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The environment brought them together. And now, together, they've brought out a book on the environment. (No flip-flop jokes, please.)

John Kerry first met Teresa Heinz at an Earth Day rally in 1990. The two reconnected at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and then, three years later, wed. He continued to focus on the environment as a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, earning the title "Environmental Hero" from the League of Conservation Voters, while she continued her work as chair of the Heinz Family Philanthropies, a major grant maker in the areas of health and the environment.

Now, having survived a failed presidential bid, the political power couple has refocused on the issue that inspires them both. Their new book, This Moment on Earth: Today's New Environmentalists and Their Vision for the Future, highlights more than a dozen grassroots activists, most of whom they encountered on the campaign trail in 2004. The book is emphatically optimistic about the green movement: "environmentalism isn't dead," they write, "it's just being reborn -- the very idea of what it means to be an 'environmentalist' is being revolutionized. People from all walks of life, without concern for party or ideological lines, are coming together in unprecedented numbers across the globe."

This Moment on Earth, by John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry.

The duo introduce readers to people like Ellen Parker, a social worker from Cape Cod who battles cancer-linked pollutants, and Helen Reddout, an orchard owner in Washington state who struggles against fecal runoff from nearby dairy farms. Better-known figures like attorney and activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and green architect and designer Bill McDonough also make appearances. Throughout, the authors weave in their own experiences with the natural world -- from Heinz Kerry's childhood in the wilds of Mozambique to Sen. Kerry's environmental advocacy on Capitol Hill.

Last week they spoke with me from their home in Washington, D.C., about the characters in their book, their 2004 campaign experience, and the role the environment will play in the next presidential election.

There are so many topics that you could have covered on the heels of your 2004 election experience. Why did you decide to focus on the environment?

John Kerry: It presents the most important challenges in front of us.

Can you elaborate? There are certainly plenty of politicians and Americans who would argue that the war is the greatest challenge in front of us.

JK: Global climate change is a security issue on a planetary scale. There are millions of lives that may be impacted by it. But it's not just climate change that presents critical challenges -- it's overfishing, it's acidity in the oceans, it's the mercury in our lakes, streams, and rivers that contaminate our fish. What does it say about a country like ours when 40 percent of our rivers, lakes, and streams are too polluted for fishing or swimming? Our water bodies and air quality are challenged beyond any point in our history. It's a disgrace, and it's a challenge to all of us to get it right.

Your book is very hopeful. What inspired you to write a hopeful book at a time when the challenges are so vast?

JK: This is not at all a Chicken Little doomsday deal. There are tremendous economic opportunities in addressing these problems, climate change in particular. Here you can improve the environment and public health, but also create jobs and strengthen national security. The potential economic byproducts of addressing this issue are enormous. Not only that, the tipping point is near.

Teresa Heinz Kerry: The 2004 election convinced both of us of the need to connect the dots for people -- between the threats, the solutions, and all the concerned citizens who are working to reverse our downward course. We met so many wonderful people while campaigning who were tackling all different kinds of environmental challenges, and creating solutions at a grassroots level. We were very moved by this hopeful surge of activism.

Who were some of the most inspiring activists you met?

JK: The first story that comes to mind is that of Rick Dove, down in North Carolina. He's a 67-year-old Marine who became a fisherman in retirement with his son. They started developing lesions on their hands and loss of memory, as did other fishermen nearby. Suddenly they see literally tens of thousands of fish floating by over a period of time with sores on them, and they realized that this is all traceable back to the hog farming and the fecal matter that's being released straight into the river. So they take matters into their own hands -- challenging the authorities, enforcing the law, and holding people accountable. It's a wonderful story of a guy who had every right in the world to retire completely, but who sees a sense of duty, and responsibility, and goes out and does it. That's patriotism at its best.

THK: There's another interesting parallel to the Dove story. A few years back in the Chesapeake Bay area [of Maryland], pollution from local chicken farming triggered neurological problems -- paralysis and brain dysfunction -- among fishermen and boaters, and those affected mounted an impressive response. There are countless examples of people in different ways turning around what was illness, fear, and in some cases despair, into action that is very forceful, very practical, and quite successful.

But probably the most inspirational for me of them all is the one I've known the longest, which is Bill McDonough, a philosopher who dares to think beyond any normal constraint. He enlightened me to the connectedness of human health, the strength of our economy, and the well-being of our environment -- to the possibility of creating goods and services that simultaneously generate ecological, social, and economic value.

The activists you spotlight embody what you call a "bottom-up" approach to environmental activism. You argue that it's more effective than a "top-down" approach. How so?

THK: Whenever we've had systemic and sustainable change in this country, it's because the grassroots has been ready to accept it. Top-down activity from the government cannot take root unless there's bottom-up acceptance. In other words, I don't think the feds can implement aggressive, massive change unless there's a readiness at the ground level. I think we're at that moment right now.

JK: You're going to have to do both. You can't deal with global climate change unless there's a government policy to have carbon priced, to have an economy-wide cap, to create incentives for capital to flow toward solutions. But the pressure to make all that happen is going to come more from the bottom up. That's what spurred the first environmental movement in the 1970s when we got the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, marine mammal protections, and all those other laws. We believe that a similar explosion of grassroots activity is happening today.

It seems to me that the common thread that unites most of the activists you profile is environmental justice, and yet that term only comes up in a few instances in your book. Why did you decide not to use that as a unifying phrase?

JK: Many of the people we spoke with didn't consider themselves "environmentalists" or part of any particular movement -- they just thought they were making a commonsense choice between right and wrong. We'd ask, "Do you consider yourself an environmentalist?" And they'd invariably say, "Not really," or "No, I don't," or "I never think about it."

Ultimately, we believe, the labels are not important. In fact, the labels can sometimes get in the way -- they tend to polarize and isolate. What we want to do is prove that this is inclusive around a bigger set of values and principles that people can all embrace.

There's an impression among many Americans that you have to be well-off to live an eco-friendly life -- to afford organic arugula, a Prius, energy-saving devices, and the like. You both have the resources to build a green home, but what would you say to people who don't?

JK: It is absolutely true that people with resources have an easier time making these choices. But economies of scale are going to push a lot of these things down in cost, and they'll become far more accessible. You watch -- you're gonna see Wal-Mart and Costco and a bunch of people selling many green products and energy-saving home retrofits at affordable prices before very long.

Even now, people have choices -- you may not necessarily go organic, but you can go local, which tends to be a lot cleaner and cuts down on the energy used to ship the produce from far-off places.

Do you think the environment will play a greater role in the 2008 election than it did in 2004?

JK: Yes. We tried very hard [in 2004]. There wasn't one state where we didn't do a major environmental initiative of one kind or another. We did global warming, we did water quality, air quality, we did offshore drilling, wind farms, hog farms, energy independence. You name it, we did the issue. But the press didn't necessarily pick it up. On the heels of An Inconvenient Truth and the significant public awakening that it has sparked, I think the political climate has changed sufficiently that, indeed, this will probably be more of a cutting issue in 2008.

Do you think that other candidates will, or should, follow John Edwards' lead in making his campaign carbon-neutral and proposing 80 percent CO2 cuts by 2050?

JK: I think a lot of the candidates have been taking stands on the climate issue. Hillary Clinton supports a carbon cap. [Barack] Obama supports a carbon cap -- I think he's joined on to the bill I introduced in February with [Sen.] Olympia Snowe [R-Maine], that calls for a 65 percent reduction in greenhouse gases below 2000 levels by 2050.

Who do you see as the presidential candidate articulating the strongest environmental agenda?

JK: I'm not going to get into the presidential race right now. I will down the road probably articulate that, but at the moment, I just don't want to get involved in the '08 stuff.

Can you tell us about your own personal connection to the environment, how you take steps to lighten your own environmental footprint?

JK: Well, we've become much more conscious of it in the last couple of years, although as many as 11 years ago we built our house with a lot of energy efficiency in mind. More recently, we've become much more conscious of the carbon imprint, and we buy carbon credits. We've also shifted to hybrid vehicles -- not all of our cars, but I have a hybrid here in Washington, we have a hybrid in Massachusetts, we have a hybrid at our home in Idaho. We've changed almost all of our light bulbs. We're looking at solar installation and wind installation -- localized to home power. And we're going to continue to move down that road, very aggressively.

THK: I know for me the hardest thing, and the one I'm trying to work the hardest on, that really would impact me, is my flying schedule -- how to do the meetings that I have to do via video conferencing, and do less flying. That's hard for me, but that's where I'm trying to make improvements.

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To be, or not to be -- that is the age-old question, and civilization today faces its own dire version of it. As the negative social and ecological effects of 150 years of industrialization are becoming impossible to ignore, people are asking whether we can maintain our standards of living. But very few are asking if we should.

Dark days or bright opportunities?

Photo: iStockphoto

There are, however, two contemporary thinkers for whom this question is primal: William McDonough, green architect and designer, and Derrick Jensen, neo-tribal environmentalist and philosopher. They epitomize the vanguard of the new green zeitgeist. They are the elemental planners of a future sustainable society.

Both visionaries are mythically Shakespearean in the quirk, richness, and lyrical beauty of their respective evangelizing characters. But one is Establishment, the other Counterculture. One wears a bow tie, the other wears beads. One comes from the corporate aristocracy, educated at Dartmouth and Yale; the other from working-class Spokane, Wash. and the Colorado School of Mines. One founded three revolutionary companies; the other keeps the company of revolutionaries.

One was named Time Magazine's "Hero of the Planet" and is the only recipient of the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development. The other lists more modest encomiums, but to many in the movement, he is every bit as much a hero.

Though these two men share a common belief -- that industrial civilization, with its outrageous fortune, is killing the planet, plunging all life into a veritable sea of troubles -- they represent two sides of the most important question of our age: Is civilization worth saving?

McDonough says "yes," and is prepared to suffer the slings and arrows required to make it work. Jensen says "no," and is prepared, in a manner of speaking, to take up arms and end the whole experiment.

William McDonough.

Photo: Amy Graves/WireImage

The priest, by his very nature, derives his faith from pre-existing dogma, which he believes is the One True Way. In the case of William McDonough, the dogma is that technology and human ingenuity can solve virtually any crisis.

Some of McDonough's more prominent projects include the Lewis Center at Oberlin College, a building that was designed to clean its own wastewater and produce more energy than it consumes, and the famed Herman Miller Furniture factory in Michigan, which boosted productivity so much that the building paid for itself. He is co-creator of the design imprints GreenBlue and MBDC, which have become the harbingers of what McDonough calls "the next industrial revolution." Instead of an extractive, polluting, single-use "cradle to grave" system, McDonough promises everlasting economic life through his renewable Cradle to Cradle system.

McDonough sees civilization as a good thing, something worth saving, and chalks up our current environmental crisis to a kind of growing-pain mentality. He explains that our industrial childhood -- the Industrial Revolution -- was predicated on the cradle-to-grave lifecycle. Realizing the limits of this system, and its inherent social and environmental toxicity, he endeavored to create an industrial system that mimics the environment, which takes the principles of nature and applies them to design, and in many respects, integrates the built environment with the surrounding ecosystem.

He has become an archetype for the burgeoning field of "sustainable development," a traveling missionary proselytizing for the church of technology, bearing the gospel of "zero-impact, carbon neutral, closed-loop smart growth" -- a fancy way of saying that he designs buildings that are "like trees" and cities that are "like forests." He presides over the marriage of technology and ecology, and sends the two off with the church's blessing to be fruitful and multiply, bearing living, breathing structures that take care of themselves.

Imagine a building, enmeshed in the landscape, that harvests the energy of the sun, sequesters carbon and makes oxygen. Imagine on-site wetlands and botanical gardens recovering nutrients from circulating water. Fresh air, flowering plants, and daylight everywhere. Beauty and comfort for every inhabitant. A roof covered in soil and sedum to absorb the falling rain. Birds nesting and feeding in the building's verdant footprint. In short, a life-support system in harmony with energy flows, human souls, and other living things.

On the surface, his creed seems noble. But is it even possible?

Certainly on an individual-building scale. But his ultimate goal for civilization is not limited simply to a "paradigm shift" in design. He aspires to a more utopian ideal, totally rethinking how we live and work and prosper.

In McDonough's world, there would be no "trade secrets," which allow corporations to legally pollute in the name of profit. His world is a transparent one, where the Constitution still reigns, but "freedom" is not reinterpreted as the right to pollute, endanger, or destroy -- and our intentions are not measured by what is not against the law.

"Imagine an economy ... that purifies air, land, and water ...!" GreenBlue's website boldly claims. If only we'd listen to him, the growing crowd of acolytes wails, we'd have a chance of saving the planet and ourselves! We can have it all!

Though this priest is preaching hope and harmony, a prophet has appeared who is making people distinctly uncomfortable. He is preaching that the church of sustainability has gone astray by placing its faith in technology and valuing human life above all others. He believes the priests have become corrupt, and has nailed his theses to the door.

His prophesy is of a slightly more acerbic and apocalyptic nature, the man in the dark robe, staff in hand, barking in the marketplace of ideas, warning of the perils of hubris. He has gone into the wasteland of industrial society, with its dams and pavement and cell-phone towers, and returned to the ecosphere bearing tales of the end of days. But unlike the biblical Armageddon, this apocalypse is entirely human-made. It is what he calls the "culture of death" -- and what we call industrial civilization.

Portrait of Derrick Jensen, part of the Americans Who Tell The Truth collection by artist Robert Shetterly.

Derrick Jensen believes the current "civilization" -- a system of sprawl, consumerism, monoculture, industry, war, empire, and a near-total disregard for non-human life that relies on finite resources and is predicated on unlimited growth -- is, in a word, insane.

It should be noted that McDonough does not, in principle, disagree with this take on civilization's path so far. He says quite clearly, "This cradle to grave flow relies on brute force (including fossil fuels and large amounts of powerful chemicals). It seeks universal design solutions ("one size fits all"), overwhelming and ignoring natural and cultural diversity. And it produces massive amounts of waste -- something that in nature does not even exist."

But whereas McDonough believes all we need is faith in technology to persevere, Jensen believes civilization should be brought down as soon as possible in order to save the planet. So much damage has been done, he says, that it's not a matter of if, but when. The only question becomes, what are you doing to prepare yourself?

The moneychangers in the temple think he's nuts, not to mention bad for business. But when has the voice of truth ever been welcomed with a drink and a snack?

Jensen's two-volume, consciousness-shaping testimony Endgame takes as two of its central premises: civilization, especially industrial civilization, is not and can never be sustainable; and civilization is not redeemable. He believes we will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we can't get people to stop buying McMansions and SUVs, how on earth are we going to teach them to survive when there is no more food?

Moreover, continued development means less access to land, where access to land means access to self-sufficiency, which means access to life. "Land is primal," he says. "Everything else is based upon it, even culture. There cannot be only one culture." Because of this, Jensen claims sustainable development is "an obvious oxymoron," a "synonym for industrialization."

Despite the purportedly radical and fatalistic nature of his thinking, Jensen's analysis might be closer to the truth of our situation than the understandably alluring optimism of McDonough. For all his brilliance, McDonough's dependence on technology might be -- stressing might -- that fatal flaw, or at best, the myopia that keeps us spinning our wheels trying to save a system that ain't no good for us.

This thoroughly depressing idea may explain why, throughout history, the prophets were killed in unspeakable manners for being heretical, while the priests continued to promise a better life for the adherents, even in the face of destitution.

One thing is clear: ideologically speaking, neither would exist without the other. In this case, the natural but unwitting binary system between McDonough and Jensen serves to push the issue of sustainability further than before, folding space, continually challenging the very notions upon which our society rests, and forging ideas for a new, perhaps even better future for life on this planet.

Regardless of the rationality of our need for change, it won't be easy, or pleasant, and it will probably end up looking a lot different than the way things are now. Revolutions tend to do that.

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The way China has catapulted itself onto the Monopoly board of global capitalism has caught most Western leaders on the hop. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid looking back at their pursuers, top U.S. and European Union businesspeople are wondering, "Who are those guys?"

Yuan-a make a deal?

After all, how much do we know about the China National Petroleum Corp., which yesterday bid $4.18 billion for PetroKazakhstan, a Canadian oil company with big reserves in Central Asia? Or Haier, which earlier this year tried to nab U.S. white-goods company Maytag? Or Lenovo, which bought IBM's PC business? How do you pronounce corporate acronyms like CNOOC (the China National Offshore Oil Corp., which recently tried to purchase Unocal), SAIC (the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp., which fought Nanjing Automotive Corp. for Britain's Rover), or TCL (the TV company that bought France's Thomson Electronics)?

China has been a global trade presence since well before Marco Polo trekked there, but, as the recent flurry of successful and attempted acquisitions of major Western brands suggests, its influence has surged of late. If you like the German spectator sport of schadenfreude, one delicious consequence of this is watching presidents, prime ministers, and CEOs from other nations scramble for position in the rapidly rearranging global business turf. Countless commentators have raised questions about the economic and global security implications of this rearrangement, but the murmur about the potential environmental and social consequences has been far more subdued.

Take CNOOC. Earlier this month, the company withdrew its $18.5 billion offer to buy Unocal in the wake of a political firestorm in the United States. That firestorm was triggered not by the company's corporate-responsibility record, which would have been a reasonable subject for discussion, but rather by the idea of selling off a U.S. oil company that some regard as a national strategic asset. On that issue, we go along with Thomas Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times that, "if China wants to overpay for a second-tier U.S. energy company, that's China's business. Anyway, the more starved Americans are for oil, the sooner we will adopt alternatives and get off this drug once and for all."

But Friedman made a deeper point -- one that's not going away with the CNOOC bid off the table. As he put it, China and America have become economic "Siamese twins." He writes, "We have slipped into a symbiotic relationship with another major power that is neither a free market nor a democracy." That, surely, is the real issue. How can we help bring China -- and other emerging economies -- up to speed on environmental, human-rights, and anticorruption protections?

One major obstacle to doing so is the hypocrisy of many Western approaches to globalization. After years of insisting they were 100 percent committed to free markets and no-holds-barred globalization, political and business leaders in the U.S. and E.U. are having their bluff called by China, Inc. From the East looking West, it's increasingly clear that, in fact, Americans were 100 percent committed to Americanization, Europeans to Europeanization, and so on. It's hardly surprising, then, if some Chinese business leaders view Western concerns about corporate social responsibility and sustainable development as little more than protectionist trade barriers.

Still, that hardly makes legitimate concerns about the environment and worker rights disappear. Today's China is awash in contrasts. The newest factories, whether churning out cars or pharmaceuticals, are among the best in the world. At the same time, the country has some of the worst sweatshops and some of the most dangerous working conditions; think of the endless stream of coal-mine disasters that kill hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese miners every year.

The civil society and nongovernmental-organization (NGO) sectors are gradually gaining their feet, but those feet are still tightly bound by government controls that massively constrain NGO evolution and censor what such organizations can say. Instead of expanding civil liberties and liberalizing economic policy simultaneously (as some other governments are doing), China's leaders are trying to increase economic health while maintaining tight political controls -- in the hope, apparently, that wealth will suppress the nascent appetite for democracy.

It's hard to say whether this high-stakes gamble will succeed. On the one hand, Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang recently told a closed meeting that 3.76 million Chinese took part in 74,000 mass protests last year alone. On the other, such public activism can hardly be taken for granted; the London Times reported last week that China has created elite police squads in 36 cities to crush protests.

What is certain, though, is that anything that enables China to operate without civil-sector watchdogs should make the rest of us uneasy, not just about the nation's growing economic clout, but also about its environmental reach. (Air pollution from the country's great urban-industrial concentrations is now turning up as far afield as Canada. And that's to say nothing of the country's coal-powered carbon-dioxide emissions that will help accelerate global climate change.) In a July 2005 survey by Toronto-based polling company GlobeScan, over 300 sustainability experts worldwide were asked whether they thought China would adopt the "best environmental and energy technologies and practices available." Forty-four percent thought it unlikely, against 28 percent who were confident that China would rise to the occasion.

One of the optimists is eco-designer Bill McDonough, whom we bumped into in Beijing, at the Fortune Global Forum this May. As chair of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development, he believes China will be forced to become a leading incubator of environmental innovation simply because the in-country collision between people's needs and the ability of natural systems to support them is already so acute. As he notes, "The Chinese have to build new housing for 400 million people in 12 years." General Electric Chair and CEO Jeff Immelt also sees China's impending crises as a huge opportunity for sustainability solutions, telling Fortune, "While Europe has been a driver for innovation in cleaner technologies, China promises to be its market."

Having met people from CNOOC, PetroChina, and Sinopec, it's clear to us that sustainable development will be a tough sell in China. That said, we share McDonough and Immelt's optimism, not least because of two meetings we had with Vice Minister Pan Yue, deputy director of the State Environment Protection Administration. He and SEPA have stalled dozens of major development projects that ignored environmental laws. The fact that anyone would even try to stop the juggernaut, let alone succeed, is encouraging.

We owe people like Pan all the support we can offer. We must use the oft-claimed leverage gained by engaging China as a trade partner to help its leaders and citizens fight for new rights and responsibilities. Otherwise, we risk having our own undermined.

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Kevin Doyle.

With what environmental organization are you affiliated?

I'm one of two national program directors at The Environmental Careers Organization (authors of the new book The ECO Guide to Careers That Make a Difference -- see below). At least, that's my current title. I've worked for ECO since 1984, and in that time I've been Pacific Northwest regional director, national general manager, director of programs, director of development, director of program development, and four to five other titles. I like to move around and do different things, and I'm fortunate that ECO has needed an executive to do exactly that over the years. If you're going to stay at the same organization for over 20 years, it helps to shake things up every two or three years.

What does your organization do?

ECO operates paid internship and fellowship programs for future environmental professionals. We have more than 20 different programs that recruit and place college students and recent graduates on challenging, professional-level assignments at government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and private companies. Every year, we hire over 530 new "associates," and we put them to work on assignments that range from three months to two years in length. All associates work full-time, and all earn competitive stipends or salaries.

Most of our associates (sometimes also called interns or fellows) are placed at agencies in the federal government. We also have programs with nonprofit organizations, including a Boston Environmental Justice Leadership Program here, and a Sustainable Communities Leadership Program in California.

What do you really do, on a day-to-day basis?

Ha! If I even have an "official" job description, it's almost certainly something we wrote just to have it in the file. What I really do on a day-to-day basis varies wildly.

Over the last two years, I had the incredible pleasure of working with a woman named Beth Ginsberg, who is now a corporate accountability program manager at CERES (Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies) here in Boston. We both believe that "environmental" work has become a subset of "sustainable economy" work, and that this change has widespread implications for how people prepare for environmental careers, and how they define success after graduation from undergraduate or graduate school.

We came up with the idea of a book that would essentially be a set of conversations with leading innovators, activists, businesspeople, and scholars like architect Bill McDonough, ecotourism leader Martha Honey, conservation biologist Stuart Pimm, and environmental justice scholar Robert Bullard, among others. From there, Beth did most of the work! But, like so many program directors, I end up sharing the credit for The ECO Guide to Careers That Make a Difference.

How many emails are currently in your inbox?

I have 21 emails in my mailbox, several of which are from college students and job seekers looking for help. ECO gets something like 25,000 unique visitors to our website every month. People really want to do this work.

Who's the biggest pain in the ass you have to deal with?

OK, I'm supposed to be honest here, right? I think the biggest pain for me is people who talk a good game about how important ecological protection or sustainable economics is, but who seem to have only bumper-sticker understanding of what's actually involved. Or, conversely, people who are convinced that environmental problems are way overblown, but obviously don't know what they're talking about once the conversation gets one level below the surface.

Our ecological, social-justice, and economic security crisis is so important, and so complex. The older I get, the more frustrated I get by sloppy thinking -- including my own!

Who's nicer than you would expect?

I'm glad you asked. It gives me a chance to offer applause to two groups of people that take so many unfair hits: federal government environmental employees and corporate environmental managers. So many of these people are struggling every day to make their huge and hidebound institutions more effective. Just as one example, I think the people who staff the refuges of the national Fish and Wildlife system are national heroes. And they are just so nice.

Where were you born? Where do you live now?

Born in Brainard, Minn. Grew up in Fairfield, Iowa. Live with my wife, Deb Mapes, in Watertown, Mass., a couple of miles from Harvard Square.

What do you consider your environmental coming-of-age moment or experience?

I'm absolutely a bookworm, and environmentalism came to me from books. Thoreau's Walden, E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, anything and everything by Wendell Berry, the Worldwatch "State of the World" reports, RAIN magazine, text books, science books, and so forth.

I've had a chance to talk to hundreds of people about their answer to this question, and I've been struck by how many people trace their moment to outdoor recreation. I was actually well along in years before wild nature really began to move me. It was really books, ideas, and politics that got me going. Now, it's people.

What has been the worst moment in your professional life to date?

It is very much connected to the comment above about knowing your stuff. I gave a university talk all full of passion about the need to put a finger in the dike that holds back ecological destruction, and a scientist in the audience skewered me -- demonstrated through his questions that I just really didn't know what I was talking about. Very, very bad day.

What's been the best?

Much harder to answer -- impossible, actually. I have an awful lot of good days. Leading an ECO workshop or conversation that really connects is pretty high on the list. Connecting people who need to be connected is right up there. Sending off a final manuscript! That feels very good.

What environmental offense has infuriated you the most?

The media response to Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist and similar books and articles just makes me want to scream. Not Lomborg himself, but the way the media tries to achieve "balance" on environmental concerns with simplistic "for and against" debate formats that shed lots of heat, but no light at all. We desperately need better political journalism, environmental journalism, and science journalism.

[Editor's note: See non-faux-balanced Grist coverage of Lomborg here.]

Who is your environmental hero?

I have three kinds of heroes -- thinkers, professionals/managers, and citizens. And they are far, far too many to mention, so I'll just name a tiny handful.

Of thinkers, Wendell Berry is definitely a hero. Perhaps because I grew up in a small town in the rural Midwest (although not as a farm boy), his thoughts really resonate with me. I don't agree with everything he has to say, but he cuts through so much B.S., and he writes like a dream. Jeremy Rifkin always gives me food for thought, too.

Among professionals/managers, I have a great respect for the career of Gus Speth, who is now the head of Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, but who seems to have done just about everything.

Closer to home, I have a freelance environmental journalist friend just down the road named Dan Grossman, whom I admire greatly -- and not only for his work. Even as a citizen and a parent, he's a good model for environmentally sound living that isn't all grim and self-sacrificing.

Who is your environmental nightmare?

Any smug person who doesn't want to think about the consequences of their actions on other people, the natural world, or the future.

What's your environmental vice?

Well, there's certainly more than one! One that I'm not proud of is using more heat at home than I really need to. I mean, I could just put on a sweater.

How do you get around?

It is so easy to get around Boston by bus and subway -- and by walking. I really do try to avoid using the car whenever I can.

What are you reading these days?

Environmentalism and the Technologies of Tomorrow by Robert Olson. Great stuff. I also enjoyed The Hype About Hydrogen.

What's your favorite meal?

Breakfast! Granola, fruit, and soy milk with dark-roast black coffee. For dinner: striped bass, baby potatoes, asparagus, mixed greens, and wine.

Are you a news junkie? Where do you get your news?

Absolutely a news junkie. Boston Globe, New York Times, Economist magazine, E magazine, Environment, Nature (the summary parts anyway), Grist, SustainableBusiness.com, SolarAccess.com, ENN.com, government reports.

Which stereotype about environmentalists most fits you?

I would say that I'm a bit too reflexively left-wing in my politics, more skeptical of business than of government, and perhaps somewhat too harsh when judging fellow Americans. I'm an almost-vegetarian, too, if that's still an eco-stereotype.

What's your favorite place or ecosystem?

Easiest question yet -- Point Reyes National Seashore and surrounding area of Marin and Sonoma County in Northern California. It's bliss.

If you could institute by fiat one environmental reform, what would it be?

Make it government policy to reduce our fossil-fuel consumption by 50 percent in 20 years.

Would you label yourself an environmentalist?

I would absolutely call myself an environmentalist, and proudly. To me, an environmentalist is a person who actively considers the long-term needs of other living beings, and of the natural systems that support them, in all personal and political decisions.

What's one thing the environmental movement is doing particularly well?

Maintaining and expanding the national consensus that development sprawl isn't a great thing, and that we can do something about it through policy, land purchases, and so forth. There was a great op-ed in The New York Times by Will Rogers, head of the Trust for Public Land, showing that even as President Bush was winning the presidency with a less-than-stellar environmental record, people everywhere were approving bond issues and other measures aimed at protecting land and water resources they care about.

What's one thing the environmental movement is doing badly, and how could they do it better?

We're failing to make the case that ecological health, economic security, and social justice are mutually reinforcing goals, not competing interests. To do better, we need to highlight examples that people can really relate to without using technical jargon or policyspeak. We really need to work on our language -- telling the story of sustainability through stories and concepts that are part of our current everyday world.

What important environmental issue is frequently overlooked?

The plight of environmental refugees -- people whose lives or livelihoods are adversely affected by senseless ecological destruction that leads to floods, drought, desertification, deforestation, coastal erosion, and so forth.

What was your favorite band when you were 18? How about now?

Definitely The Who when I was 18. Now, at 47, I tend more toward U2, but I also have a real soft spot for all singers -- past (Ella Fitzgerald) and present (Diana Krall) -- who can do a good job with the great American songbook of Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Rogers and Hart, and all those guys.

What's your favorite TV show? Movie?

Currently, The West Wing is about the only show Deb and I watch, unless the Red Sox are playing. We just saw Sideways at the theater, and loved it. Past movies? Anyone who doesn't appreciate All the King's Men needs help.

If you could have every InterActivist reader do one thing, what would it be?

Spend some serious time thinking about what would need to happen for your own community to be "sustainable." Then start talking with other people about it.

Dreamwork

Kevin Doyle, The Environmental Careers Organization.

Which environment-related fields do you see growing fastest right now? What type of jobs do you see declining in the future?    -- Name not provided, Nashville, Tenn.

There are several answers to this question posted on the ECO website. If you go to our Career Tips section and click on the one for September 2004, you'll find detailed data on growth rates (up, down, or steady) on several representative job titles, along with salary information. Also, if you visit our publications section, you can read (or download) the introductory chapter of our 1999 career guide, with answers that are still fairly accurate. Click on The Complete Guide to Environmental Careers in the 21st Century and read chapter one.

Finally, if you read our 2004 book, you'll find a sector-by-sector breakdown with answers to the "what's hot and what's not" question. The book is called The ECO Guide to Careers That Make a Difference: Environmental Work for a Sustainable World.

If those sources don't give you what you're looking for, here's a short list of ten job titles that seem pretty fast-growing right now. Keep in mind that "fast growing" can be measured against a very small base (with the result that the total number of jobs is still small), or it can be measured against a large base (with the result that almost anyone with a background in that field gets lots of job offers).

Kevin's extremely subjective list of growing environmental jobs:
Conservation biologists Ecosystems managers Information systems/geographic information systems specialists Global climate-change scientists/researchers Renewable-energy specialists/energy management Environmental/land use/regional planners Policy integration specialists Community organizers Fundraisers (nonprofit), or business development pros (for profit) Industrial ecologists "Dual track" environmental professionals (e.g. economics and engineering, environmental science and MBA, etc.) Environmental health/public health professionals Fuel-cell researchers/engineers For another take, here's a list of "expanding professions in an eco-economy" from the Earth Policy Institute's excellent book Eco-Economy by Lester Brown:
Wind meteorologists Family-planning midwives Foresters Hydrologists Recycling engineers Aquacultural veterinarians Ecological economists Geothermal geologists Environmental architects Bicycle mechanics Wind turbine engineers

In all the punditry concerning the "hydrogen economy" and the alternative-energy industry, no one ever talks about jobs. Will an alternative-energy infrastructure be able to replace or even exceed the job opportunities currently provided by our petroleum-based economy?    -- Nick Gray, Dayton, Ohio

Maybe I just hang out in a geeky crowd, but I find that there is a lot of talk about the employment impact of shifting from fossil fuels to more environmentally benign energy sources. You're right, however, that there is no short answer to the question of how the final jobs equation will balance out. That's largely because all of our projections are guesstimates, based on different assumptions about which direction we'll take. So, the comments below are some impressions from the conversation that's going on out there, with some suggestions for websites and reports that you might look at to join the conversation.

Let's start with the resources. Good places to visit regularly are: Renewable Energy Access, Clean Edge, GreenBiz.com (my favorite starting place for energy resources), Rocky Mountain Institute, American Wind Energy Association, National Hydrogen Association, Renewable Energy Policy Project, Solar Energy Industries Association, and Earth Policy Institute.

If you consider that major energy users are heating/cooling/lighting buildings, and need electricity for appliances/equipment, transportation, and manufacturing, then a few things become apparent.

First, the single most important "alternative" energy source is conservation, by far. We could generate huge numbers of jobs simply through retrofitting structures and industrial processes to be more energy efficient. Of course, these wouldn't be positions for "environmental" professionals (much less for the chattering policy class), but they would be real jobs nonetheless. If we added upgrading to passive solar when appropriate, that's many more jobs for the construction trade.

Second, if we talk just about the generation and transmission of energy, we find that renewables such as solar, wind, and biomass (taken together) create jobs at a much higher rate than non-renewable energy, when manufacturing, installation, operations, and maintenance are accounted for. Want proof? Check out an April 2004 report from the University of California's Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory.

Third, it's not for nothing that investors and policy types are salivating over the potential for the fuel-cell industry. PricewaterhouseCoopers has predicted that by 2013, North American fuel-cell companies will provide jobs for up to 108,000 people on the manufacturing side alone.

Finally, if your question is primarily focused on the transportation sector, where the popular press is likely to compare our current gasoline-powered system with a possible hydrogen future, we're clearly in the realm of speculation. But one thing is for sure and that is that we'll get two waves of jobs -- one in the retrofitting of our current infrastructure and another in operating it. With that in mind, AP writer Mark Johnson has written: "General Motors Company estimates that it would cost $11.7 billion to build 6,500 hydrogen fuel stations in 100 metropolitan areas throughout the United States, and 5,200 more on national highways."

The bottom line? If one was looking for a public and private investment that would not only result in greater national security and ecological/public health, but also in jobs, the best place to go would be renewable energy. And I haven't even touched on the thousands of research jobs that our move away from fossil fuels will create.

Where would you suggest I focus to find a career that will leverage my corporate business skills (which do not include any sustainability work), but not require a substantial pay cut? Which types of green careers offer more competitive compensation? What resources are available to aid my transition? Any green headhunters out there?     -- John Street, San Francisco, Calif.

Boy, I wish I had a dime for every time I've been asked a question like this one. Where should I start? I guess the first thing to say is this -- there is no such thing as "sustainability" work generically, or "green careers" generically. There are only individual positions at government agencies, corporations, nonprofit groups, and academic institutions -- each with their own requirements and qualifications and quirky hiring managers. In short, "green" careers are no different than any other careers.

Are there jobs at places like the Environmental Protection Agency, Trust for Public Land, BP Solar, Tetra-Tech, Sierra Club, and other such places that "will leverage corporate business skills"? Of course there are! Every "green" business, for example, has a need for the same kind of people that all other businesses have -- finance, sales, marketing, accounting, IT, operations, PR, and so forth. And, generally speaking, green businesses (like other businesses) are aware that really talented people from another industry can bring these transferable skills to environmental businesses.

Like other industries, however, the environmental sector highly values success and experience in its own niche. If you lack such experience, you're at something of a competitive disadvantage, and you'll need to hone the sales pitch that makes people focus on the quality of what you do have, instead of the content knowledge and industry experience that you don't. That will be true of any kind of career shift, of course.

Now, about money. Since I don't know your personal situation, I can only speculate. My experience has been that people with strong managerial experience and proven results in one industry can be coached to make a good case for a roughly similar position in environmental work -- especially if they are coming from sales, marketing, finance, or IT. It's not easy, but it can be done.

If, however, you have been in a non-managerial position, or have a less-than-stellar resume, all bets are off. You may be priced out of the market because your current salary is less a marker of your ability than it is the result of "time and grade" salary increases. Once you are out of your current organization, you'll be competing against hungry, younger people who can and will work for less while producing similar results. That reality is not unique to the environmental workforce.

You asked about headhunters. There are some who specialize in the environmental sector, but usually they are looking for people who already have significant success in our niche. That's been my experience, anyway.

Finally, if the career search you hope to make is not only a jump from one industry to another, but from one whole professional field to another -- then you'll be fortunate to make the leap without a pay cut. Again, it can be done, but it's hard. For example, if you're currently a finance manager at a bank, and now want to be a conservation biologist at The Nature Conservancy (don't laugh! I get this kind of scenario all the time) -- you're not only going to take a pay cut, you're going to have to go back to school.

What advice would you give to someone interested in switching careers from an established career to a more enviro-related field? Is it necessary to go back to school to get an enviro-sounding degree even just to get one's foot in the door? Or is it possible to find an enviro-related job that utilizes one's more mundane business skills?     -- Jay, Michigan

See the answer to John, above, but think about these things also. A huge number of jobs at all "environmental" public and private organizations are unrelated to environmental content information. Here at ECO, for example, we have departments/divisions for finance, IT, operations, accounting, human resources, fundraising, communications, sales, marketing, and recruiting. None of these positions require a significant environmental background.

Try this technique: First, identify a person who is doing exactly the work that you would like to do. Be bold! Don't hold back. If your ideal job is running a scuba-diving-focused eco-tourism business in the Virgin Islands (even though you can't even swim), that's fine. Second, visit with the person you have identified and bring along a copy of your resume and a willingness to tell your personal story briefly. Third, ask the person you've identified the following question: "What is the gap I would need to close to be able to do the work that you are doing?" Fourth, really listen to the answer. Following those four steps is the very best way to get an answer to your question about whether or not you need to go back to school, and (if so) whether you actually need another degree, or just some new skill capacity.

What are the options for someone without experience looking for a full-time job in the environmental field? What if financial reasons preclude an internship as a viable option?     -- Name not provided, San Diego, Calif.

Hmm ... Do I sense a trend emerging here? Seems like there are lots of people who lack specific environmental education, experience, or skills (and who don't have a trust fund in the closet), but who really want to do this kind of work.

The single most important thing to do for anyone in this situation is to narrow your focus as much as you possibly can. If you don't have a lot of room for error and risk, it's critical that you know exactly what you want to do. The more specific you are, the more effective we career-guidance people can be in helping you craft a detailed strategy that will work. Some types of positions absolutely require experience (no exceptions), while others are less picky. But generic information about which is which will be of no use to you until you have a detailed answer to the question what do you want to do?

As an aside, however, it's also important to ask yourself how badly you want to do this work. It's interesting to me that people like singers, dancers, novelists, and athletes rarely ask about how they can get started without experience, or how they can avoid pay cuts. Why? Because singing, dancing, writing, or playing is such a passion that they can't imagine not doing it.

For those who don't yet have education or experience in environmental work, it might be useful to check your passion level, as well as your degrees and the work experience line on your resume. Ask: How badly do I want this? Am I willing to try and fail?

Does your organization, or another you know of, help connect retired people with useful work, paid or not?     -- Richard McNeil, Ithaca, N.Y.

The best resource that I know of is the Environmental Alliance for Senior Involvement. The Corporation for National & Community Service also has great opportunities for retired individuals, sometimes through AmeriCorps. Also look into organizations serving retired people which are not specifically environmental, such as SCORE and RSVP. Finally, most local nonprofit environmental groups would love to hear from you directly, even if you don't go through one of the organizations above.

Related Links:

Why won’t Lisa Jackson/Nancy Sutley visit a mountaintop removal site?

Senators opposed to Clean Energy Jobs Act are ignoring bill’s benefits to Americans—Part 2

Senators opposed to Clean Energy Jobs Act are ignoring bill’s benefits to Americans—Part 1

Some may cry nepotism when they see Andre Heinz, the middle son of Teresa Heinz Kerry, take to the podium as one of the leading spokespeople on the environment for John Kerry's presidential campaign, but his ascent is hardly without merit. True, he has deliberately steered clear of a career inside the Beltway, so in some senses he is new to the political scene. But having grown up in Washington, D.C., the son of former senator John Heinz (R-Penn.) and now the stepson of Kerry, he is as conversant on the inner workings of Capitol Hill as he is on the environmental principles he's been studying and working to implement for more than a decade.

Since graduating from college in 1992, Heinz has earned a master's degree in environmental studies from the Yale School of Forestry and spent years working closely with environmental luminaries including Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and William McDonough. He's become a student of the "industrial ecology" movement, which aims to shift global industry and economics toward sustainable strategies. For the past six years, Heinz has worked in Europe for The Natural Step, which advises government entities including the E.U. and the U.N. and companies ranging from Nike to McDonald's to BP on how to make their business models sustainable.

In the first long-form interview he has given to any media outlet -- three months on the campaign trail, he says, has been more than enough time to come to distrust the American press -- Heinz spoke with Grist about his equal devotion to his Republican roots and the Kerry campaign and his life as a self-proclaimed "resource pig."

You've been making regular campaign appearances where you have the opportunity to address the environmental problems of today with broad audiences. How does it feel to be on such a prominent platform?

It's both exciting and frustrating. It's exciting to try to represent the really progressive and, I think, farsighted ideas that you find in the proposals of the Kerry-Edwards platform, such as the plan for 20 percent renewable electricity by the year 2020 and aggressive proposals for becoming oil independent in the short term. That alone is amazing -- not to mention reengaging the world with the Kyoto Protocol, and protecting our wild areas, our forests, and our fisheries. It's a thrill to represent candidates who understand the real nature of nature, the real value -- intrinsic, subjective, and objective.

These are candidates who understand that by doing one thing you help achieve another goal. By having a 2020 goal you're also helping create the clean-technology markets of tomorrow. You're helping to make America better able to be a moral leader in the world.

And the frustration?

The frustration comes from not being able to say, at this stage, everything that might come to mind. You kind of want to promise the moon, at least I do, because you sense the urgency surrounding the challenges facing sustainable development in America. But I can only talk about what the Kerry-Edwards platform has thought out and proposed.

What are concrete environmental achievements that Kerry could make happen as president?

If he could do the 2020 plan, succeed there, and become independent of imported oil, that would be his biggest achievement. It would transform the economy, moving it closer to a carbon-free, hydrogen-based system. It would address climate-change concerns and national security. It would gain us allies internationally. We could help developing nations materialize by leapfrogging into clean technology, without going through dirty industrial cycles. It would be gigantic.

How would Kerry handle the formidable industry forces he would face as president, which would be far stronger than any he has faced as a senator from a liberal, pro-environment state?

Those pro-industry forces aren't so much a threat as an opportunity, and John understands that as well as anybody. I think he will be able to bridge the divide between environment and industry as president. He's the one to drive home the message that moving toward sustainability is pro-industry. He knows how to make that argument and build support around it so people realize that they really do win, rather than some win and some lose. That's why I get so damned mad at the Bush administration for wasting time. The longer we wait, the more we'll fall behind our foreign competitors in the global market for green technologies, the harder the decisions will have to be, the more people will lose. We'll have big losers -- not just from an environmental standpoint, but the costs to industry will get increasingly severe.

Do you plan to play a role in the administration if John Kerry wins the election?

Right now I'm focused only on what happens between now and November, and I can't predict beyond that. I'm in a position where, arguably, I could have some influence on a potential Kerry administration with regard to the question surrounding sustainability. Whether or not that translates into my having a direct, public role would remain to be seen. The only thing I feel first and foremost is that I would never want to have influence solely due to who I am. Access, fine. But I would want influence due solely to the merits of the ideas.

Have you always -- or ever -- been interested in entering politics?

I've always shunned politics because I grew up in Washington. I did not like the people I often ran into in D.C. who were there clearly because they were wide-eyed and titillated at being around the power center. I didn't like the sycophants, I didn't like people with hidden agendas. I didn't know how my dad could [deal with] that. With my father, I thought, "Here's a great public servant. Here's a guy who's got a stomach of steel so he can put up with the nonsense and keep his eye on the prize and do the right thing." I don't think I have that sort of patience.

After your experience on the campaign trail so far, have you become more or less interested in going into politics?

The nice thing is that on the campaign trail, you meet normal people. When we did the Boston-to-Oregon trip after the convention -- on train, on boat, on plane -- we'd meet the normal, good folks who come out. You read the hope in their eyes, you read the concern in their face, you feel it in their hand, and there's no BS there.

I always thought that even though I was kind of built like a politician -- I feel comfortable speaking in public, and I spend a lot of my free time thinking about making things better -- it wasn't for me. But on the campaign trail you're often confronted with reminders of why you're doing it. That said, I don't know yet whether I am more or less likely to go into politics.

Are you a Republican like your father?

I grew up a Republican. But now I actually decline to state. In Pennsylvania you have several options; one is you check a box saying "decline to state."

As a spokesperson for the Kerry campaign, and someone helping to pull in blue votes, does that make you a Democrat?

No. I've always had the philosophy that you vote for the person, not the party. The assumption is that you can only associate with people in the same party, and I think that is a very divisive set of rules to live by.

Having been raised Republican, I always wanted to make sure the Republican Party had people that were talking some common sense. The Republican Party today is not at all the Republican Party that I observed growing up -- it is extremist, liberal, dangerous, fundamentalist, naive, romanticist. They are as scary as I could possibly imagine. They're not conservative, they're not prudent. Quite frankly, they're not Republican.

How big of a role will the environment play in this election?

I think more than in previous elections. But not as big a role as it could have if the Bush administration hadn't been so masterful at rolling back all of these hard-fought environmental victories and keeping it all under the radar. Over the past two years there has been better coverage of what is going on, and people are connecting the dots better, but still so much is untouched. If our worst fears are true about the Cheney energy task force, for instance, and if that hidden information had come to light, how might that have affected the election? The effect would have been huge.

What concerns you most about Bush's environmental rollbacks?

People often say the biggest concern is that Bush puts industry interests first at the expense of public interest. But I would clarify it this way: Bush does the bidding of certain industries and certain voices within industry. There are some who would be ready to make the move toward sustainability with the right leadership or a few incentives.

More importantly, for all industry, Bush is their gravedigger. He's the worst business leader as a president we've had. He sticks his head in the sand. He doesn't realize that the markets of tomorrow are already being defined and will continue to be increasingly defined by the indisputable fact that we have fewer and fewer resources, and more and more pollution on our planet, and the dynamic is being accelerated as a function of more people with higher standards of living at high levels of certain kinds of materialization worldwide.

What would four more years of Bush mean?

It would mean another four years of Americans dragging their asses with respect to modernization. Imagine the rest of the world gets to a level four years from now where they go, OK, we've got huge purchase orders for clean technologies from India and China, the economies of the other countries have grown. America is all of a sudden the one that can provide only the dirty services, only the dirty products.

Four more years of Bush would mean less and less regulation; more and more localized pollution; more and more globalized pollution; more and more externalization of problems in other nations; less and less international goodwill.

Do you think there are inevitable ethical compromises that come with the role of a politician?

I don't think there are any inevitable ethical compromises. I think it's inevitable that you will be faced with choices, and one choice could be to compromise yourself, and the other is not.

I would think, though, that the theater of politics -- the media, the pageantry, the oversimplification of the messaging that's required -- inevitably presents ethical conflicts. You are forced to oversimplify things.

That's precisely why I hardly ever do interviews. Most of these folks want a sound bite, and it drives me bananas. I can't believe how in America today we've gotten so far away, as a culture in general, from making time during our day to actually listen and think. It's an American problem. In Sweden, where I've spent considerable time these last five years, the political process is so different, and one of the ways you can sense that is the reporting and coverage of it. There is a consistency between how it's covered and how it's conducted. If you were to just repeat sound bites all the time and name-call and lie, you would be considered a Neanderthal back from the deep freeze. Here it is par for the course. And it's very sad because what in the hell are people making their decisions based upon?

Kerry seems to have gone out of his way to avoid oversimplification, to talk in shades of gray -- and of course he gets slammed by the other side for flip-flopping.

Despite the pressures, despite the pundits, despite the hammering in the press that he takes for not slinging crap and mud back at the other side, for not being exciting, despite it all he doesn't buckle. He believes that people deserve to be told clearly what they're being offered. I think he believes in people making informed choices and taking responsibility for those choices.

You've made the environment the central focus of your career. Where did it begin?

It all started back in 1992 when I graduated from college. It was no mystery to me then that the environment was an incredibly important issue. It's something most young people understand inherently, intuitively -- that the conditions are getting worse and worse. At that time, there was an increasing focus on global and environmental problems. There had been a lot of talk about the impact of tuna fishing on dolphins, about climate change, endangered species, deforestation. For me, as an English major at Georgetown University, I thought, what am I going to do about this?

I got involved with Campus Green Vote, which was a nonprofit, nonpartisan campaign organized around the idea of using the environment as the impetus for getting students to vote.

Did you stay on this political track?

Not exactly. After that, I kind of knocked on doors of environmental organizations in Washington and met a lot of really smart people who were doing great work, but none of it really spoke to me. It wasn't until early 1993 when I met Bill McDonough, the green architect. It clicked. I'd finally met someone who could articulate a way of seeing the world and its problems in the way that I felt. I felt something was missing, and he could explain why. We have a design problem, as he puts it. We're designing without principles. We are taking, making, and wasting things according to a very linear, cradle-to-grave design process, which is not something that fits very well within the natural word.

And you began to work with him?

I was a project assistant for Bill for the next year, working on things ranging from sustainable community planning for one of the Lakota reservations, to working with city planning for Chattanooga, Tenn., to collaborating with different ecological thinkers like Paul Hawken and the chemist Michael Braungart on various forms of industrial ecology. It was really fast exposure in one year.

Later, in 1994, Paul Hawken gave me a call and said, "You might consider coming to Boston for this meeting. It's the organization of The Natural Step. I think you'd like it." There was never a truer word spoken. I went to the meeting and was just completely jazzed. It was the same feeling I had when I met Bill, but more so. The same sense, the same logic, the same click. It's an attractive pedagogy based on basic scientific principles -- a transparent and an intellectually tight way to recruit people into a constructive dialogue around sustainable design, investment, planning, and thinking.

At that point Paul asked if I wanted to work for him. I spent a year as a research assistant on the book he wrote with Amory and Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism. [Editor's note: Read an excerpt from Natural Capitalism, about making the shift toward a sustainable economy.]

Thereafter I decided to go to grad school at the Yale School of Forestry. I had been working with visionary folk on the environment, but I didn't have a very traditional grounding in the field. I thought that the mainstream viewed them, in many cases, as fringe. I thought that if they had certain kinds of resistance to their ideas, it would be even harder for me without having some kind of credential.

How did you take to academia after all the visionary work?

At the end of the two-year experience, I basically concluded that what I had been learning from the other folks was even more valid. So I went to work for The Natural Step in Sweden as the director of international affairs. It was a combination of management and administration and communication. It was a really cutting-edge place to be. After two and a half years of that, I decided I wanted to get deeper into the actual work of The Natural Step, which is to say the advising services that we perform for governments and companies. So I've been consulting with them in Europe and the States and traveling a lot, up until the last several months, when I've been strictly campaign-oriented.

What do you see as the biggest weaknesses within the environmental movement?

I think to some extent we can be our own greatest enemy. There are a lot of egos in the environmental community. It has been a field launched by charismatic personalities because these are people who had to go it alone -- they had to stand up like Davids to the Goliath, in the face of huge odds. But big egos don't fit so well in the same room.

We also tend to believe that if you have any experience or perspective that is grounded in a mainstream business or public-policy perspective, that you are incompatible with the environmental movement. Because of that we organize ourselves sub-optimally. We tend not to have good management skills. On the whole, we don't actually understand the benefits of marketing, financial planning, communication, legal protection, and all the things you need nowadays to maximize your time and power and money down the line.

Does your environmental concern come from your family?

Absolutely. It's hard for me to figure out where the policy and political talk started and stopped. We talked about everything all the time as a family, about the world, people, what's going on.

I remember the environment coming up as a topic in the mid- to late '80s and early '90s. For example, dolphin-safe tuna. This was an issue close to us because the Heinz company owned Starkist and we were thinking, wait a second, what's happening here? Is Heinz unintentionally involved in decimating the dolphin population? I remember my mom talking to the then-CEO about it.

We know your mother is an active environmentalist. Did your father have as much of an influence on your environmental interests as your mom did?

Yes, from two perspectives. It was something we talked about together from a policy standpoint, but he also taught me an appreciation of the outdoors. We fished together, walked together; he loved spending time on the farm and very much respected the value of nature and wilderness.

What about you personally? Are your personal habits environmentally sensitive?

Not on average. My level of materialization because of my income and consumption choices is much higher than the average person, so if you look at it that way I'm just a resource pig. With the amount of traveling that I do -- not just with the campaign, but traveling back and forth to the U.S. -- I will spend most of my afterlife in carbon debt hell. I am off the charts.

But for the most part I try to be mindful and conscious when I make purchase decisions or investment decisions -- from organic foods to compact fluorescents to taking public transportation to an investment portfolio.

There are certainly times when I say, you know what? I'm just going to do something that's really fun. Now it's just awful for the environment, but it's fun. Maybe I'll take a two-stroke motorboat out onto the lake, or drive a snowmobile or a sports car. The good news is that it's a motivating factor to try and pursue greener technologies so you can still have your zero-to-60-in-under-five-seconds but you do it on hydrogen. I would love to see someone create a quiet, biodiesel, hybrid-drive snowmobile.

Do you drive a sports car?

For practical purposes, I don't use a car. In Europe, I just take the bus and the train everywhere. I do have a two-seater gas-guzzler sports car, but I only drive it like once a year.

What make is it?

None of your business! [Laughter.] The reason I don't want to go into these details is that it brings attention to the wrong issues. I'm wary of cleaner-than-thou, holier-than-thou discussions. The central concern should not be about personal virtue, but how you are trying to change the world and whether your theories of change hold water.

Still, we are the consumers who are driving the demand for clean products and moving sustainable markets. Shouldn't we be held accountable for our personal decisions?

Sure, and I try to do my part in that. Let's put it this way: I'm somewhat ashamed to have a gas guzzler, but I'm relieved that I never get a chance to drive it. [Laughter.] My point is there are still those who say you can't talk to the environmental issue unless you live in a cave and wear a hair shirt. But I'm not sure that that's the best poster child for recruiting people to this movement. The future of the environmental movement is going to be less about asking people to change their lifestyle, and more about changing the rules that cause the footprint.

In other words, we have a design problem.

Yes, we have a design problem. Once you get that, once you see it, once you know it, it really alters the way you think. You always want to relate everything that's being done back to the overall question: Is this moving us closer to or farther from the goals for a sustainable society? What we need to do is get our leaders in industry and policy to see that. And despite the tremendous obstacles posed by the current administration, I think we're on our way.

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