Renowned journalist Bill Moyers has seen a thing or two during his career, including the incredible social change wrought during the LBJ administration. He talks with Grist about what it takes to change direction in America, whether it’s too late to act on climate, and what he thinks of climate skeptics.

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Grist catches up with The Yes Men—those high-minded pranksters behind the faux climate-week New York Post and the notorious SurvivaBall—to talk about runaway climate change, that Big Apple arrest, their plans for Copenhagen, and their latest movie, The Yes Men Fix the World, which comes out on October 7.

To get involved with The Yes Men in an effort they hope will be the largest international climate civil disobedience action of all time, visit www.beyondtalk.net.

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AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

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What do Stephen Baldwin, the Pope, and the Environment Minister of the Netherlands have in common? They're all getting hot and bothered about climate change, and they were all at the premiere of Age of Stupid. (OK, the Pope sent a lackey, but he totally would have been there if he could.) Umbra Fisk surveys the scene, talking with Heather Graham, Moby, and others about the future of the planet.

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We can't believe what's going on today either, Pete.Courtesy of The Age of Stupid

"Why didn't we stop climate change when we had the chance?" asks the main character of Franny Armstrong's new film, The Age of Stupid. Living in a world of climate catastrophe, this solitary character, played by Oscar-nominee Pete Postlethwaite, serves as humanity's moral hindsight from the year 2055. He scans video archives of events unfolding between 2004 and 2008, shocked that the world at that time knew it was flushing its future down the drain. Humankind's stubborn refusal to act on climate compels him to dub contemporary times "the age of stupid."

Fortunately, we don't (yet) live in this climate-ravaged scenario of the future, and we have opportunities like The Age of Stupid to knock our thick skulls into action.

Before The Age of Stupid's U.S. premiere in New York City on September 21, director Franny Armstrong took a few minutes to chat with me about the film's part documentary, part back-to-the-future format; its scare-tactics approach; and what it's supposed to inspire (or depress) you to do:

Look for big names at the film's eco-premiere Monday, such as former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, musicians Thom Yorke (Radiohead) and Moby, X Files actress Gillian Anderson, and our own Umbra Fisk, who will be appearing at -- if not walking down -- the green carpet that night. Check back here Tuesday for her video coverage. The live New York event and film screening will be simultaneously broadcast to 440 U.S. theaters Monday. However, if you don't catch The Age of Stupid at a local movie theater that night, you'll have to wait a while to see it on TV or DVD ... most likely after the Copenhagen international climate talks in December, and by then, Armstrong would argue, you'll likely be too late to have the most climate impact. Which would be stupid.

Synchronize your watches because The Age of Stupid film premiere is part of both the high-profile Climate Week NYC and the TckTckTck Campaign's Global Climate Wake-Up Call. Climate Week will see hundreds of world leaders in business and politics meeting in New York to address climate change in anticipation of the Copenhagen talks a mere seventy days away. The activist-organized Wake-Up Call is a day of rallies and actions to call on world leaders to commit to serious greenhouse gas reductions. Find (or organize) a Global Climate Wake-Up Call event near you on Monday, September 21.

The Age of Stupid looks to be an unforgiving examination of the actions (and inactions) of today, portending extreme consequences for mankind if it doesn't get its act together on climate. Will this film wake up the masses to the climate crisis or will its chilling predictions eventually be realized?

Watch the trailer and decide for yourself:

The Age of Stupid USA Trailer from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

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The following is an interview with Jason Burnett, who worked in the EPA under President GW Bush. In it, we discuss efforts by the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. Burnett quit the EPA in protest in June 2008, alleging interference from the Office of the Vice President.

The interview is meant as a supplement to the story, "Everything you always wanted to know about EPA greenhouse gas regulations, but were afraid to ask."

What was your job at EPA?

I was brought in to lead the response to the Mass v. EPA Supreme Court case, and to develop the first federal GHG regulations.

Did you work on both the endangerment finding and the rules?

Traditionally, EPA has collapsed both of those into one rulemaking -- they have, in the preamble to the rule, the discussion about endangerment. That's the sequencing we were planning to have. We were, at least initially, on a very fast clock. There was political desire to get everything done by the end of the administration's time [in office].

So you felt like you could get the rules out the door fairly quickly?

There was a pretty large, impressive team put on this, up to 100 people.

There's no question there was a change of course -- for an understandable, if not justifiable, reason: Congress was in the process of passing the Energy Independence & Security Act (EISA), which did much of what we were planning on doing through regulations.

There was never a strong desire -- I daresay, in many quarters outside of EPA, any desire -- to move on to the stationary sources, but the way the CAA works, after you touch the mobile sources you automatically and immediately have to deal with stationary sources. From the political perspective at the White House, it was an unfortunate side effect -- worth doing only because it advanced the goal of increasing fuel economy of cars and trucks and creating more volume for renewable and alternative fuels. After passage of the EISA, there was another way of accomplishing those same goals, and they didn't then need to deal with the stationary source ramifications, -- namely, the PSD/NSR challenge.

Did the Bush administration ever really think they could get out of it, or were they just kicking the can down the road?

There were some people who thought they could make an argument, which ultimately would lose. And other people who said, "we don't want to make superfluous legal arguments, we'll just figure some other way of delaying." Fortunately for the integrity of our court system, they did the latter, basically by saying, "this is really complicated and interconnected, and would benefit from public input, and therefore we're going to go out and talk about all the complications and interconnections."

How do you think the Obama EPA's rules will differ from what your team came up with?

I think they'll be different in two fundamental ways. One is, they're going to be more aggressive. Two, they're going to deal with the California waiver, because the Obama admin has now granted it, whereas the Bush administration denied it. Whether the California program is in force will affect how you design the federal program. So EPA need to make at least those two adjustments.

I'm not surprised we still haven't seen the proposed rule. They probably could have pushed it a little faster, but they probably wanted to give Congress time to work through legislation. Virtually everyone believes that legislation will be better.

I keep hearing that. Is it true?

It entirely depends on how good the legislation is. It would be very easy to improve upon what the CAA would do. I have at times pushed for very narrow CAA fix. You could address the most problematic or challenging parts of the CAA in a very surgical way. At the other extreme is to pass the comprehensive, 1000-plus page bill.

How could the CAA be made more suited to the challenge of regulating CO2?

EPA certainly has discretion, and I'm confident it's being quite aggressive in pursuing ways of making GHGs fit within the CAA. But that will be challenged in court. Pretty much regardless of what they propose, there will be legal vulnerabilities. Trying to make GHGs fit within the CAA, you're going to have to be fairly creative in how you interpret certain terms and how you sequence the program.

Can lawsuits stop the regulations?

They may not delay the effectiveness of the regulations but they may make it pretty messy. Parts of the regulations may be passed back to EPA -- either left in force and passed back to EPA to rectify legal deficiencies, or taken off the books and passed back to EPA.

Exhibit A in the challenges of the CAA is the Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) / New Source Review (NSR) program. EPA has a proposed rule over at OMB for review on how to work through PSD -- I haven't seen it. I'm sure EPA's trying to deal with the volume thresholds in the CAA, which say that a "significant" source of pollution emits either 100 tons or 250 tons, depending on the type of source.

The Supreme Court gave the definition of pollutant such broad range, but the volume thresholds are weirdly specific. How could Congress know how many tons of some future pollutant would be significant?

The original ICTA petition and later the Commonwealth of Mass were smart to focus on Section 202 of the CAA, which works quite well for regulating GHGs. In fact most of Title II, the mobile sources title, works quite well. There wasn't much attention paid in that case to the other dominoes that would fall upon issuing a S202 regulation. Also, there was the view that if this is what a plain reading indicates, what Congress had in mind -- you're going to regulate sources that emit 100 tons -- then you've got to find a way to make it work. And if GHGs meet the definition of air pollutants, they meet the definition of air pollutants, no matter how inconvenient that may be for the regulators and the regulated community.

Conservative advocacy group CEI says that EPA either obeys the thresholds and destroys the economy or, unilaterally and illegally, changes them.

That is something we foresaw years ago. It's a legal question.

There is a huge advantage to Congress raising that threshold. It would be a one-sentence amendment: For the purposes of greenhouse gases, the CAA threshold shall be 25,000 tons. That would solve a large fraction of the challenges.

I wouldn't be surprised if the court put EPA on some kind of schedule, where they are allowed to start out with a higher threshold, but over time that threshold had to move down to 250 or 100 tons. I hope EPA is successful in defending its proposal to lower the thresholds There are very good policy reasons not to try to apply PSD to the very smallest sources.

CEI is wants to turn this into a regulatory nightmare, so they can then stand back and say, I told you so, EPA ruins everything they touch.

Explain PSD. Why is it such a problem?

PSD applies to either new or major modifications -- it requires any new or modified facility to install Best Available Control Technology (BACT). For other pollutants, there's a long history of determining what BACT is. So we understand for a petroleum refinery, BACT today is a low-NOX burner, for instance. But right now we don't have any precedent for what constitutes BACT for greenhouse gases. So that's one problem, but it's one we can get around. EPA can start establishing this precedent.

The NSR program has been hugely contentious as it applies to regular pollutants, because there's this question as to what constitutes a major modification. That issue would come back with a vengeance when greenhouse gases come into play. A very small modification can increase GHG emissions by 100 tons. Take a coal-fired power plant that is emitting several million tons of CO2 a year -- if they increase their operations by, say, 20 minutes over the coarse of a year, that emits a huge amount of CO2, more than 100 tons, certainly. If you do something that increases your emissions a fraction of 1%, that arguably could trigger PSD and require you to install BACT. The scare story is that that will cause facility managers for any large source of pollution to really just freeze up and not make any modifications at all.

What kind of modification would entail 25,000 tons?

It's in the eye of the beholder whether it's big or small. If you think of something emitting 2.5 million tons a year, then 25,000 tons is 1%. Doesn't seem all that large. On the other hand, from the perspective of the environment, 25,000 is in and of itself a large source. The challenge we're dealing with is, these large emitters just emit so, so much CO2.

There have been pollution control exemptions. So if you're going in and making a modification for the purposes of pollution control, that in itself doesn't trigger NSR for all the other pollutants. It's a mechanism to reduce that perverse incentive -- the incentive to do nothing at all.

There's no question that will be litigated.

Say more about the BACT problem. Could IGCC be BACT for a new coal-fired plant?

The question will be, what constitutes BACT for a new coal-fired power plant? Is it carbon capture and storage (CCS) or something else?

In fact, environmental groups have petitioned EPA to find that IGCC is BACT. One of the counter-arguments will be, the baseline analysis of BACT does not include modifying the source. So if you if you propose a coal-fired power plant, BACT can't tell you to build a gas-fired plant. The argument that industry will likely make is, if I'm coming in proposing a pulverized coal plant, BACT shouldn't switch types of sources over to IGCC.

The whole issue of what constitutes BACT will itself be litigated. There will be people arguing that CCS is not commercially available and therefore can't constitute BACT. Others will argue that IGCC is modifying the source and therefore can't be considered BACT. We've yet to really even start that debate in earnest -- it will be an ongoing area of employment for lawyers.

Also, BACT is supposed to be a case-by-case review, where you're looking at the best technology at that point in time. Even if we decide today that something doesn't yet meet the threshold, someone will argue tomorrow, well, now we do.

Can a cap-and-trade system for GHGs be set up under the CAA?

I may have as much experience as anybody in that question: My first assignment when I came to EPA was to develop a cap-and-trade system under Section 111 and 111d of the CAA.

Sec. 111 is new source performance standards (NSPS), but 111d applies to existing sources. I've been of the view that if you are going to move forward with the CAA, the way to do it is to cover stationary sources -- as much as you decide, largely as a policy matter, you want to -- under 111 and 111d. Whether or not you put in place a cap-and-trade system depends on how much legal risk you want to take.

When I was at EPA we developed a cap-and-trade system under 111d. It was the mercury emissions rule, much-maligned by environmentalists because they were worried about hotspots. But no one's concerned about hotspots for CO2.

You dust off the legal argument EPA made for using 111d for a cap-and-trade system, and you search and replace mercury with CO2. You'd put both environmental groups and industry in an awkward position. Environmental groups would want to support the rule, presumably. Industry would not want to but they're already on record saying EPA has authority to issue a cap-and-trade system under 111 -- they wanted to have that for mercury.

It would be, in some ways, a more cumbersome cap-and-trade system than what Congress, at least in theory, could do. 111d is fundamentally a partnership between EPA and the states; EPA can't set a national program, period, whether it's cap-and-trade or some other program. Rather, EPA sets out the overall goals and tells the states to figure out how to regulate to meet those goals. The way it would presumably work is, EPA would strongly encourage states to opt in to the national cap-and-trade system -- or whatever it develops. But there's no requirement for states to do that.

Would the US regional cap-and-trade systems qualify under that kind of program?

I think that's exactly what would happen. EPA would set emission reduction criteria for existing sources and states would be in charge of designing programs to meet those, and the states that already have cap-and-trade programs, like the RGGI states or the Western states, would either be able to argue that their program already meets the EPA requirement, or would have to modify their program in some relatively minor ways to fit the EPA program. But what it would do is force all the other states to develop something, or essentially opt in to the federal program.

The threat of EPA regs was supposed to drive conservatives and business to the table. It doesn't really seem to be happening.

Not to the degree I might have expected. Part of the issue is that groups like the Chamber of Commerce are positioning themselves as, Just Say No. They're going to Just Say No up to the bitter end. Then they're going to complain about the regulations EPA moves forward with, even though any rational person looking forward can see that this is a natural outgrowth of their strategy.

The US Chamber is doing a disservice to their own members, for two reasons: one, many of their members stand to do quite well in a carbon-constrained world; two, they are pretending they can say no to both, when in fact the choice is one or the other.

Is there anything conservatives or business could do to stop the EPA going forward, or put roadblocks in the way?

I don't think so, because there was a lot of work in the previous administration to figure out what that road block could be, and they didn't come up with it. And that was when they had a receptive administration.

This is after we had completed our work and then it was rejected. Then, all attention was paid to, how do we relieve EPA of its obligation to respond to this? CEI and the Chamber were putting a huge amount of effort into figuring out legal theories, because if they'd come up with a plausible legal theory, it would have been forced on EPA. No theory came forward that was even plausible, and I heard a lot of theories. None passed the laugh test. If there is one out there I think it would have been discovered during that process.

More and more you're going to see the Chamber and EEI and CEI trying to figure out either how to make this a real big mess that will then cause political backlash, or at least dragging in smaller businesses that realize their industry is going to be regulated and just want others to be in the boat with them.

Do you think EPA can do it?

What EPA will face is a very large challenge and some inefficiencies, but they'll make it work. It won't be what anyone would design if starting with a blank sheet of paper, but it won't cause the US economy to come to a grinding halt.

There will be cases where there's clearly unnecessary regulatory red tape, and those will be well-publicized by the Chamber and their allies, but by and large EPA has a lot of tools it can use and a lot of creative people that can come up with systems for getting around the big problems.

One of the problems people have been talking about is, this is going to require a mom-and-pop business to get a PSD permit. Well, one, EPA may successfully raise the threshold to 25K tons. Two, even if the program is applied to sources that emit 250 tons, EPA may be able to figure out a very simple way for people to comply -- for example, instead of needing a formal permit application, you send in a post card that says, for instance, if you're building a new building, you've used an Energy Star label HVAC. Some people would complain because they didn't want to use an Energy Star system -- but that's hardly regulatory red tape, it's just a regulatory burden some businesses don't want to face. It may make good policy sense to move small businesses toward using more Energy Star equipment.

What do you think of the progressive push to preserve EPA authority in the climate bill.?

It's my general understanding that EPA authority is preserved in certain areas, modified in others, eliminated in others. It's preserved by and large in the mobile source sections and eliminated in the case of the PSD nightmare scenario. Those are reasonable decisions.

Environmental groups need to be careful what they ask for. You have to make sure you're not going to create the sorts of problems that the US Chamber and CEI are looking for. You don't want to play into their hands. You don't want to create a political backlash 5, 10, 20 years from now. Presumably you want this legislation to be in force for a long, long time rather than only being in force when you have the votes on Capitol Hill.

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Theodore Roosevelt had his delicate spots—he was an asthmatic child and later a naturalist who reveled in birdwatching. But 100 years after his presidency, the image of him that endures is decidedly more swaggering—an outdoorsman who loved to hunt, a mountaineer, a populist who thundered against corporate "despoilers" of the public welfare.

He also left a legacy of 234 million acres of national parks and other protected American wilderness. Historian Douglas Brinkley, who has written acclaimed books on Ford Motor Company and Hurricane Katrina, focuses on the conservationist work of the larger-than-life president in his new book, the 960-page Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.

We spoke recently about Roosevelt and how he might have taken on today’s despoilers.

Q. Roosevelt’s time in the Badlands, on his African safari, and in the mountains with John Muir—he seemed link it all to his work in public. What was it that he found in the wilderness that made him such a powerful leader?

A. He had chronic asthma as a boy and got very skeptical about hyper-industrialization, seeing the smokestack factories along the East River in New Jersey. Yet when he’d go to the Catskills and later the Adirondacks, his illness would go away. He found that being out in the wild was the cure to his respiratory illness. 

He also created a philosophy that what made American democracy unique was wilderness. He believed that it would have medium-sized cities surrounded by what we today would call greenbelts. And that if you let sprawl happen it would desecrate the beautiful American landscape.

He was also very influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin and this notion of the need for species survival and the classification of species. Roosevelt’s greatest accomplishment may have been his leadership in inventorying the biotic America. He wanted to know what kind of wildflowers we had, what insects, what types of prairie grass. And he wanted to educate people that the planet was one whole thing, one biological organism.

Q. What would he think of the so-called unscientific America today, where so many people reject evolution?

A. He would be aghast at people ignoring science. He pushed for science and biology to be taught in public schools.  He wanted all children to grow up understanding Darwin and Huxley. On the other hand he was a bit of a romantic about nature. The combination of the two made him almost an ideal president for the current environmental moment.

Q. Today we’ve got big business interests—the National Association of Manufacturers for one—saying the world is going to end if we pass a climate change bill. It sounds like Roosevelt faced the same kind of opposition when he took on the mining industry and others who didn’t want places like Grand Canyon to be protected. What was his strategy?

A. He would have taken his fist and smashed the National Manufacturing Association. I’m not kidding, he was that vigorous a figure. Anybody who put a company profit over the public welfare, Roosevelt called them despoilers. It was his favorite word. He also called them swine. It was a trend of capitalism he worried about, that we would create a culture where the corporations could do what they wanted for their profits and do damage to the public welfare.

Q. Do we have anyone of any influence speaking like that today?

No, we don’t. Roosevelt cloaked himself in American mythology--he’d wear a cowboy hat and bandana, carry a gun, and present himself as kind of an archetype of American manhood -- so he could talk to common people. Sometimes 200,000 people would come to hear him give conservation speeches.

He didn’t see it as negotiable. He was a pragmatist, but there were some things that you couldn’t negotiate. You couldn’t partially mine the Grand Canyon. It needed to be preserved forever. And that was the end of the conversation. Even though Congress voted to mine it for zinc and asbestos, Roosevelt used an executive order and overruled them.

Roosevelt also called for a global conservation congress that would have global environmental laws. One hundred years ago, in 1909, he called for that. He knew that it doesn’t go any good to save birds in America if they go down to Central America and the whole flock is massacred. It doesn’t do any good for us to keep the Rio Grande clean if Mexico’s going to dump sewage in it. So Roosevelt’s notion that we could work in a global fashion on conservation issues is very timely today.

Q. Did he have any success with that?

A. No. The first one he passed was with Canada and Mexico, and it was successful. But they were planning the global one when he left office and went to Africa to collect for the Smithsonian Institute. William Howard Taft came in with the Republican big business crowd, and they threw out the idea.

Q. A politician going to the wilderness for self-reflection--that’s such an exotic idea today, Appalachian Trail jokes notwithstanding. What’s lost with that?

A. Well, it’s tough to do. I think it’s good that President Obama visited Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon last weekend. But I’d also like the president to get into some of the wilderness areas of America and to start thinking of immediate things that can be done on climate.

For example, ANWR in Alaska should become a national monument or park. Obama should create a national caribou reserve. Roosevelt created national buffalo reserves—the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma and at the Flathead Reservation in Montana--wildly successful efforts to keep the buffalo alive and thriving. We need to do that now for the caribou that climate change has put under great stress in Alaska.

Historian Douglas BrinkleyPhoto: Danny Turner for HarperCollinsQ. And Obama could do that through executive order?

A. He can. He could do it tomorrow with an executive order declaring ANWR a national monument. The only problem is a weird stipulation put on ANWR in 1980 that says it would be sacrosanct for only one year, and then Congress would have to agree to it. He would have to use the political muscle to get votes on Capitol Hill. But he could get them. It’s just a matter of wanting to have these fights. [Update: See below for more on conservation law in Alaska.]

And on the Mexican border, wildlife is dying like crazy because they’re building a wall that’s killing off an entire wildlife corridor. The wall is idiotic. There’s a lot that can be done besides the big difficulty of weaning the world off of its addiction to petroleum. Those are proactive things the Obama administration should be doing now.

Q. Do you see any way that the Republican Party might embrace his conservation legacy and reclaim the environmental heroes in its past?

A. We’re on the verge of a new green revolution, and I think I think there’s an opportunity for the Republican Party to reinvent itself as promoting it. The problem is the oil lobby and the coal lobby are so powerful in Republican politics that nobody wants to stand up to them. Until you get a Republican of great vision who can be Rooseveltian in putting long-term public welfare over short-term corporate good, I don’t see it coming any time soon.

Q. How do we make environmentalism badass again, the way it was for Roosevelt?

A. Everybody likes TR, because we can see that his legacy is not a Democratic legacy or a Republican one, it’s a great American legacy. I don’t think we have to be at partisan odds over clean air, clean water, and keeping our forest reserves intact. Those should just be American goals. And I think Roosevelt helps that process along.

There’s always a need for an alliance between sportsmen--hunters and anglers--and the preservationists in the environmental movement. They have different interests, but when they work together they can get a lot of things done. It can often mean those extra Congressional votes. I know for a fact that these hunt clubs, many of them for their own reasons, want to have caribou and polar bears saved in Alaska right now. Green activists might be able to form alliances with them, working against the extraction industries. Roosevelt provides an example of bringing those communities together in a common, concerted effort.

Watch Brinkley talk Roosevelt and Wilderness Warriors on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart last week.

Update: More from on Arctic National Wildlife Refuge conservation law from Cindy Shogan, executive directory of the Alaska Wilderness League (AWL):

The short answer is that ANILCA (Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act - passed in 1980) says that large withdrawals of public lands terminates unless Congress extends the withdrawal through legislation within one year of the withdrawal.
 
Yes, an Arctic Monument would be large - but we would argue that this is not a new withdrawal, these lands are already withdrawn.

Shogan also directed me to attorney Peter Van Tuyn, who has done work for AWL. He provided this anwer:

With passage of ANILCA in 1980, Congress purported to “provide[] sufficient protection for the national interest in the scenic, natural, cultural and environmental values on the public lands in Alaska.” ANILCA § 101(d), 16 U.S.C. § 3101(d). Among other provisions, the Act set aside more than 104 million acres in new and expanded “conservation system units” and created 56.4 million acres of wilderness. In doing so, Congress stated that ANILCA struck the proper balance between lands set aside for conservation and lands left available for other uses, and as such, future legislation creating new conservation system units in Alaska would be unnecessary.  Id.  Based on this balance, ANILCA’s so-called “no more” clause limits future actions by the executive branch to establish or expand conservation system units in Alaska. ANILCA 1326, 16 U.S.C. § 3213.  The provision renders ineffective any executive withdrawal of land that exceeds 5,000 acres in the aggregate absent public and congressional notice and a joint resolution that approves the executive action. If Congress, within one year, does not ratify the executive land withdrawal it automatically terminates.

Layering an Arctic Refuge Monument over the existing Arctic Refuge does not, by itself, violate the “no more” clause.  As noted above, ANILCA’s “no more” clause limits the authority of the executive branch to withdraw public lands in excess of 5,000 acres without the express permission of Congress. 16 U.S.C. § 3213(a). The language of the “no more” clause, however, clearly indicates that the provision is only triggered when a withdrawal of land actually occurs.  The general understanding of the term “withdrawal” in the public lands context means a removal of land from the operation of some or all of the public land laws under which the land would ordinarily be made available for settlement, mineral location, or other forms of disposition or private use.  Currently all land within the Arctic Refuge, in particular the coastal plain area and wilderness areas, are fully withdrawn from operation of the public land laws. As a result, in its existing state, the land in the Arctic Refuge cannot be further withdrawn, and establishing an Arctic Refuge Monument would thus not run afoul of the “no more” clause.

As with anything legal, there are other nuances to the answer, but this is the gist of it. 

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Adam WerbachAdam Werbach’s career is something of a lodestar for the trajectory of the 21st century American environmental movement. A student activist tutored at the knee of the Archdruid himself, the legendary David Brower, Werbach was elected the youngest president of the Sierra Club in 1996 at age 23. 

Then business beckoned and he launched a startup, Act Now Productions, to advise companies like Wal-Mart on going green. Global advertising and marketing goliath Saatchi & Saatchi acquired Act Now last year, rebranding it as Saatchi & Saatchi S (for sustainability) and installing Werbach as the CEO.

Now he has written Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto.

“The book came from a basic frustration with the business dogma I confronted as someone who had what I thought were some very simple ideas about how business should work,” says Werbach during an interview at Saatchi & Saatchi S’s offices in San Francisco’s Mission District. “It became clear to me they didn’t hold the same fundamental business notions I did. They lacked a singular strategy that brought in the concepts of sustainability.”

The book, which joins a shelf of sustainable business titles published in recent years, is essentially a how-to guide for companies to reframe the way they do business in a carbon-constrained, Twittering world.

“To be successful, you need to peel off the green blinders and start thinking of sustainability as a new tool set, like information technology or globalization, that can help you reinvigorate a business,” Werbach writes.

In fact, Werbach would like to take the environment out of environmental sustainability.

“The battle I’m trying to fight in the business world is to adopt a broader definition of sustainability that is not just about environmental sustainability,” says Werbach, who at 36 sports a touch of gray in his hair. “That’s a limiting factor to sustainability. What are the tools you need to be around for the long term? What is your long-haul strategy?”

In other words, casting sustainability as a green thing allows companies to compartmentalize such efforts rather than make them part of the corporate DNA.

Still, even in an era when mainstream environmentalists are more likely to lunch with corporate suits than file suits against them, such talk is sure to rankle.

But the message may resonate among the younger generation for whom the thought of corporate environmentalism does not cause cognitive dissonance. For instance, the MBA students I talked to who signed up for the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Corps saw nothing incongruous about pursuing green goals from within the Fortune 500. In fact, the point was to change corporate America from within.

And those are exactly the people Werbach is trying to recruit with his book. “The world of corporate change is still underpopulated with people who have a sustainability mindset and experience,” he says. “There’s a better chance I’ll be arguing with six people about who has the best idea when I’m with activists, which is great. It’s more likely I’ll be lonely and looking for help when I’m working with a company.”

In his book, Werbach lays out “Seven Tenets of a Strategy for Sustainability”:

Like other books of the genre, Werbach's contains his own PowerPoint-friendly jargon -- sustainability-speak, if you will. He advocates an approach he calls “STaR mapping” to analyze a company’s strategy in terms of social, technological, and resource changes. Then a company needs to decide on a “North Star goal” -- “the strategic direction toward which an organization drives to reach greater sustainability.”

Werbach presents case studies of companies that have pursued sustainable strategies, like Clorox, whose Green Works natural cleansers have been endorsed by the Sierra Club.

It remains to be seen whether corporate America embraces sustainability as way to gain a long-term competitive market advantage or just as a marketing strategy. But signs of change abound.

Late last month, Werbach was invited to give a talk on sustainability at Apple’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. The iPhone and Mac maker has long been a whipping boy of groups like Greenpeace for its lack of environmental disclosure and reluctance to jump on the green bandwagon crowded by Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and other tech stalwarts.

Apple also came in for a fair share of criticism in Werbach’s book.

“I don’t know a lot of people who have strict critiques of Apple who are invited to go speak there,” he says. “A friend from a previous incarnation invited me down. His instructions were to say whatever I wanted. I was shocked they would say that. We had a really open conversation about what I thought they could do better.”

And Werbach at least practices what he preaches: I learned about the Apple meeting through his Twitter feed.

Find out more at the Strategy for Sustainability website.

Read Todd Woody’s past Green State columns.

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This marks the first of a series of interviews with people working to make U.S. communities smarter, greener spaces. Got a suggestion for an interviewee? Send it our way or leave it in the comments section below.

Tim Halbur’s career has included a stint as a journalist for NPR, co-producer of an environmental-justice driving tour of California’s I-5, and founder of an online media production company whose clients ranged from HarperCollins to the American Institute of Architects. With a masters in urban and regional planning, Tim puts his obsession to work every day as managing editor of Planetizen, which recently released a two-DVD set called The Story of Sprawl. It’s a weirdly compelling collection of short films from the 1930s through the ‘60s focused on cities and transportation, with commentary from the likes of Andrés Duany and James Howard Kunstler. We checked in with Tim to find out how the DVDs came about, which cities he thinks are the smartest, and what urban-planning changes he’d make if he could wave his magic wand.

Q. What’s your occupation, and what does your work look like on a day-to-day basis?

A. I’m managing editor of Planetizen.com, a news and information website for the urban planning, design, and development community. My average day involves trawling the web for news I think will be of interest to our audience, editing opinion pieces by experts in the field, and putting together our books and DVDs.

Q. You recently compiled and released a two-DVD set called The Story of Sprawl —how did that come about, and how is it being received? Were there any surprises along the way?

A. I found a film a few years back called “Give Yourself the Green Light.” It was produced by General Motors in 1954 to advocate for building more and better highways. And regardless of the propagandistic element, it struck me as a fascinating snapshot of the time. You can see that as the population grew and people moved to the outskirts of cities, the existing road network wasn’t very efficient. But the roadbuilding that GM was promoting led to a brutal system of transportation planning that effectively cut the heart out of many of our cities.

So as I collected more films like “Green Light,” I began to see a story emerge about how sprawl happened that was richer than the one I’d learned in planning school. Eventually, I chose eight films that I think explain in detail why so many people abandoned cities, why the spread of major freeways and suburban housing happened so quickly, and the price we’ve paid for this disinvestment.

Q. The films in The Story of Sprawl paint a pretty dark picture of urban areas—busy, dirty, violent, poor, unhealthy—but they seem to also convey a bit of hope. In one, the narrator says, “If we plan well, urban Americans will someday enjoy more of the advantages of a large city without many of the penalties they now are forced to pay.” Do you think we’ve seen that promise fulfilled? Or is it still in the works?

The Story of SprawlPlanetizen.comA. Well, I think the interesting thing about what these films show us is that the problems facing our cities are not new. The effect of the spread of suburbia and auto-oriented development was already dawning on urban thinkers by the early 1960s as they saw a disinvestment in downtowns and a growing lack of civic culture. Unfortunately, many of their solutions ended up being just as bad as the problem.

The picture of cities being dirty, violent, and poor is where I think the propaganda aspect of the films kicks in. Cities were certainly dirty with pollution through the period of the 1930s-‘60s, which these films cover. And health issues were a reasonable concern with crowded conditions in big cities back in the early 20th century. But I believe these films were edited to make things look much worse, and again, the solutions they proposed were well-intentioned, but wrong. The issue of cities being “clean” led to the creation of those depressing housing projects with empty stretches of grass around them, where residents would supposedly enjoy being surrounded by a healthier atmosphere. Today we know better.

As to being able to enjoy the advantages of a large city without paying the penalties, I think in some ways yes: we’ve learned more about how to make downtown urban areas work well. But I also believe that there are always tradeoffs. As David Sucher, who wrote a book called City Comforts, put it, people today want an “urban village.” And those terms are in many ways contradictory. Urbanity means accepting some chaos, anonymity and proximity to strangers. Village life is about stability and community. You can work to bring aspects of both to city life, but city living is really a choice to embrace vibrancy, which includes a little chaos and grit.

Q. Which cities in the U.S. do you think are doing a particularly good job of becoming more livable, greener places?

A. Portland is the obvious answer. It has managed to create an “urban village” more than anywhere else in the U.S. But David Owen, a writer for The New Yorker, has made a persuasive argument that Manhattan is the greenest city around in his new book, Green Metropolis. The average New Yorker consumes about one-fourth the electricity a resident of Dallas uses, just from the advantages of a dense infrastructure and effective transit.

For me, density really is the underrated way to get green. I get frustrated seeing the focus on green building, when the same sort of 3,000-square-foot tract housing is being built and declared sustainable. We need to be focusing on designing high-quality, comfortable but relatively compact spaces that are unlike the cheap ‘70s apartment buildings we’ve been plagued with so that people want to live together. There are tremendous social and environmental benefits to be had from living more densely.

Q. What has the Obama Administration done right so far for cities? What improvements would you like to see?

A. I think it’s too early to tell. The Administration has been a bit distracted by the end of society as we know it, so I don’t blame them for taking a slow approach to urban issues. The proposed high-speed rail corridors would be a big boon, and I hope they get built. Otherwise, they’re showing a good grasp of the issues and are rightly focusing on the regional perspective. Too many of today’s problems stem from the inability to create consensus among the various small governments in large metropolitan areas.

Q. If you could wave your magic wand and decree one big change in the world of urban planning and architecture, what would it be?

The City of Roses thinks regionally.A. Given my answer above, I’m tempted to change local governments to be more beholden to a regional elected authority. Portland has been able to make effective change ... because the voters created a regional authority with teeth that could do things like create metro transit and enforce urban growth boundaries.

But being a utopian at heart, I’d really like to sweep my wand and try something more dramatic, like taking this “urban village” idea to the extreme and refashioning America’s cities into more functional structures. The problem with sprawl is that it destroyed the city/small town framework that worked so well. City planning is a delicate balance when practiced correctly. You can see that in cities in Europe that retain their forms. Each part of the city, from the countryside where food is produced to the economic heart of downtown, has its proper place in the structure. For the last 60 years, we’ve ignored all of that because cars got us everywhere.

Q. Where do you live, and what do you love about it? What would you change? Any suggestions for what people can do in their own neighborhoods?

A. I live in a great neighborhood in Los Angeles now, near one of my favorite urban public spaces, the Fairfax Farmers’ Market. It’s a series of small stalls that house delicious food stands, produce, and knickknacks, and it’s been there since the 1930s. I’m new to L.A., and I’ve really fallen in love with it. Tom Waits recently said that L.A. is “like a battery. It’s always plugged in.” I feel that since I’ve been here.

As to what people can do to create change in their neighborhoods, I’d say seek out your local community non-profit group focused on land use issues, and support the creation of walkable communities and better transit. Groups like TransForm in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Michigan Land Use Institute are big enough to make change on the local level, but not so big that they lose touch with their communities.

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American retail is riddled with cheap, fall-apart merchandise. We know this. Sales are a ploy to get a shopper to spend, as opposed to a boon for penny pinchers. Right. And how much mileage do we get from that old, overused adage, "You get what you pay for"? More than we'd like to admit.

So why is Ellen Ruppel Shell's new book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, so shocking?

Shell deftly weaves a compelling, cautionary tale out of disparate strands: the psychology of manipulating shoppers, the environmental costs of our lust for inexpensive things, the deskilling of the retail industry, and the loss of appreciation for "quality." Tracing the history of discount culture from the yesteryear excitement over brown paper packages to today's ambivalence about crammed plastic bags, Shell shows us why we feel we've been ripped off if we pay "full price."

She pushes readers to ponder the strange circumstances that make an item shipped from thousands of miles away less expensive than something homegrown. And how a major furniture retailer can convince a customer to get attached to a piece just enough to buy it, but not enough to keep it long. And, most disturbingly, just how expensive our bargain hunting is turning out to be.

_____

Ellen Ruppel Shell

Q. What audience did you have in mind when you wrote Cheap?

A. This grew out of my own curiosity about my own behavior. Since I have a science background, and I try to be a very rational person, I was startled by my own shopping behavior. So if that was happening to me, I figured it was happening to an awful lot of people. As someone who is socially conscious, I was making purchasing decisions that didn't reflect that social consciousness sometimes. I wondered what was behind that.

I'm trying to reach a thoughtful audience, and I'm particularly interested in reaching younger people because I think they have the spirit and the opportunity to change. Interestingly, it seems to resonate with young people quite a bit.

Q. Why do you think your message is resonating with young people, especially considering how inclined they are to move around and not get attached to their property?

A. I don't want to speak for all young people, but there are all sorts of ways to get value without playing into this con game of cheap.

You go to a place we have in my town [Boston], called the Garment District, which is second-hand, third-hand kind of clothes, and you can get really good stuff there for very little money. You can be creative with it -- dress it up or dress it down, do what you want with it. It's not a cookie-cutter piece out of H&M that everybody's wearing that week. You're the boss of that thing, it's not the boss of you. It's style rather than fashion.

The idea that you can go to IKEA and get good deals -- it's really not a good deal. You can't ever get rid of it, it's not something you can resell. You don't really own it; you're kind of renting it. So that's something that young people who are thinking about moving can think about. What you want to do is to be able to put it on craigslist, or maybe get your friends to help you move your stuff. You want your stuff to [have] resale value if you really want to save money. You're not being cheap, you're being smart. They're two different things.

Q. How does the psychology of marketing inhibit the ability of consumers to see an item in terms of its entire lifespan?

A. IKEA names all its products to make stuff seem cute, but then they're telling you, "You're not really attached to this, are you crazy?" They're getting you to laugh at and make a mockery out of the idea of durability. They make durability seem like an old-fashioned, passé idea. And it works. I think it's really juvenilizing: "Oh, come on, you want a new toy. You always want a new toy."

Particularly in the marketing of cell phones. You have a cell phone that works really well for you, and then you have a friend who has a cooler one, and you want it. That's kind of 4-year-old behavior. When you have 3- or 4-year-olds, they want the new shiny thing. But as you get older and a little more mature--and I don't mean 50, I mean 16 or 17--you learn that that's not what it's about. It's about what works for me. Marketers obviously don't want you to think that. In the case of the cell phone, they assume you're going to use it for a year or less, and it's not durable. Even if it is, they assume you're going to junk it. I say, "Screw them!" If it works for you, hang on to it. Don't buy into that, because basically, it's all about them making a profit. It's not about you and what you really want.

Come hither -- cheap goods for sale!Q. Do you see similarities between the psychology of marketing cheap goods and of greenwashing?

A. Yes, I do. There's a mnemonic device that's used by marketers in terms of discounting. The mental shortcut is, "Lower price, good deal." And those two things don't necessarily follow. Something that's low price triggers the impulsive side of our brains and causes us to make decisions without much thought. The same thing is true for some of this green marketing. We're told that something is green, or it has the aura of green, and that makes it OK to buy it.

That's actually why I [focused on] IKEA instead of Wal-Mart. Most of us think, "IKEA's the good guy." IKEA has taken some tiny, baby steps towards environmentalism. For example, they started charging for their plastic bags. When you charge for plastic bags, it's reasonable to question if it's really a green step or just a way to make profit. They use low-wattage bulbs in their stores. But those are cost-cutting measures. There's nothing wrong with cost-cutting measures, but they don't take environmental steps that cause them to reduce their profits. People think, "Oh, it's a green store." But the whole story that they tell of clean living and the outdoors is a mnemonic to get you to buy. When you look under the hood, and you look at something that is essentially being sold as a non-durable product, something that won't last and isn't necessarily marketed to last, that's not an environmentally sound product.

Q. What do you say to those who believe the way discounters do business is essential to the American spirit of capitalism?

A. If you reconsider Adam Smith's arguments, in light of today's realities, he would not say what a lot of people think he was saying. He was concerned about greed and morality. He was a moral philosopher. When we talk about a free market, Adam Smith could have never anticipated the free market that we have today, which is a global market of supply chain that depends on instant messaging across the globe and transportation costs being so low that they're essentially negligible.

That's why the invention of [shipping containers], which has severely lowered transportation costs, is so important in the story. In [Smith's] days, if you shipped something from Japan or China, it was costly. Now, it really isn't. It completely changes the argument about what works and what doesn't. And when you're talking about a global economy and you have workers who are completely out of our sight, who we use as a labor source--and the resources in those countries as well--and costs are so low because transportation costs are so low, it's a completely different equation.

Q. Do you foresee a change in our perception of cheap if transportation costs are driven up through climate legislation?

A. There's no question [about] that, if we actually taxed for carbon use around the globe so that we can't just outsource our pollution--which is what we're doing now to the developing world. In terms of pollution, it was pretty shocking to see the levels of particle pollution of areas in China. We're talking huge amounts of carbon being burned, toxins in the air and the water, which is all to keep prices low, because when you put in environmental protection it costs money. If the price of oil went up substantially and environmental restrictions were made globally so that we couldn't outsource our environmental costs, I definitely think this could have a big impact on cheap.

Q. So there are two ways to frame the rejection of cheap: from a personal, psychological standpoint and also an environmental standpoint.

A. And also sociopolitical impact, because as we pursue cheap goods, we also pursue lower wages, less benefits, and worse working conditions because that's what makes things cheaper and cheaper. If wages go up in Mexico, plants close up and go to China, and if wages go up in China, the plants move on to Vietnam. We're basically pursuing the least regulated cultures, where the rule of law is the weakest when it comes to enforcing the kinds of things we in the United States really value.

Q. Do you think the general public is shocked when they make the connection that their cheap habits are supported by deregulation?

A. Some of the critics have said the book is shocking in the sense that it kind of opened their eyes. And it was shocking to me; I didn't know this stuff before I did the book. I think with knowledge comes power and you get to enact change in people.

Q. Is a rejection of cheap goods and food sustainable on a global scale?

A. In the book I quote World Bank economist Michael Morris because I don't want people to think that this is going to be easy or that we're all going to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. It is a world of many billions of people. In talking about agriculture and small farms, there's this notion of happy peasants--which is a myth. It's true that small farmers can flourish, but it's also true that in many places in the world, the small farmers are the poorest of the poor. We do need to feed this world, which has so many more people than when we had these small farms. We do need to have large agricultural systems.

What I call for in the book is a middle way. I don't think we necessarily need factory meat farms, for example. I think that's actually a very costly system in many different regards. If that's something that the local-food movement and the slow-food movement pushes against, it's probably a good thing. Do we need large fields of gain? I think we do. [Fields of corn] to be fed to livestock is an unfortunate thing, but, as my background is in science, I do see the positives there, and I don't want to sell them short. For people who are starving around the world, they need a source of readily available food.

To feed the world, we're going to have to keep some of that in place, but we're also going to need a lot of local farmers, and we need more diversity in what we subsidize. We subsidize the grain growers, and the corn growers, and the soybean growers--anything that has to do with the meat industry. But we don't subsidize very much fruit and vegetable growers, which, if you're going to have a healthy diet, that's what you need. We need to really rethink our agricultural system, but the way to do it, I believe, isn't just to tell everyone to shop at their local farmers market--it's too expensive for most people, and it's unavailable to most people. I take more of a middle ground than a lot of other folks, people who I very much respect, but who I think are looking through a very narrow lens. I think we have to be careful not to oversell or oversimplify.

Q. In Cheap, you talk about the role that corporations and politics have played in how we've gotten to where we are, but you also place a significant part of that burden on individual consumers. How do we get to a sustainable middle ground in the retail landscape?

A. Consumers need more information. When you go to New York City and you go to a coffee shop, they tell you the calories of what's in the food. You can make better decisions; you change your choices.

I didn't write this in the book and I wish I had, but some kind of labeling so that consumers know the origins of what they're buying, and how it's made, and what it's made of [is important]. And eventually you should be able to go on the web and find out what company made this, where's the supplier, and [if] are they acting responsibly. Suppliers in the developing world are notorious for labor abuses. The way you make these changes is to make the labeling at the point of purchase where the buyer can see, right then and there, what he's buying. And that changes behavior.

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Rod Coronado.“Rod Coronado is not a terrorist,” says Dean Kuipers, author of Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado's War to Save American Wilderness and a longtime writer about the world of eco-activism.

Back in the 1980s and '90s, during Rodney Coronado's radical sabotage campaigns on behalf of animals and the environment, terrorism was generally considered to mean violence against people. Feeling strongly that the loss of any life was wrong and that casualties would harm the movement, Coronado took care to not hurt anyone as he liberated animals and burned down research facilities across the American West. Charged with arson in 1995, Coronado served four years in a medium-security prison and, in August of 2006, was sentenced to eight more months for dismantling a government-owned mountain lion trap.

But over the years, the official definition of terrorism expanded. Through the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act, the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act, and the 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, the federal government proclaimed that the tactics the radical animal-rights crowd had been using for years were now a form of "terrorism" and could be prosecuted much more harshly.

In 2007, Coronado found himself standing before a judge once more--though not for property destruction, as his days of burning down buildings were long behind him, but for making a speech. While giving a lecture about his past radical actions, Coronado answered an audience question about how to build an incendiary device out of a plastic jug, and for that, Coronado was charged with a felony and ultimately sent to federal prison for a year and a day. Compared to other collared eco-activists who have been threatened with sentences of up to 20 years under the stricter federal laws, perhaps he got off easy.

Kuipers has been following Coronado's flame-broiled tale of radical action for 17 years and tells the whole story in Operation Bite Back. Kuipers makes it clear that he does not advocate arson or property destruction, but challenges us to consider whether it's reasonable to apply the label of terrorist to someone who releases animals from a lab.

------

Q. How has the shifting definition of "terrorism" changed the environmental movement since the 1980s?

A. I think a lot of the old-timers, the "rednecks for wilderness"--it's sort of where Earth First! began, and Sea Shepherd too in a way--might pin a little bit of that expansion of the term "terrorism" on the late '80s-'90s anarchists who came into the scene. Guys like Rod Coronado. They changed things a lot because the original eco-radical[s], like Greenpeace, were sort of mainstream conservation guys -- they called themselves conservationists. Mostly they were white men who had parties out in the woods and ate steaks and drank whiskey. They were kind of red-blooded Americans, like the heroes of The Monkey Wrench Gang.

And then this whole new contingent, right around 1990, started coming in that was much more about anarchism and identity politics. "What do I believe, and how does that separate me from the rest of the world?" People got into listing their issues. "I not only don't eat animals, but also I am transgendered and I have these piercings that are very important to me." Those kind of issues just drove the old-timers insane, because all of those things started being in the radical journals: "What are we going to do about the homophobia in our movement?" Those are all important discussions, but they didn't have anything to do with saving whales or species problems. That was very disconcerting to the old school of the movement. A lot of them kind of left the movement, because they didn't think that was as important as saving a chunk of wilderness or preserving a specific species.

The use of the word terrorism was always around, even in the '60s, early '70s -- but it was always rhetorical. I think it was Ron Arnold who actually coined the term in 1982: "eco-terrorist." But it was rhetorical at that time because eco-terrorism didn't exist. Unless you killed somebody, you weren't a terrorist. And they hadn't killed anybody, so there wasn't any eco-terrorism.

Changing [terrorism] laws [to encompass environmental activism] really came about because guys like Rod Coronado went further, started using arson. The threat of more violence was sort of there in that movement and I don't think that went over very well with a lot of the conservation movement, and they kind of split off in a lot of ways. So I think that the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front and people who modeled themselves after them have found themselves very isolated from the rest of the movement.

Q. Where do you see the eco-movement going from here?

A. I think that the mainstream approach is totally taking over right now, and they're being successful. Kind of all they had to do is wait out George Bush. I think they have a very sympathetic ear right now. All of the big groups -- NRDC, the Sierra Club -- are very effective right now. They have sympathetic ears in Congress; people like Henry Waxman [chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and cosponsor of the House climate bill] kind of took the key positions that they needed them to take. The deck is loaded now for a lot of stuff to happen.

However, I think that the radical parts of the movement arise because of threat. The global warming question will continue to get bigger, and species extinction and various types of animal abuse, for lack of a better word, are not going to get better. So I think that that kind of action will rise. I don't see that the terrorism laws have ever really stopped it because people -- young people in particular -- just assume they won't get caught. And they're right. They've hardly caught any of those people through the years, [even though there have] been over 1,200 actions and like a billion dollars worth of damage.

I think that the radicalism will rise if the mainstream movement fails to get anything done. I think that's why there's always a radical element to any movement. They're there to step it up and push everybody to a more aggressive position. If they pass some real bullshit legislation about global warming that's basically full of loopholes and everybody can drive a Hummer, the radicalism will step up.

Q. How do people respond when you talk about your work?

A. It depends on who it is. There's such a huge community of people who believe in more radical action -- called direct action -- in solving environmental and animal rights problems that there's a lot of sympathy. But there [are] a lot of people for whom Rodney Coronado is not radical at all and would like to see it go far beyond that.

But that's not the mainstream, and for the most part, mainstream America doesn't really want to get involved in this. They still eat meat and they don't really want to think about factory farms or where their mink coat comes from. Consciousness has definitely gone way, way up, but still it's a huge jump from being conscious about where your food comes from or where your coat comes from to being somebody who knows people who actually go out and do stuff about it, [whether] it's just legislation [or] actually trying to close a place down physically. That's kind of shocking.

I'm sure my family in Michigan would be a little bit appalled: "Another book from Dean that we can't read!"

Q. Have you faced conflicts within the mainstream media because there are stereotypes about environmental activists?

A. I haven't encountered that many serious challenges. You have to dial things back. You have to position them in such a way that the publication feels comfortable that you haven't just completely denied one half of the story from getting its say. Even when we know things are just absolutely for sure -- something like a cancer cluster of people from asbestos -- you've still got to call for a comment from the asbestos department where they say, "No, it's not us." But I do that, so there haven't been too many stories I've brought to people where they've just said, "No, that's too radical for us."

Even in my book, I don't write about Rod Coronado saying that arson is awesome. Arson is not awesome. Arson sucks. It's a thing that people should not do, but it's a tool that he used and I present it pretty matter of fact. I'm sure I will be accused of being an apologist for arson, but that's not my purpose. But if I did write a book about that, I don't think it would be as good, because suddenly there's no reason for any of the farmers to talk to me, the FBI, the police. All those guys have amazing and cool facts that I don't know, and I want all that stuff. As long as we do that, I think the story gets better and people are more open to reading it. I lose less of the audience. You can make more of a difference.

Q. What originally drew you to writing about eco-radicalism?

A. [The actions] happen in great locations. I grew up in the woods in Michigan with a big hunting and fishing family. I was living in New York City when I first started doing this stuff and really sweating it, and having a hard time getting myself out to the Catskills on the weekends to see some trees.

But there are whole protests that last for months happening in redwood groves in Northern California, and people trying to stop roads from being built into central Idaho, which is like God's Country. It's just amazing there -- huge contiguous pieces of roadless wilderness with wolves and moose. Those are the kind of places I like to be in. And on a boat with the Sea Shepherds out in the eastern tropical Pacific to Cocos Island or something -- it's fantastic. I'm not only working on a story, but I'm in the places I would like to see preserved.

Q. Does it water down our legitimate concerns about terrorism to have environmental and animal-rights activists looped into it?

A. Sure. I think it's an insult to the intelligence of the average American, that we can't tell the difference. But of course we can tell the difference! Osama bin Laden goes on the TV on one of his Al Jazeera tapes and says, "We will make the infidels pay," and that's about killing people. The Militant Vegan League -- which is something I'm just making up -- sends out their communiqué saying you have to stop hurting bunnies and you have to stop factory farming where you keep chickens in little cages. It's just a completely unrelated issue in every way -- strategically, philosophically, tactically, in every way. Terrorism is such a strong word that it just allows the same kind of law enforcement tactics to be used to suppress it.

Q. What is the No. 1 message you want to stick with people after reading your book?

A. What we were just talking about. I picked out a particular person--Rod Coronado--to help me tell the story because I want it to be obvious by the time you get to the end that Rod Coronado is not a terrorist. He's done lamentable things, he's burned things and attacked businesses and been very aggressive. But he's never attacked any people. He's an intelligent and respectful person who did things on principle and believed that he was executing the height of nonviolent direct action.

There's a difference between bursting into the Holocaust museum with a gun with the intention of "I'm going to kill a bunch of people to make a statement," and going into someplace late at night and burning their fence and making sure that no people are hurt because you want to make a statement.

We need to take some action to preserve the difference, for all kinds of reasons. So that people don't rot in jail who don't need to for long periods of time. So that we, as a country, are not spiritually affected by this -- I think that there's a price to pay when your country endorses things like torture, and calling people terrorists who are not terrorists plays into that. You're falsely accusing certain sectors of the public of doing something they're not doing.

I also think that it's not that good for us environmentally, that we shouldn't be able to demonize people who are trying to get a message across that many people would recognize as positive.

Catch Dean Kuipers on his book tour or follow him on his blog. You can also see him on BookTV Sunday, July 25.

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President Obama gave a very lengthy "must-read" interview to the several reporters Sunday in which he spelled out a great deal of his thinking on the climate bill (transcript here).  Since Senate passage of a climate bill depends crucially on Obama's strong messaging and lobbying effort, I will excerpt the interview in two parts.

The wide-ranging interview gives Obama a chance to explain his reaction to the House abandoning his goal of 100% auctions and how the bill fits into the international negotiation process.

Significantly, Obama argues that, as I and others have suggested, meeting the emissions targets with domestic clean energy strategies will be cheaper and easier than the naysayers argued, and that we can then toughen the targets as the science - and other countries - demand.  We may

be able in this process to take a look at what kind of progress are we making five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now. With the framework now in place we may find ourselves not only able, but eager to move on that even more ambitious program.

Here's the first half of the interview [and in Part 2, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and climate czar Steven Carol Browner chime in]:

President Obama: Well, we wanted to have you guys in because the vote on the energy bill came in on Friday, and although I made a statement, I didn't have a chance to talk to the press about it.

I think this was an extraordinary first step. You know, if you had asked people six months ago - or six weeks ago, for that matter - whether we could get a energy bill with the scope of the one that we saw on Friday through the House, people would have told you, no way. You look at the constituent parts of this bill - not only a framework for cap and trade, but huge significant steps on energy efficiency, a renewable energy standard, huge incentives for research and development in new technologies, incentives for electric cars, incentives for nuclear energy, clean coal technology. This really is an unprecedented step and a comprehensive approach.

And if you tie it together with what we've done earlier, both in the stimulus on R&D and weatherization programs and a whole host of other steps, you take a look at the national fuel efficiency standard that we put into place - I think it's fair to say that over the first six months we've seen more action on shifting ourselves away from our dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels than at any time in several decades.

The other thing I wanted to emphasize is the fact that as we transition into this clean energy economy we are going to see, I think, an enormous amount of economic activity and job production emerging. I know that opponents of this bill kept on suggesting this was a jobs-killer, but everybody I talk to, when we think about how are we going to drive this economy forward post-bubble, keep on pointing to the opportunities for us to transition to a clean energy economy as a driver of economic growth.

Just simple examples: weatherization, you know, we know that our buildings are hugely inefficient. Every time we provide incentives for making our buildings more energy efficient those are jobs for welders, jobs for engineers, jobs for a construction industry that obviously is going to be in a tough way for some time to come, high-skill and relatively low-skill jobs are going to be generated in this process. When you look at our renewable energy standard - wind, solar - as a consequence of our Recovery Act you're already seeing thousands of jobs being produced. This bill will build on that and every time we make a wind turbine you're looking at 400 tons of steel, you have the potential for jobs not only in design but also in manufacturing of wind turbines.

So I think that at the end of the day this bill represents an important first step. There are critics from the left as well as the right; some who say who doesn't go far enough, some who say it goes too far. I am convinced that after a long period of inaction, for us to have taken such a significant step means that we're going to be in a position to advance technologically, obtain huge gains in efficiency. I think what we're going to see is that if we're able to get this in place that it's going to be very similar to the Clean Air Act of ‘91 or how we approached acid rain, where all the nay-sayers are proven wrong because American ingenuity and technology moves a lot faster when incentives are in place.

That's part of the reason why I think you saw a lot of businesses supporting this bill - everybody from Starbucks to GE, because what business is looking for is clarity and certainty, and what this bill signals is that we're not going to keep on being a prisoner of the past, we're going to reach for the future. The country that is able to lead on clean energy is the country that ultimately is going to be able to compete effectively in the 21st century.

So that's a little preface. I'll just go around the room and Carol and Steve will chime in if and when you guys have some technical questions.

Media: Mr. President, you've, as a candidate and even after you were sworn into office, been an advocate of hundred percent auction of the permits. That this bill obviously doesn't do that, it gives away some 85 percent, 60 of them to business. You know, why have you now sort of endorsed a bill that goes in a different direction?

Obama: Well, I think that what we always knew is that the transition from an old energy economy to a new, clean energy economy is going to be difficult. And there are going to be different regions affected differently. And as we began the process of actually working a bill through Congress, a lot of those regional differences come to the fore. So folks in regions that are highly reliant on coal-burning power plants, they say to themselves this is going to cost us more than folks who have greater access to wind power/solar power. You've got heavy manufacturing that is already having a tough time and needed to have some mechanism so that they could transition.

And my general view was once we got a framework in place, some of these transition costs could be accommodated to ensure that certain communities are not hit a lot harder than others. But the overall direction and the overall thrust is to reduce our emissions of carbon and incentivize clean energy production. And part of the region I think that business was supportive and that ultimately we got support from legislators who in the past had been opposed is because of the flexibility that was built into this bill.

Media: Does it undercut the effectiveness of the program? And does it complicate your plans to renew middle class tax cuts, which you had hoped would be paid for with the revenue?

President Obama: Well, there is no doubt that if we had not had some of these offsets then this would have raised more revenue. But what is also true is I wanted to make sure that we had protected low- and middle-class workers and families from spikes in electricity costs. And we wanted to make sure that there wasn't huge regional variation. And I think that the balance that was struck in this bill is appropriate.

As I said before, I actually think that this is going to be similar to our efforts at controlling acid rain with the cap and trade. I think this is going to end up being much less costly, much more efficient; technology is going to move much more rapidly than people anticipate. And we are going to have - be able in this process to take a look at what kind of progress are we making five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now. With the framework now in place we may find ourselves not only able, but eager to move on that even more ambitious program.

Exactly what Obama means "that even more ambitious program" is not entirely clear here, but he clarifies it later on, explaining that, yes, stronger targets will ultimately be necessary and achievable.

And it also gives us an opportunity I think to go to the Chinese and the Indians, who are going to be rapidly developing and who, although per capita have a much smaller carbon footprint, generally have less-efficient industries. We're going to be able to take a look at what they're doing and, to the extent that they are taking steps within their own economies to make progress, I think we're going to be able to help leverage even greater gains internationally.

Media: Talking about the regional differences, as you well know they're much more pronounced in the Senate. What do you expect from the Senate from this bill and how do you think it will change?

President Obama: One of the things that we were convinced of was that we could not get the Senate to move aggressively until they saw how the politics aligned in the House. And I think now that you've seen somebody like a Rick Boucher of Virginia able to enter into very constructive negotiations with a Henry Waxman of California, that, I think, provides a blueprint for how the Senate can proceed.

And I think that there is a clear sense on the part of the American people, on the part of governors - both Republican and Democrat, mayors - both Republican and Democrat - that the future is in clean energy and we need to do something about it. So my expectation is that the Senate is going to move forward; they're not going to have a bill that's identical to the House bill. This will end up in conference and there are going to be a series of tough negotiations. But I think the ability of the House to move forward is going to be a prod for the Senate towards action.

[Obama was then asked about trade restrictions in the bill, which I'll blog on later this week.]

Med One of the provisions that got added very late to this bill that senators had expressed some reservations about was the one that puts tariffs on goods imported from countries that don't have these sort of restrictions. What do you think of that revision and would you like to see the Senate strip it out?

President Obama: At a time when the economy worldwide is still deep in recession and we've seen a significant drop in global trade, I think we have to be very careful about sending any protectionist signals out there. There were a number of provisions that were already in place, prior to this last provision you talked about, to provide transitional assistance to heavy manufacturers. A lot of the offsets were outdated to those industries. I think we're going to have to do a careful analysis to determine whether the prospects of tariffs are necessary, given all the other stuff that was done and had been negotiated on behalf of energy-intensive industries.

So certainly it is a legitimate concern on the part of American businesses that they are not disadvantaged vis-a-vis their global competitors. Now, keep in mind, European industries are looking at an even more ambitious approach than we are. And they obviously have confidence that they can compete internationally under a regime that controls carbons. I think the Chinese are starting to move in the direction of recognizing that the future requires them to take a clean energy approach. In fact, in some ways they're already ahead of us - on fuel efficiency standards, for example, they've moved beyond where we've moved on this.

There are going to be a series of negotiations around this and I am very mindful of wanting to make sure that there's a level playing field internationally. I think there may be other ways of doing it than with a tariff approach.

Media: One of my questions is about just the whole - how all this is going to work, and some of the political risks of having this very large bureaucratic system and also in dealing with the perception that even if you were just trying to address regional differences that at the end of the day this is a bill weighed down with special interest provisions, and whether that would be a political - could turn into - both of those things could turn into political liabilities going forward.

Obama: Well, here's my general theory, that if you want to avoid potential political liabilities then you just do nothing around here in Washington. That seems to be the working theory. That's what's happened over the last several decades when it comes to energy. And my approach has been to say that rather than stand pat with a status quo that we know isn't working, that we need to reach out and shape our future.

Are there going to be glitches and bumps in the road in implementation? Absolutely. I don't think that any of us anticipate that there aren't going to be some aspects of the transition to a clean energy economy that don't stir up some political opposition. And I think that finding the right balance between providing new incentives to businesses, but not giving away the store, is always an art - it's not a science because it's never precise.

But on balance I think what you have with this legislation is a bill that business can embrace, but is tough enough that by 2020 we will have seen significant reductions in carbon emissions, we will have seen the kind of certainty in clean energy that the wind industry and the solar industry and the biomass industry has been hungry for. You're going to see farmers making a series of very concrete decisions about reforestation and tilling and the economic benefits of putting windmills on their acreage, that are going to have huge benefits for rural communities.

I think that when we look back 10 years from now, 15 years from now, we're going to say to ourselves this was a moment when we decided to take action, to strengthen our economy, create jobs, and improve our environment. And I think what seems controversial now is going to seem like common sense in hindsight.

Media: We're engaged now in a series of international negotiations leading up to Copenhagen in December. Quite a number of European governments, even some scientists and environmental groups say that the emissions targets in this bill are not strong enough. They're unlikely to get stronger in the Senate. Is this in some ways the highwater mark or is there an advantage to you to saying this is where we are now and going to Copenhagen and saying we will continue to work to strengthen it?

Obama: Well, you know, I had a conversation with Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been a leader on this issue in the European Union. And you heard her quotes, she said there's a sea change in terms of U.S. support.

Now, they would like to see even more aggressive targets. My argument to her and to the Europeans is we don't want to make the best the enemy of the good. We did not get into this situation overnight, we're not going to get out of it overnight. By putting a framework in place that is realistic, that is common-sensical, that protects consumers from huge spikes in electricity costs while setting real, meaningful targets - what we are doing is changing the political conversation and the incentive structures for businesses in this country.

My strong belief is, is that innovation and technology are going to accelerate our process beyond these targets, and that we're going to look back and say we can do even more. But I think legitimately people want to make sure that we are not setting such high goals without having even put a framework into place that it - well, let me phrase it this way: I think legitimately people want the framework in place and for us to make strong, steady, gradual progress, as opposed to trying to shoot for the moon and not being able to get anything done.

Media: In other words we are moving as far and as fast as we can right now in this country, politically?

President Obama: I think that the Waxman-Markey bill represents a great start. And I suspect that the Senate is going to come in - that there's going to be a strong overlap, but not perfect overlap; the final legislation that emerges is probably not going to satisfy the Europeans or Greenpeace. On the other hand, I think that when you've got corporate leaders like Jeff Immelt, legislators from coal regions like Rick Boucher, and Al Gore all agreeing that this is worth doing, that's a pretty good coalition to work with.

Media: Do you think the Senate is actually going to be able to get something done this summer? You've got a lot of things, between health care....

Obama: How the Senate times all this stuff is going to be, obviously, up to Harry Reid and the leadership in the Senate. But with the House having taken the lead and set a benchmark, I think the Senate is going to recognize now is the time to act.

So how all this stuff gets sequenced is hard to gauge. It may be that the Senate decides to do health care before they do energy. We've still got financial regulation in place. And the air traffic control system on all this legislation, how we land all of it I think is going to require enormous hard work and a deft touch by legislative leaders. What we want to do is to simply encourage the Senate and the House to seize the day, seize the opportunity.

The most important message that I want to deliver - and it's the same message that I'm delivering on health care - is everybody knows what we're doing isn't working. Everybody knows that. There's no contradiction. That the most vocal opponents to this legislation all have to admit that the status quo is unacceptable. So then you ask them, well, okay, what should we do? And they're sort of mumbling and muttering and vague allusions to, well, maybe we ought to do more nuclear power.

Well, I'll tell you what, there is a serious approach to nuclear power in this building. "Well, we need to focus on production, that's what will free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil." I've already said I'm happy to see us move forward on increasing domestic production, including offshore drilling - but we can't do that in isolation from all these other important steps that need to be taken.

So if the starting point is to acknowledge that we can't keep on doing the same things that we've been doing and expecting different results, then it means that now is the time to act. And I'm confident that ultimately the Senate is going to feel as the House did and, as tough as this may be, they're going to go ahead and move forward.

Media: But Mr. President, can I ask you, when you look at how the negotiations may go, do you have a floor or a bottom line for you about how many permits you're willing to give away? And then as you look at the House bill as it starts to overlay the Senate where they may go, you raise concerns about the tariff in there. Are there other issues, though, that you think are important not to delete as the Senate takes - that's one issue you don't want, it seems, in the bill, but is there something you think that should be in a bill in the House that you're willing to fight for?

Obama: Well, here's my bottom line. I think you have to have meaningful targets so that by 2020, by 2050 we are actually seeing reductions in carbon emissions. I think we have to have a strong push toward energy efficiency. We know that's the low-hanging fruit, we can save as much as 30 percent of our current energy usage without changing our quality of life. So we've got to go in that direction. I think that there has to be a strong renewable energy component in it. And it has to be deficit-neutral, consumers have to be protected from huge spikes in electricity prices.

So I've got some broad criteria the House bill meets. There are going to be provisions in the House bill and in the Senate bill which I question, in terms of their effectiveness. I'm not going to have a line-item veto, so ultimately - you know, I'll take a look at the final product. And if it meets those broad criteria - moving the country forward on energy efficiency - then it's a bill that I will embrace.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

In an exclusive interview with Grist, Nancy Sutley, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, says coal isn't going away anytime soon.  She also says the administration can't promise a slowdown in mountaintop-removal mining.  Here are highlights in video and text. (For more, read the full Q & A.)

Want more? Read the full Q & A.

Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / GristNancy Sutley is sitting in the catbird seat as America's environmental landscape begins to radically shift under the Obama administration. As chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, she is President Obama’s chief environmental adviser, coordinating activities across more than half a dozen federal agencies on issues ranging from climate change to water quality to land conservation.

Sutley, a Latina and the first high-level openly gay official to join the Obama administration, served from 2005 to 2009 as deputy mayor for energy and the environment in Los Angeles. There she helped quadruple renewable energy production, cut greenhouse gas emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels, and push through a program to cut air pollution from cargo ships at the region’s enormous ports. An outspoken advocate of environmental justice, Sutley also served at EPA during the Clinton administration, where she worked on clean-air protections.

For all her achievements in the environmental realm, Sutley is no idealist. She promotes the development of cleaner coal technology, reasoning that “clearly coal is a part of our energy mix now and it's likely to be so in the future.”

I met with Sutley at CEQ headquarters in a cozy brick townhouse next door to the White House, where we discussed climate policy, the fruits of the economic stimulus bill, and her role as an agent of environmental change.

Q. Let’s start with your job description. You coordinate federal activities on environmental policy. What does this entail on a practical level?

A. CEQ was created back in the 1970s to provide some policy guidance to all the agencies toward the U.S. meeting its environmental goals. On a day-to-day basis it can mean anything from thinking about the environmental trends and what are the pressing environmental issues affecting the country, to trying to resolve differences of opinion between agencies on very specific environmental questions.

Q. The House may soon vote on the landmark Waxman-Markey climate bill. You have said that President Obama is willing to personally intervene to ensure the passage of strong climate legislation. In what ways are you and he working behind the scenes to rally support for this bill?

A. The president’s been very up front. He met with the House Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats, and he’s talked about it repeatedly, that he wants to see comprehensive energy and climate legislation on his desk for him to sign. He has urged, as we’ve all urged, Congress to continue to move forward on acting on comprehensive energy and climate legislation, to foster this clean energy economy, to foster green jobs, and to tackle this pressing problem of climate change.

Q. Has President Obama said that specific provisions need to be included in the bill for it to be acceptable?

A. I don’t think that he has, and [I don't think that] now it is appropriate to draw lines in the sand. I think Congress is doing its job, it’s debating about the best ways to approach very important issues.

He has called for and been consistent in calling for an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. I think that’s generally an accepted, scientifically based goal, the goal we need to meet to try to deal with the worst potential effects of climate change. He’s also talked about protecting consumers, in addition to promoting clean energy and creating green jobs. There’s a lot of different ways you can go about doing that and it’ll be an important component of the bill going forward.

Q. Do you think that passing a moderate bill would be worse than passing no bill at all? Some people have voiced concerns that the bill might get stripped of its strongest provisions.

A. I think that the U.S. needs to deal with these energy issues. This has been a lament in Washington for many years, that we don’t have an energy policy. We are on the cusp of being able to really move our economy in a different direction, in a cleaner, more sustainable direction. There’s not always one way to do it. And it’s not just the only opportunity--we’ve made important efforts and investment through the [economic] recovery act in clean energy and in green jobs.

Q. The stimulus package allocated tens of billions of dollars to clean energy development and green jobs promotion. Can you give examples of energy projects and green jobs that are emerging as a result?

A. One of the important things that the recovery act does is provide very significant funding for green job training. That’s something we really never had. The Department of Labor is working very hard to get that money out the door to provide a platform for people to be trained for these new green jobs.

In terms of clean energy, the Department of Energy [is] working on loan guarantees for money for the smart grid. The Department of Transportation [recently announced] the first money on high speed rail, which is a really exciting opportunity to change fundamentally the transportation system, to bring us into the 21st century with respect to rail, which can help to reduce pollution in our cities and reduce our contributions to greenhouse emissions as well. Money for weatherization, money for improving the energy efficiency of government buildings—the U.S. government is the largest landlord in the country, we own thousands of buildings and manage thousands of buildings—to try to reduce their environmental footprint. The president said when he signed the recovery act that he wanted not only to stimulate the economy now, but to provide the foundation and the investment in this clean energy future.

Q. Sometimes building clean-energy projects butts up against protections for endangered species and land. How can you speed up renewable energy projects when you confront such barriers?

A. What’s important is for there to be a cooperative and concerted effort. Most of these projects will be built by the private sector, but we have an important role to play thinking about putting renewable [energy projects] and transmission in places where it’s appropriate to have them, where you have the best resources, but also to stay away from areas that are very sensitive.

I think there’s an important effort underway between the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture -- which manages the Forest Service, which manages a lot of land -- between the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, to try to work together as federal agencies to speed up the process, to not shortchange the environmental review. There [have] been efforts at the state level, in California and the Western states, to try to identify areas where the renewable resources are good, and to try to identify areas that are particularly sensitive that you want to stay away from. So I think with the federal government working together with the states, local governments, the environmental community, and the people who want to build these projects, we can come up with a sensible, efficient way to move forward with projects that will help move our country toward a cleaner energy future.

Q. Will there be trade-offs? Will we have to decide that clean energy may need to trump endangered-species protection? Or do you think it’s possible to do it all?

A. I think we have frameworks [so] that we can do it all. The National Environmental Policy Act reviews are intended to do that, to understand what the environmental impacts [are] of actions that the federal government’s involved in. Many states have similar kinds of reviews, so we don’t have to make tradeoffs between endangered species and transmission lines. It’s possible in a smart way, if we’re working together, if we’re planning ahead and making smart choices, that we can do both. I don’t think people have really anything to fear by the expansion of renewable energy.

Q. Mountaintop-removal coal mining has gotten a lot of attention recently for the harm that it’s causing Appalachian communities and waterways, and I know that the Obama administration has said that you will scrutinize permits more rigorously. Do you think this means we’re going to see less mountaintop mining as a result?

A. I don’t know the answer to that right now. There are a bunch of permits sitting in limbo because of some court decisions, and the reviews of those will have to move forward, and the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers will have to make decisions based on science and the law. The Department of Interior has asked to withdraw a last-minute Bush administration rule under the surface mining law that they oversee. So with respect to projects that are pending right now, I don’t know the answer to that, but they will have the scrutiny they deserve.

I think everybody acknowledges, the president has said it, and I think everybody you’ll talk to acknowledges that there are serious environmental impacts associated with mountaintop mining, and we have to address them going forward, and we have to look at what we can do under our existing authority to strengthen the oversight of these projects and to see that we’re using those authorities fully to try to address the environmental impacts of mountaintop mining. So again, does it mean fewer projects? I don’t know the answer to that. But it will mean that we will deal with the environmental impacts of those projects.

Q. Another hot-button issue is “clean coal.” Do you think it’s misleading to imply that mining and burning coal can be clean?

A. I think what we have to recognize is that all forms of energy production have environmental impacts. The only one I think that doesn’t is energy conservation. So we have to consider what are the best ways to address those environmental impacts. I think there is hope for technology that will help to reduce both the environmental impacts of mining coal and producing electricity with coal. There are promising technologies to deal with the carbon dioxide using carbon capture and sequestration. The truth of the matter is we’ve had a generation of coal plants that have been built using basically 1950s technology and we really have to push to innovate in that technology because clearly coal is a part of our energy mix now and it's likely to be so in the future.

But even if we were to stop using coal tomorrow, it’s used around the world and we have to deal with its environmental impacts. So investing in the technology, investing in innovation in how coal is used to produce electricity, is very important not only for our country and our economy but really for the entire world. And we can be a leader in providing that technology, we can be a leader in providing the innovation and research that will get us to be able to deal with the effects of burning coal and try to address carbon capture and sequestration. These are important technologies that we’re going to need.

Q. A clean environment should be a universal civil right, and yet it’s widely perceived to be an issue of a narrow, white, privileged slice of America. The Obama green team is a diverse group. How are you helping to shift the way Americans think about the environment and potentially expanding this narrow issue into a universal political movement?

A. I’ll take a little bit of issue with the premise because I’ve worked here in Washington, I’ve worked in California, at the state level in Los Angeles, where the environment is an issue for everyone. People care about the environment they experience, as they experience it. People care very much about the environment in their communities, they care about the health of their families and their community, they care about the places that they live.

It doesn’t always get translated into the big policy issues of the day, but I think this team, the Obama administration, the team here at CEQ, we are people with a really broad range of experience. A lot of us have worked at the community level, at the state and local level, where there is no doubt that the environment is an issue people care about across the board. So I think we bring that perspective, and reaching out to people across a broad range of communities is a very important issue for us. And we’ve got Van Jones here, who’s a special adviser at CEQ on green jobs. We believe, and I know the President believes, that the promise of a clean energy economy will reach across the entire spectrum of our country.

The other thing I’d say about this theme is that the experience really goes beyond the environmental agencies. We have people in positions, in agencies, that don’t have the environment in their title, who care very much about these issues. Secretary Solis in the Department of Labor sponsored the first environmental-justice legislation in California. John Donovan, the secretary of [Housing and Urban Development], came in with a lot of experience trying to green public housing in New York and bringing that same ethic here, to think about sustainable and livable communities. So I think it’s not just the type of people, but also that the environment cuts across so many issues that we deal with, and we have a great team in place who bring those experiences here to Washington.

Q. What policy developments would you like to see with regard to environmental justice?

A. What unfortunately I think happened over the last eight years was that those voices didn’t have a place in the administration’s discussion about the environment. The first thing we need to do is give those voices a place as we put policy together. We’ve been very active in reaching out into a diverse set of communities. As I talk to people to hear what they’re thinking, I think there’s really a lot of excitement about the possibilities of growing this green economy and creating a clean energy economy of green jobs and what it can mean to communities which have been suffering a long time with both economic deprivation and environmental harm. So there’s real opportunities there, and most important is to start the conversation with them. And that we’ve started to do.  And we’ll make sure that as we move forward on this clean energy economy, that it really does touch all parts of our economy and all parts of our country.

Q. What’s the most fun part about your job, and the hardest part?

A. The hardest part is that, having spent the last 13 years in California and coming back here, the weather really stinks, so sometimes I get up in the morning and I think, why did I leave California?

The most fun, as my experience has been doing jobs like this in other places, is the people you get to work with. It’s an incredible group of people, and we’re working for someone who’s a very inspiring leader, who cares about these issues. And I think we feel the sense of possibility, the hope that’s out there in this country that we can move our country into a better place, and that this clean energy economy is really an integral part of a vision for the future. To work on forward-looking policies with a great group of people is great, and it’s wonderful and I look forward to many happy years doing it.

Be sure to check out video highlights from the interview.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

In a wide-ranging interview with Grist, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson hit on a number of hot-button topics. Here are highlights in video and text.  (For more, read the full Q & A.)

Want more? Read the full Q & A.

Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / GristLisa Jackson has a flair for the unexpected. At our interview, she wore a saucy pink suit and pointy pumps—not typical attire for the nation’s most powerful authority on the environment. She is joyous and quick to laugh, as demonstrated during her recent appearance on The Daily Show -- a first for a Washington eco-wonk.

Jackson made news during her first few months as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency by issuing an initial finding that greenhouse gases jeopardize public health and welfare -- a move she described to Grist as part of a “solemn responsibility” to follow through on a directive from the Supreme Court. This finding, when finalized, will enable the EPA to directly regulate greenhouse gases from all sources, giving the agency more power and purview than ever before.

Formerly an EPA employee for 16 years, Jackson served as commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection from 2006 to 2008 under Gov. Jon Corzine (D), where she won praise from enviros for her work on climate change and clean water and criticism for a sluggish toxic cleanup program.  Now back at the EPA, she is the first African American to head up the agency. 

I met with Jackson at EPA headquarters to get her take on Obama’s “green Cabinet,” the scourge of mountaintop removal, and the fight against climate change.

-----

Q. You’ve served almost half a year as EPA administrator. What’s the best part about your job?

A. The best part is being a part of President Obama’s administration. It’s starting to hit me -- the real change in attitude about the environment, the fact that the president sees the environment as a crucial step towards our economic recovery. He sees clean energy as part of the solution. So I have a boss and a bunch of colleagues in the Cabinet who actually value our role, even though we certainly have moments where we have spirited discussions and disagreements over how to get something done. But at its heart, we’re talking about a policy team that really works together to move our country forward on clean energy and addressing climate change.

Q. What’s the hardest part?

A. We work hard. President Obama expects from us a level of work that means that because we have such a broad agenda here at EPA, we knew we had to come out swinging. We wanted to set a high standard. Our challenge now is to make sure that, as we have announced new positions -- whether it’s dependence on science, transparency, the law -- that we actually follow through and that change is felt throughout the organization.

Q. You're a key member of the so-called “green team,” which we sometimes hear in environmental circles referred to as the “dream team.” Is that an actual team?

A. We started to use the term “green Cabinet”; it pops up from time to time on my schedule and I really like that. It’s a large team; we meet at least monthly. It includes transportation and agriculture and commerce and labor and the president’s office of energy and climate change -- that’s Carol Browner and Nancy Sutley over at [the Council on Environmental Quality] and John Holdren at [the Office of Science & Technology Policy] and Shaun Donovan at [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] and Secretary Vilsack over at Agriculture and Secretary Chu at the Department of Energy and Secretary Salazar over at Interior. What a group, to sit around and really try to find ways to break down the silos that have traditionally stymied federal policymaking and action.

Just [recently] we did a hearing on smart growth, and to sit next to the secretary of transportation and hear him talking about the importance of thinking smartly about land-use planning as part of the transportation bill, was just extraordinary messaging. And we were with Secretary Donovan from HUD; he’s been quite an advocate as well.

Q. [Last week] the Obama administration released a report on climate impacts across the country. What was the EPA’s role in this report and what is its significance?

A. We have a draft finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, so the science that went into that finding is a lot of the same science that is built upon in the report. Information that we have, and also that [the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration] collects in the National Weather Service, and other scientists -- lots of information they’ve synthesized to paint this picture of how climate will impact our country.

Q. Are you waiting to see what Congress will do before you make a move on regulating greenhouse gasses?

A. I’d like to remind people that EPA had a legal obligation given to us by the Supreme Court almost two years ago to basically address greenhouse gases in the context of the Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act says that EPA has authority if greenhouse gases are a criteria pollutant—meaning they endanger public health and/or welfare—and I thought it was just extremely important that rather than play any kind of gamesmanship we just speak to that one issue.

I would like to see new legislation. The president has called for new energy and climate legislation. It’s extremely important for our country, including the discussions that are happening in Congress right now amongst all of the different interests that have to be part of the energy solution that the president wants.  That being said, I thought it was a solemn responsibility that I had as administrator of the EPA to follow the law and do what the Supreme Court said. And certainly if we find that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, that requires EPA to act from a regulatory standpoint.

And of course we have to watch Congress because if law passes that takes away that authority or changes it in some way, we have to be ready for that.

Q. The Waxman-Markey climate bill would limit the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases. Would this tie your hands?

A. I think the drafters have rightfully said, “Listen, if we’re going to pass a new law specifically to address climate change, we also realize that the Clean Air Act is out there and provides uncertainty if we have a law that compels a cap-and-trade program.” Those discussions are ongoing; certainly states have had a lot to say about it. And I think our position is that right now we’re going to continue to carry out our responsibilities to the American people. That means closing the comment period on the endangerment finding, and that closes June 23. That means moving and working with [the Department of Transportation] and the state of California on auto regulations.

Q. In the lead-up to international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December, other countries are watching what we do. Do you think it will inhibit our ability to lead at Copenhagen if we don’t have a domestic climate policy in place?

A. This is truly one of those situations where, as a globe, we have to come up with a solution. A lot of great work was done at Kyoto, a lot of great work was done in Bali. It's been and continues to be a very important and very vigorous dialogue. Led by Todd Stern over at the State Department, we’ve certainly been playing a lot of a supporting role in that effort. But we have to make sure we continue to move the dialogue forward. It’s complicated by the fact that the picture’s still emerging here. The president has said that we need a global solution, but we also need to show the world that we’re in this game for the long term.

Q. Do you think we’ll have a climate policy in place by then?

A. I hope so. I certainly hope so. I want to remain optimistic that we will.

Q. Mountaintop-removal coal mining is a very controversial issue. [Recently] your administration said that you would rigorously scrutinize mountaintop-removal permits, but you’ve approved dozens of permits already. Why not ban the practice altogether?

A. The actual rules that enable surface mining, and mountaintop mining is one type of surface mining, are Department of Interior’s rules. And, I think wisely, the Council on Environmental Quality called together all the groups who work on mountaintop-mining issues, that would mean Interior and EPA and the Corps of Engineers, and said, "OK, listen, we need to look at this practice." The assessment yielded something that I certainly agree with, and I think many people do, which is that the current state of the law and regs doesn’t allow us to just change the law and the regs to say that this process will no longer be allowable. There’s no way to do that under current law.

What we can do at EPA is commit to a couple things: rigorous scrutiny of permits to make sure that we look at potential impacts to water. And I think that there is a valid criticism that’s been leveled that the process is not open enough, that outside advocates -- whether they be environmentalists or people who are advocating for mining or maybe community members -- don’t have enough information to gauge whether or not they agree with EPA’s determinations or not. So we’ve not only said we’re going to scrutinize new permits as they come up, pull out the batch of 110 that are sitting and already waiting to be issued by the Corps and scrutinize those, but we’re going to do it with one other new improvement, which is to put all the information we have out in a database that’s publicly available, so that the public will know what concerns we have and why we have them. If we miss something, we can certainly have that discussion. If we disagree--reasonable people may be able to disagree on the science--but at least people aren’t trying to guess what EPA’s thinking as it reviews these permits.

Q. Sometimes you get the sense climate change that is the only environmental problem we’re grappling with. What do you think is the most pressing environmental concern after climate change?

A. I think it is important that we make sure the American people know that here at EPA we have an agenda that’s broader than climate change. It starts with renewing this agency’s commitment to science, to the law and transparency.

When we talk about environmental programs, I think we have to talk about air pollution still. A recent study said that as many as 60 percent of Americans live in areas of our country where we don’t meet air standards for the other criteria pollutants, even if you put CO2 and greenhouse gases on the side. That’s a pretty powerful and potent statement in the year 2009, that we still have that level of concern about air pollution. And in some areas, some urban areas and other areas, it’s much higher percentages, where the majority of the year the air is literally not safe to breathe. Climate change is a long-term threat, but things like ozone pollution and particulate pollution is much shorter and can have acute health impacts, even death. We have a huge obligation there.

And water. I think more and more Americans are very much aware of the fact that clean water is still not a given, even in this day and age, that we have too many communities that are struggling for clean drinking water. And then the next step, communities whose very economic future and recovery depend on a clean and sustainable source of water. And we don’t have answers for those communities.

We have a huge agenda on toxics, I like to say “toxic sites,” the clean-up program that many of us know as Superfund and brownfield sites. The president’s commitment to refunding through a “polluter pays” tax is music to our ears here at EPA. But then the other side of toxics, which is toxic chemicals. Many people aren’t as familiar with EPA’s role in evaluating toxic chemicals and assessing risk of chemicals. And I would like to see a robust and modernized program there as well.

Q. The EPA has been criticized for years for being notoriously slow at judging the toxicities of chemicals. What do you plan to do to speed that up?

A. We have two ideas: The first is to work within the regulatory authority we already have. That law is TSCA, the Toxic Substances Control Act, which basically requires EPA to assess new chemicals as they come on the market. Anything can be improved, but that’s not the greatest source of frustration. For many Americans the concern is the existing chemicals that were sort of grandfathered in when TSCA came to be, and new concerns about how well and how much of that chemical universe we’re assessing. And we’re right now reviewing our regulatory authority to come up with some new ideas, some fresh ideas, besides the voluntary programs that we’ve seen for the past eight years, in terms of TSCA.

Then we announced just a week ago a reworking of our risk assessment process in terms of something called IRIS [Integrated Risk Information System]. We have a huge database that’s internationally used where we put chemical toxicity information out for everyone to use in their decision-making, and we had gotten to the point where, in my belief, an overly complicated system that involved a little too much opinion from non-scientists had come to be the way that IRIS risk assessments were done. We changed that, we’ve gone back to a simpler process; we are aiming for a 23-month from start to finish process for IRIS risk assessments.

And EPA’s working now to formulate a position on potential changes to the legislation that’s already out there. TSCA’s a statute that’s been around since 1976, and it’s reasonable to believe that it might be time to look at better ways and quicker ways to protect Americans from risk of toxic chemicals in the year 2009.

Q. The green team is a diverse group, and a lot of you have been outspoken on environmental justice, an issue that’s been sidelined for many years. What would you like to see happen on the policy level to address the disproportionate impacts of pollution on low-income communities?

A. First and foremost I would like to see the fruition of the dreams of folks who have been advocating on environmental justice for a long, long time, and almost made it their life’s passion, and that’s that they have a seat at the table and a voice and that they’re listened to, that [environmental justice] is not an afterthought to be redressed later, but that in decision making, in policy making, we give consideration to make sure that those who are poor, those who are already disproportionately impacted for whatever set of reasons, aren’t being asked to accept an additional share of environmental burden because it’s easier or because they’re disenfranchised. Of course we know that oftentimes when you take poor and disproportionately impacted, that intersects with people of color. Environmental justice I think at its heart says let’s look at the science -- if you’re being impacted, it’s very likely that we can do something to help, that we can be proactive on our decision making.

The second thing I’d like to see is that we don’t just deal with the bad stuff, but as we see this new economy growing -- this green jobs, green collar, green energy, whatever euphemism we want to use -- that we get some of that good stuff going as well, so that a lot of communities who may feel separate from environmental issues suddenly have a real stake in them, because they literally make their living through green energy or through site cleanup. We’ve seen some amazing success stories in the brownfields program where you give jobs to people to help clean up sites in their own community. And you don’t just give someone a job when that happens, you build an environmentalist from the ground up. Now all of a sudden it’s an issue that they care about, it literally is their life’s work. That’s what we want to see as well.

Q. You've talked about how your job places you in a remarkable moment in history. What is it like to experience this and why is this issue so important to you on a personal level?

A. I wish I was eloquent enough to explain to people how much of a dream come true it is to be back at EPA at this time. I think if you ask any career civil servant in the building, "If you could do anything for EPA over the last eight years, what would you do?", they would say, "I’d like to bring the place back, I’d like to value the employees, I’d like to make the American people know how important the work is that we do and how serious it is that we take it" -- and I get to do that. And I worked here for 16 years before as one of those folks in the trenches. I was in New Jersey working for Gov. [Jon] Corzine, and there was no greater job, except for this one. It would have taken a great job to leave. I wish I could tell you how extraordinary it is. All I can say is that it’s worth moving the family, selling the house, getting here as soon as possible, because from the president to every single one of the employees, it’s just been an incredible experience, really an honor.

Be sure to check out video highlights from the interview.

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"You can guilt-trip me and you can moralize and you can gloom-and-doom about it, but there are probably certain behaviors I have that I'm just not going to change. But if you presented me with solutions ... if we can figure out ways to reduce my impact -- that I can afford -- great! I'm going to do them ... I don't necessarily think that's a good thing, but I think that this is the reality and there are probably hundreds of millions of Americans who feel like I do. I'm a lazy environmentalist."
-- Josh Dorfman

And thus was born the brand that has spawned a blog, a (now defunct) radio show, two books (and counting), a Sundance Channel Green television series that premieres tonight at 9 p.m. -- and a ray of hope for couch potatoes everywhere.

But the man known as the Lazy Environmentalist is certainly no sloth himself. In fact, Josh Dorfman has been so busy writing and researching and talking and filming that he's hardly had time to devote to his first green venture, a high-end sustainable furniture store called Vivavi.

It was a coworker from Vivavi, actually, that prompted Dorfman's first use of the "lazy environmentalist" phrase, when he was accused of not being an environmentalist at all (despite his sustainable shop) because of bad habits like long, hot showers. (Which he still refuses to give up -- they help him think, OK?)

Now Dorfman is dedicated to cutting out the typical green-minded guilt-trip crap and helping people find eco-solutions that not only fit their lifestyles but improve them. He's still coming to terms with what kind of role he's playing in this movement, but says maybe he's less journalist/media personality and more "change agent." Change that sticks, that is, and spurs more change -- because it just makes sense.

Here's what Dorfman had to say about his ever-evolving eco-philosophy:

Q. Can laziness really save the world? Because that would be great news.

A. [Laughs] I would say no. Laziness probably can't save the world. But I do think that there are many ways to reduce the impact that our lives have on the planet right now, so it seems foolish to not take advantage of them and instead to be waiting for some future technology that may or may not materialize.

Q. How about this: Can we save the world by buying things?

A. What I think we have to do as a society, as a country, as a civilization, is we have to bring our lifestyles into balance with nature. All of us consume something, almost every day ... we have to do whatever we can to reduce the impact of that consumption. What gets us to solution is a combination of the right laws and policies coupled with greater transparency in the marketplace so that people have a greater sense of the impact of their purchasing decisions. Business is playing a role in that too.

I just focus on the consumer side of [this issue] because, to me, the other things aren't working fast enough. I think that we've had some major, major strides in terms of environmental policy, but at the same time, when you look at our environmental organizations -- be it Sierra Club or World Wildlife Fund or the Nature Conservancy, you name it -- they may have millions of members, and that's phenomenal, but there are 300 million Americans. So how do you gauge the other 280-290 million Americans who aren't in these organizations? How do you reduce the impact of their behavior, because that's really the key. That's what I'm trying to focus on.

Q. You're a spokesperson for Brita and for Clorox's Green Works line. How did that come about? Did you have any hesitation about lending your name to big corporations?

A. Well, it's something that I think a lot about. When [my first book] came out in 2007, Brita approached me about becoming their spokesperson for their FilterForGood campaign. ... [It's] a tremendous campaign. There are lots of campaigns to raise awareness about bottled water, but to be able to be involved with a company like Brita in a larger corporation, you create a bigger platform ... you're able to be a part of something that can have a broad impact across a wide swatch of our society.

As I've thought it through, I've come to feel that if it sits with me as a solution that I think is substantively better than the conventional choice, then that's something I can get pretty excited about getting behind.

As we transform our economy -- which I really believe is what we have to do -- into sustainability, I just think that these large corporations are going to be part of that change. They have to be. Some of them will go out of business, but most of them are going to be here and they have to transform. These are the steps corporations have to take to transform and sometimes it's hard for us as environmentalists to operate in this gray area. We want to see the world in terms of good guys and bad guys, black and white, and that's not a luxury that we have if we're really serious about creating change that's going to make a real difference.

Q. I recently reviewed a number of natural toilet-bowl cleaners, and Clorox Green Works was the winner -- doing the best job for the cheapest price. But a lot of readers commented about how they are skeptical of Clorox and don't want to support the company because of the other products they put out.

A. I think sometimes we get caught up in trying to make the perfect choice. So we argue back and forth saying, "Am I going to support Green Works? Am I going to support Seventh Generation? Am I going to support Mrs. Meyers?" And my feeling is "Great! Support it! Do it!"

But for folks who happen to really love Clorox and trust Clorox, and have Clorox as a valued brand … I've talked to those folks, too, and they have been like, "Hey, I love Clorox, and I'm really psyched that they gave me an option, because I trust them. If they're doing something green, then I'm going to trust that it's going to work." So there are all kinds of way to look at it.

We ought to be saying, "Here's all the good ones; whatever choice you want to make in the good camp, great!" Let's focus on the other products that aren't so good, instead of infighting to try to get the perfect choice.

Q. Do you personally test all of the products and services that you recommend in your blog and in your books?

A. I vet as much as I possibly can, personally. ... [But] there's no science to it, so I do spend a lot of time really trying to think through, "Is this a choice that really moves the ball forward and is this an area ... that's worthwhile to focus on?"

Q. I read that your "epiphany" came about when you realized all of China's bicyclists would turn into drivers. How do you see gently greening U.S. consumers as a fix to rapidly escalating international problems? Is what you're doing really addressing some of these big, urgent issues?

A. I think it is addressing the issues; as an environmentalist and someone who is very, very concerned about these issues, the question that I have in the back of my mind -- which is sometimes in the front of my mind -- is, "are we going fast enough?" I mean, that's the big question. ... We probably don't have time, but the challenge is that there's the cultural reality where we're not really willing to embrace the fact that we're in a crisis. We're just not. We're not willing to take the steps that we would take if we were really listening to the science.

Q. Are we letting people feel like they're doing something great by making one or two different purchasing decisions or lifestyle habit changes -- when in reality, it's not enough?

Dylan Dyer, (host) Josh Dorfman, and Cym Warkov filming the "lazy landscaper" episode of "The Lazy Environmentalist."Photo: Eric SenchuckA. This isn't about one change; this isn't about just unplugging your cell-phone device. That's not what this is about. This is about saying that there is so much rapid innovation taking place that one could transform almost their entire life and be living perhaps a higher quality lifestyle, more affordable, while at the same time reducing their environmental impact. I truly believe that. I'm not like a one-small-step kind of guy.

And I'm not saying this is a terribly original idea here, but I do believe there is an intangible that does take place when people can make good environmental choices that they feel good about. Then, they want to do it again. It's kind of like the magic behind the Toyota Prius. When you buy that car -- and everyone else on the road knows that you're an awesome hero of the planet and that guy in the toll booth gives you a high five because you're this super-awesome person -- it feels good. There are ways to continue to do that that also meet people's criteria that the car works, it's easy to service, it's at the right price point -- all of those things are important to people.

Demoralizing, guilt-tripping, gloom-and-doom, polar bears on a melting ice cap ... people get upset for a few minutes, and then they go on with their day. They don't change how they live. I'm trying to figure out, how you really get people to change how they live.

Let's assume that we start to live in smaller homes or design our communities better or drive more fuel-efficient cars -- what is this really going to mean for our society? What are we transforming toward? What does the future start to look like? For so many other things, politicians paint a vision: "Here's where America is going!" But there's no vision of what America starts to look like yet when it goes green.

Q. You have to get the message of the urgency out without being too alarmist. It's a fine line to walk.

A. Where I'm trying to plug in is to shine the spotlight on things that people can get excited about because it works for them in their lives or in their place of business or wherever they are, and they can feel like they're being part of environmental changes.

It's not just about sacrifice. It's really about living smarter, and that's ultimately what I believe and that's what I think most environmentalists are saying.

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Entrepreneur Jeffrey Hollender launched a mail-order catalog business 20 years ago and nursed it for more than a decade before it became profitable. That company is now Seventh Generation, and there's no more catalog, but there certainly is a ton of recycled toilet paper -- and all-natural cleaning supplies and non-toxic personal-care products.

It's a product category that has seen massive growth in the last few years as environmental issues have risen to front-page news status. In fact, Seventh Generation saw its biggest numbers recently -- posting about 50 percent growth last year. Which is exactly why Hollender has decided it's time to step down from his role as CEO.

Sound like odd timing? Not for Hollender. "I realized that I lacked most of the experience that would be required to manage that growth to its fruition," he says. Hollender was also growing increasingly torn between other projects like writing -- his next book, In Our Every Deliberation, comes out next month -- and speaking gigs, and a TV program called Big Green Lies. "As I wandered around the offices, I began to wonder what all the people in different rooms were doing."

So as of last week, there was at least one more new face in the Seventh Generation offices: Chuck Maniscalco. He comes to the company from PepsiCo, where he was CEO of the $10 billion Quaker, Tropicana, and Gatorade division, which he calls "very purpose-driven businesses." Maniscalco, who actually came out of retirement to take on this job, says he's determined to manage Seventh Generation's growth in a way that remains true to the company's commitment to sustainability.

As for Hollender, he'll be continuing in the role of "Chief Inspired Protagonist," focusing more on corporate responsibility and sustainability advocacy work rather than being involved the company's day-to-day operations.

I spoke to the two of them in a three-way conference call just days after Maniscalco took over his new office. Here's what they had to say:

Q. One of the reasons you're leaving, Jeffrey, is because of the massive growth Seventh Generation has seen recently. What do you attribute that success to?

A. Hollender: I think that we live in a world where there is a tremendous sort of search for purpose and meaning. In some respects, who Seventh Generation is and what we aspire to helps people be the people they want to be and live the lives they want to live and that is a stark contrast to what they often experience from [other] companies and businesses ... [It] builds a strong and deep connection to people that I think is more important than it has perhaps ever been. Now, that's not enough; you have to also get your products on the shelves of stores at the right price and the products have to work the way people expect them to work.

Q. Speaking of getting your products on the shelves at the right price, are you still refusing to sell them in Wal-Mart?

A. Hollender: Historically, that was true; up until a year ago while we were in a very close dialogue with Wal-Mart and working to help them become a more sustainable and responsible business, we were not comfortable selling to them. But the progress that Wal-Mart has made in the past three to four years is astounding and absolutely an incredible inspiration for what's possible of a large company. Does that mean they're perfect today? No, but they have made more progress than just about any company that I can think of and that progress has led us to experiment with them in a small group of stores. ... So it's really a question for Chuck in terms of when is the right time and what is the right way, but there is no philosophic issue that restrains us from doing business with them.

Q. Do you feel like it's possible for a big company like Wal-Mart or PepsiCo to commit to the same standards of sustainability that Seventh Generation has?

Chuck Maniscalco (left) and Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation.Photo: Chrystie HeimertA. Maniscalco: I think it would be difficult for any company to ever reach up to the standards that Seventh Generation has set. I've never seen it before, and I probably will never see it again and that's why I'm here. Having said that, Wal-Mart, for example, was a very big customer for PepsiCo and Quaker Oats, and Wal-Mart over the course of the last several years has been the single biggest force in getting companies in the consumer packaged-goods world to take waste out of their products, out of their packages, and out of the supply-chain stream. So I think they can be a force for good.

Hollender: And they can move quicker than government or any regulatory agency. Now, they don't all use that power in ways that are beneficial, in fact we wouldn't be in the situation we are if they did. But I don't believe that we can solve the urgent problems that face us -- whether it's global warming, or whether it's a crisis of fresh water or species disappearance -- without aggressive leadership from the business community. Part of the role that Seventh Generation wants to play is showing business that being responsible is good business and being sustainable is good business, and that we can't afford to have business stand in the way of the progress we need to make to become more sustainable.

Q. In the same vein, is it possible for a company like Seventh Generation to scale up? You've said your goal was to take the company from $150 million annually to $1 billion. How do you plan to do this while maintaining a commitment to sustainability?

A. Maniscalco: It's a question of how to get big and be authentic at the same time ... Even with all of the growth this business has had over many, many years, we have still tapped into a minority of the consumers out there who care about what we offer in our products and who care about what the company stands for ... so there's still distribution opportunities. And from a consumer standpoint, this group of people is already big and it's growing by the day, because all of the issues that we all know the world is facing are becoming much more apparent to more people. So I absolutely think it's doable, but you have to do it with real care and real discipline. And that's our charge.

Hollender: It helps to be a private company so that we don't have to answer to shareholders who've purchased stock in the company who might not share our vision or our values. We choose our investors as carefully if not more carefully than our employees, because the alignment of those investors is absolutely critical. I also think that what I've experienced is that a company with the mission we have is a magnet for the best talent in the marketplace ... that's one of the ways in which we will scale, because we can get the best and brightest people to come and join what we're doing.

Q. When you started Seventh Generation, you were a big fish in a little pond. That pond is more crowded now; is there enough room in the pool for everyone? How do you feel about the competitors like Method who are on the shelves with you at Target or other stores?

A. Maniscalco: People always say they love competition and they rarely mean it. I would say, in this case, we love competition and we do mean it. In my view, the more people who come into this space -- and do so legitimately -- the greater good we're serving. And as Jeffrey pointed out before, we don't succeed against our mission if we do it all by ourselves. Secondly, the more people that come into this space and do it right, the more awareness and understanding consumers will have about how to behave responsibly. The challenge for us, I think, is to ensure that we keep driving standards higher and higher and higher, so that as other people come along, we still have a significant edge over them.

Hollender: One of the biggest gaps that exists today is a green product does not make a green company. And what we need to do -- and what we need our customers, consumers, and partners to do -- is to push businesses beyond greening a teeny part of their business, to embrace sustainability across everything they do. When you look at the competitive landscape today, it's mostly large companies taking a small part of their portfolio and making it greener than it was before. I think that consumers will increasingly look for sustainable companies, not just sustainable products.

Q. You're touching on a major problem for consumers: greenwashing -- companies putting out products that have green labels on them, but aren't really following that up within the actual product or their company as a whole. What can consumers do to make sure they're buying a legitimate product?

A. Hollender: Well, I'll just mention two things. One is we have a great application that you can download to your phone or your computer or your PDA. As you're walking down the aisles of a grocery store, you can use this application to help make better choices. Secondly, we are big advocates of what the Good Guide is doing, and we think that the service that a third party like the Good Guide provides in making independent evaluations of the products on the shelf is a very valuable service to consumers.

Q. What is the biggest challenge for a business wanting to be truly sustainable?

A. Hollender: I think we face a couple of challenges. Clearly, education is a huge challenge, so it is critical that we help consumers make conscious and responsible choices. We need greater transparency so that they can make informed decisions. Secondly, we live in a regulatory environment that often encourages us to do the wrong thing because companies are allowed to externalize so much of their costs that dangerous, environmentally irresponsible products often cost less than sustainable, responsible products. If consumers are shown the full cost of the products and services that they're buying, there's no question that they will increasingly choose responsible, sustainable products.

Q. How can we show them that cost?

A. Hollender: There are hundreds and hundreds of examples, and some of them directly affect our business. We're in the business of selling recycled tissue paper, and the government -- for the last year in which a calculation was made -- spent a billion dollars subsidizing the virgin timber industry by building roads and allowing that timber to be cut at below-market prices. What that does is it artificially makes recycled fiber more expensive. All of these things send the wrong message to the consumer, and we need to actively make sure that the government and the regulatory agencies are reflecting decisions that are in the best interest of future generations, not the shareholders of some of America's largest companies.

Q. So, it's got to be a political-activism sort of thing?

A. Hollender: It does, and Chuck's going to allow me more time to do that, which I'm looking forward to.

Maniscalco: The great news is we've now got Jeffrey playing a much bigger role in that big external environment, and I can get really focused on driving [the company] from the inside, and I think that's a really good one-two punch.

Hollender: Absolutely. We're subtly sending a message to all these large companies that they better, to a certain extent, watch out because this is a game-changing event for our business and for our industry. The addition of Chuck to Seventh Generation will dramatically accelerate the need for everyone to rise to a higher standard and move more quickly in a sustainable direction.

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We've all heard that eating locally is one way to reduce your environmental impact. But what about donating locally? In the urban wilds of New York City, a new non-profit is betting that locally based, small-scale giving can have a big eco-impact.

Ioby, whose name stands for "in our back yards," connects people working on neighborhood-level projects with community members who can physically and financially support them. At ioby.org, launched this month by co-founders Erin Barnes, Cassie Flynn, and Brandon Whitney, individuals or groups post project descriptions and budgets, and interested donors contribute to the project of their choice. Here's their introductory video:

Within its first 10 days of existence, ioby successfully facilitated the funding of the first three of its 40 listed projects: a Boy Scout proposed and executed an environmental awareness fair, a community garden got a compost education class off the ground, and another grassroots group undertook a park cleanup and revegetation project in Queens. It's all part of an effort, says Barnes, to get people connected to their surroundings and invested in the future.

The concept that powers the organization's work is known as microfinance. As a philanthropy model, it's not new, but in recent years it's gained momentum online, with popular sites focusing on education and international development projects. Ioby is the first microfinance site to focus on funding local environmental projects.

Fueled by their successes so far, ioby's founders -- who met at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and have called New York City home since graduating in 2007 -- hope to expand the model to other communities around the country, though they acknowledge that it will take a lot more work than they first realized. They recently got together to answer a few questions about where the idea came from, who's using ioby.org, and how it works.

Organizers of "It's My Park!" day asked ioby followers to help them raise awareness.ioby.orgQ. Do you think ioby's small-scale model is the future of environmental activism?

A. Barnes: A lot of environmental work comes from national campaigns, and all of those efforts are really important. But I think one of the things that we miss is the groups themselves in the neighborhoods, recognizing their own environmental problems, proposing their own solutions. Ioby helps small, community-based groups like neighborhood associations and block associations. It gives them a website, it gives them a storefront, it gives them a cash register, a place where they can talk about these issues to the general public.
I actually think that this is a pretty powerful tool for grassroots organizing. You can reach a lot of people - that's what social networking does. You engage them by telling them the stories about projects that are happening in their own neighborhoods. You ask them for $20 or three hours on a Saturday afternoon. And I think at that point you have a dedicated lifelong member who wants to make sure that half a block of green space is protected into the future.
Flynn: The people that go onto ioby.org, they get to see what's going on in their neighborhood and they get to choose a project that is meaningful to them.
Whitney: Ioby really is about local places and helping people either rediscover or discover for the first time that the environment isn't something that's abstract or far away, and that it's mostly about what's right around you.

Q. How do people get projects on ioby?

A. Whitney: You go to ioby.org. It's very easy to find the application there. You create a login first, and it's a pretty short series of questions. It's not a very onerous process, we don't think. We take about two weeks to review [the project] and make sure it meets all of our criteria, and then we get back to you with our answer and we post it. We have worked with groups to make an initial idea that didn't completely meet our criteria, or had a huge budget, into something better suited for our site.

To help residents explore the undiscovered trails of northern Manhattan, Hike the Heights sought funds and volunteers.ioby.orgQ. What kind of projects are you most excited about?

A. Barnes: There's so many. The Rockaway Waterfront Alliance is a good one. It's a rainwater harvest system that they want to install, and that's actually just $345. It's about storm water management, reducing non-point source pollution from flooding. The All People's Garden on the Lower East Side needs $2,000 to remove some serious concrete debris. There's a CUNY-Baruch honors student who is proposing to build a green roof on his school's building. Groups are composting at McCarren Park in Brooklyn, gardening in abandoned lots, boating in the East River, and hiking through Northern Manhattan. There's just so many projects on the site I can't keep track of them.

Q. Who's using ioby so far?

A. Barnes: The project groups that are using ioby are really various. Some of them are 501(c)3s, some of them are not. One group is Columbia University's public health department, and another is Sustainable South Bronx, and one is a school teacher in Washington Heights. There's a lot of community gardens, and there are some that just focus on one neighborhood, like Trees Not Trash Bushwick.

Q. How do you ensure a funded project gets completed?

A. Barnes: Our project groups do the fundraising [at ioby.org] and then, as the project is underway, they post updates. They post photos and they talk about when volunteers come out and plant some trees and clean up some debris ... At the end, when the project is completed, they submit a report and write about lessons learned, or what they would have done differently, or advice to other groups, and they put that on the website [where it's available to the public].

Q. How did you come up with the idea for ioby?

A. Barnes: We copied already successful models and applied it to the idea of doing local environmental work. A lot of the other wonderful, fantastic, online micro-philanthropies that are hugely, wildly successful are about someone really far away giving money to something that they're really far away from. We were thinking that with the environment being something that people have a personal connection to, if we encourage people to donate to something locally then they're investing in the future of their own neighborhoods.

Q. Do you have plans to expand ioby to other cities?

A. Whitney: The short answer is yes. Although we've found over the past year that it takes an incredible amount of work to build the capacity to engage with the hundreds of groups that we've talked to thus far just in one city. And so it's going to be a process of expanding city by city, and sort of picking some key places first.

Q. Do you really think small, local environmental projects can make a difference when we face such vast environmental problems?

One teacher is seeking support so students can test soil and water quality.ioby.orgA. Barnes: You're talking about New York City. You're talking about a city with the carbon footprint of Ireland. You're talking about this massive place where if all these people make a small individual effort it can make a huge, huge impact. All you have to do is get one eighth of all of New York City residents to help plant a tree each and then you have a million trees.
Flynn: I think one of the things that ioby really believes in is that a lot of small actions can lead to big change. We hear a lot about these huge environmental problems. "An Inconvenient Truth" came out, and a lot of people learned there's this big problem going on out there. Now that we have this information, what's the next step? People want to know how to get involved. And these are people that don't come necessarily from an environmental background. They want to learn more, and they want to get involved, and they can go to ioby and they can do these smaller projects that do add up to big change.

Q. It sounds as if you're equating environmentalism with community building.

A. Flynn: Ioby tries to tap into this idea that environmentalism can be what you care about. A lot of people, especially in New York, are very connected to their space. We're very proud of our borough ... And I think ioby is providing this space where you see all the great things that are going on around you in a place that you really care about.
Barnes: I think that environmentalism has always been about the things that are immediately around you. It's the streets and sidewalks we walk on every single day, it's the subway we take to work, and it's that poor little tree that's barely able to sprout out of the sidewalk. It's hotdog stands and soccer fields. That's our environment. If you clean it up, and you put your blood and sweat into that, and you plant some trees, you are going to become a steward of that for the rest of your life. This is about transformational environmentalism, where we become environmentalists for life.

Editor's note: Stephanie Paige Ogburn attended graduate school at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies along with the three founders of ioby.org. She is not involved in ioby.org in any way other than writing about it as a new model of environmental activism.

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