well-being and freedom. He passionately explained the connections between natural resources and national security, a topic that evolved into what is now termed “environmental security.”
This was in 1951, more than a decade before the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962.
The son of immigrants, he spoke knowingly about war — war of words in the classroom, war on the battlefield, and the war being waged on the environment by Americans who were anxious to leave Word War II behind and build everything from residential neighborhoods to atomic weapons. Burke was extremely worried about our diminishing natural resources, most particularly about our nation’s dependency on oil and that it was coming from the Middle East. In his 1962 book “Enough Good Men,” he specifically warned:
“Remember Suez, and what cutting off just one important raw material, oil, did to every European economy? That can be repeated indefinitely by means short of war such as political and economic influence in the affairs of the countries exporting raw materials.”
Burke’s weekly topics covered many emerging issues, but mostly he provided a way of thinking. He related disparate and remote topics into a single tapestry of understanding. For example, he discussed the breaking of a treaty with the Choctaw by the opening of the Oklahoma territory to farmers. He then related that event to one of the most disastrous environmental events of the last century: the turning over of fragile prairie sod for planting that left it exposed to eroding winds, causing the great dust bowls of the 1930s.
He also explained the geographical miracle that was the United States in terms of its plentiful rainfall coming in the right patterns; and its soil, which when not abused, provided plentiful agricultural bounties. This, along with immense mineral wealth and other natural resources, belied the myth some imagined was due to “manifest destiny” and accounted for our pre-eminence in the world.
His uncanny ability to relate the environment to then-emerging problems that included topics such as organized crime and the Mafia even gave him the ear of President John F. Kennedy, who quietly visited him for long talks at his office-trailer deep in the woods of Cheshire.
By using television as a means to teach, Burke whetted our appetite for scientific inquiry and set the stage for acceptance of many environmentalists to follow, an A-list that included such luminaries as Barry Commoner and Karl-Henrik Robert.
Through the 1950s, as his star rose, the show moved to Channel 3 and picked up Hartford National Bank as a sponsor. The bank was kind enough to provide viewers with a free transcript each week. By then the show’s title changed to “Challenge,” “Survival,” and then later to “A Way of Thinking” and “The Cutting Edge.”
Finally, in the early to mid-1960s, when the show was broadcast nationwide on NBC in New York, it was known as “Probe.” Many of his scripts were condensed into his 1962 book “Enough Good Men: A Way of Thinking.” If there could be said to be any underlying theme, it might be characterized as relating our freedom and physical security to the welfare of the environment around us.
He was of his time, and way ahead of it.
• Joel Gordes is an independent energy consultant in West Hartford. Helen Burke Weber is Albert Burke’s daughter and lives in California. She is currently editing material for a biography on his life and planning the Burke Center for Environmental and International Affairs.
I have a stack(25) of telecast transcripts from “A Way of Thinking” that I inherited from a dear friend who clearly admired Mr. Burke. I imagine these are easy to find? If you want copies I can provide them for you.
Happy Earth Day Today and Every Day
From your good friends at
The Apocalypse Corporation
(great post by the way Mr. Stillinger)
Bill, thanks for an inspiring and thoughtful post. We really do stand on the shoulders of giants, don’t we?
Thank you, Bill, for your thoughtful post.
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I’m very glad you found us, and I hope the site continues to provide posts and other things that you find useful.
Can someone help me track down Helen Burke. My father, Harold Olin Grant, was a close confidant of Dr. Burke throughout the years. I remember going to Dr. Burke’s trailer office in the woods of Cheshire, CT as a young boy and playing in the woods while my dad would vistit with Albert….sometimes for hours on end.
My dad passed away on April 22, 1992. Dr. Burke was in contact with my mom within hours of his passing but nobody ever contacted him regarding my dads death. Dr. Burke came to Wallingford, Ct and asked if he could spend some moments alone with my dad’s body. I remember being there at the funeral home when this happened. I will never forget my last time seeing Dr. Burke. He came out of the room where my dad’s body lay, hugged and kissed my mom and sister then turned to me and said ” your dad was a great man and was my very best friend. I will never forget him.”
He turned and walked out of the funeral home and we never saw or heard from him again.
I would love to speak with Helen and share some things with her about what I remembered from her father’s visits at our house with my dad.
About 50 years ago I heard Dr. Burke speak inSacramento. During theQ and A session, hewas asked what he thought about the government’s role in educaation and he replied something to the effect that he could’t be too objective, because he got a Ph. D. on the G.I. Bill. I was really impressed byDr. Burke and not only because of his being a Burke, but largely for his message regarding the water crisis in California! In the ’60′s no less! Now people are discovering the “water problem” !!!! as in the latest issue of Geographic. Thirstily yours
Russ Burke
I knew Dr. Burke and had the greatest respect for this wonderful person. He loved and respected his deceased wife and their beloved daughter. I know that he and his wife also had a son, but I do not recall his name.
We shared a common interest, older Pontiacs. We each had one.
My teenaged daughter and I used to watch Dr. Burke’s PBS presentations. They were arresting.
The world is poorer for his passing.
Patricia
I BELIEVE, BUT AM NOT CERTAIN, THAT HELEN LIVES IN CALIFORNIA.
DR. BURKE WAS A VERY SPECIAL PERSON AND A GOOD FRIEND. I THINK OF HIM OFTEN AND ABOUT THE GOOD LIFE THAT HE LED.
AS THEY SAY, “WE WILL NOT SEE THE LIKES OF HIM AGAIN.”