Column by George Sibley
Enviroment – April 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
THIS IS MOSTLY A STORY about David Orr, an educator, environmentalist, and a hero of mine for the past decade. But it is also a story about Howard “Bo” Callaway, a major owner of central Colorado’s biggest ski area until early March of this year, and not really one of my heroes — until I read David Orr’s new book this week, and discovered that (now that Bo is gone from Central Colorado) I may need to reconsider him. Confusing, but that’s life.
David Orr is a professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College, a small college in Ohio about the size of Western State College in Central Colorado. I first encountered Orr’s work through a book, Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. This collection of essays came out in 1992, not long after the first shaping event of the so-called “postmodern era”: the collapse of monolithic global communism (or at least its specter).
Orr got my attention in the first paragraph of his introduction, when he observed, “We have yet to admit that Western capitalism has failed as well.” He argued that “the two worlds built on the thought of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Marx, and Smith are in ruin. The world does not work mechanically, it is not without limits.” He proposed, along with many other voices crying in the wilderness in those heady days, that the “peace dividend” gave human society the space to “face the task of rebuilding something different, a postmodern world that protects individual rights while protecting the larger interests of the planet and our children who will live on it.”
What moved me most about Orr’s essays was their focus on the need for this postmodern rebuilding to begin with a serious reforming of education, especially higher education — away from “the further conquest of nature and the industrialization of the planet … producing unbalanced, underdimensioned people tailored to fit the modern economy,” and toward “a different agenda … designed to heal, connect, liberate, empower, create, and celebrate.”
At a time when Western State College was still moving laboriously toward even having an environmental studies program, Orr already had his students working on a 1,500-acre “laboratory for the study of environmentally sound means of agriculture, forestry, renewable energy systems, architectural design, and livelihood.” He has since raised the funds for, and constructed with much student involvement, what is probably the world’s first entirely green environmental studies building at Oberlin.
In short, back there in the Ohio Rust Belt, Orr was practicing what we had barely begun to preach at Western, and he’s still way ahead of us in moving toward that post-industrial, post-urban, postmodern world. I began trying to get him out to Central Colorado in 1995, and have finally succeeded; he will speak at Western’s Eighth Spring Environmental Symposium this April 15 (see the college’s ad elsewhere in this magazine).
Now, three years after the second shaping event of the postmodern world, 9/11 , Orr has come out with another collection of essays: The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror. The title comes in part from Samuel Johnson’s perception that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and the book leaves little doubt who the patriotic scoundrel is in this case: the corporate individual occupying the White House, George W. Inc.
FOR THOSE WHO would note that we “have yet to admit that Western capitalism has failed,” Orr attributes capitalism’s persistence to “authoritarianism imposed by corporate interests — what E. L. Doctorow calls the ‘eighth circle of thieves’ whose goal is to keep the present system going as long as possible, whatever it takes.” (And they, admittedly, do not have to overwhelm a lot of organized opposition in that pursuit.)
The essays in The Last Refuge are darker in tone than those in Ecological Literacy. Orr, like many of the rest of us, is angered by the total squandering of the peace initiative and the opportunity to move forward toward a sustainable society. He sees a world that has again been dichotomized into two monolithic worlds, a new not-so-cold war between two not-so-new “fundamentalisms.”
On one side are those wishing to stop all change and freeze societies into extreme male-dominated and violence-prone theocracies ruled by the likes of the Taliban. On the other are the free-market fundamentalists who intend to change everything for everyone, everywhere, all the time. The one is a rearguard protest against the modern world and Westernization in particular. The other is a global juggernaut driven by financial markets, technological dynamism, global capitalism, and the temptation to use high-tech weapons. It is easy to see the insanity of the former. But in more reflective times the latter, perhaps, will be seen as the more sweeping kind of derangement.
THE BO CALLAWAY STORY Orr relates gives measure to the extent to which that “global juggernaut,” and its capture of the American government, is disturbing to true American conservatives.
When Callaway and his brother-in-law Ralph Walton bought the Crested Butte Ski Area in 1970, Callaway was known nationally as a “Southern Republican,” and was a good friend of Richard Nixon’s. Bo’s early years in Central Colorado were interrupted by service with Nixon’s re-election campaign and a stint as Secretary of the Army under Nixon and Ford, when he supposedly had the ski resort in a blind trust. He somehow escaped being tarred in the “Watergate” scandals, but the Secretary position came to an abrupt end in what was known nationally as the “Snowgate” scandal, after the Crested Butte newspaper discovered that Callaway had invited a couple of high-ranking Forest Service employees into his Army office to discuss an expansion of his ski area onto adjacent public lands.
The environmental forces in the Upper Gunnison opposed Callaway’s expansion ideas — twice. And about the time that Orr was coming out with Ecological Literacy, Callaway was loaning Newt Gingrich and the other shapers of the GOPAC Contract with America his hideaway compound of luxury cabins way up in North Pole Basin, between Crested Butte and Aspen. (Anyone remember John Galt’s secret hideaway in the Colorado Rockies in Atlas Shrugged?)
So there was no reason to think of Bo Callaway as a friend of the environment — although, in retrospect, his 33 years here were fairly benign environmentally (in part because he could not afford to do some of the things he wanted to do).
The Callaways, however, did bend on a number of issues where a bigger entity might have successfully steamrolled their opposition. And apparently George W. Inc. has been too much even for this lifelong Republican, because in the first essay in The Last Refuge — titled “The Education of Power” — Orr describes an experience that began with a phone call from Bo Callaway, inviting him to “join a group aiming to improve the environmental policies of the White House.” Surprised, Orr asked, “Why me?” Callaway responded, “You are known as a sane environmentalist.”
So Orr found himself collaborating with a very diverse group of individuals, from Hunter Lovins of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Institute to Callaway and Interface Carpet magnate Ray Anderson, on a white paper to present to all the president’s men that make up George W. Inc.
THAT PAPER STARTED with a quote from a CIA report, “It is time to understand ‘the environment’ for what it is: the national-security issue of the early 21st century.” The CIA cites as its rationale the probability of global unrest and “mass migrations” resulting from “surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and possibly rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions.” The paper — with the good postmodern title, “Common Ground/Common Future” (reprinted as an appendix in The Last Refuge) — is a textbook example of the extent to which environmental and economic interests can be seen as overlapping rather than conflicting.
But if you have been following the environmental policies of our current administration, you can probably guess the anticlimactic end to this story. This unlikely collaboration was basically blown off by George W. Inc., which sent a few polite young staffers to hear the presentation, and never followed up in any way with any of the presenters — not even the faithful old soldier Callaway, whom I might be inclined at this point to call a “sane Republican.”
Nonetheless, I find hope in that story. A couple of years ago, I wrote about “the radical center” — after a rancher from Arizona’s Malpai Borderlands introduced the term at our Sixth Spring Environmental Symposium at Western. The radical center is an emerging political alliance grounded in good sense, good will, and the perception that we can no longer afford to waste whole generations in cold or hot wars between polarized fundamentalists of any stripe. And surely, any extremism that brings David Orr, Bo Callaway, Hunter Lovins and Ray Anderson together is going to go down sooner or later.
Or so I hope. And so does Orr.
Despite Orr’s anger and frustration at the degree to which George W. Inc. has squandered the opportunity 9/11 offered to move toward what George W’s father called “a kinder, gentler America,” The Last Refuge is fundamentally optimistic. In fact, Orr concludes the book with a presentation of ten “legitimate reasons we have for optimism,” a presentation I first heard last summer in Aspen at the Sopris Foundation’s “State of the World” conference.
Orr had gone to Aspen intending to speak about why we should have concern about the state of the world. But as speaker after speaker unfolded reasons for concern, Orr decided on the spur of the moment to try to offer a little hope in the face of all that awareness.
“Hopefulness is predicated on our ability to choose — we are not fated to end with a whimper or a bang. On the contrary, we are capable of love, foresight, altruism, sacrifice, and nobility. In hope and faith we are called to that side of our nature in the full awareness of our darker side.”
Having used up my space here and then some, I will refer you to The Last Refuge (which Island Press will release during the first week in April) for Orr’s full list of ten reasons for hope. Or come to Gunnison on April 15 to hear Orr in person (and if Island is on schedule, we’ll have his new book on sale there, along with his others).
But here is his tenth reason, as a sample:
“We know that God is on our side. Proof? God, who apparently has a sense of humor, reportedly recalled for a time Rush Limbaugh’s hearing, a seldom-used faculty. And God will take back all unused faculties — intelligence, humor, wisdom, foresight, and love — rendering us dumb and hopeless. But these are the very God-given qualities that will take us to a different world, not utopia, but a far better world than that in prospect. The power of humor, creativity, and enthusiasm will prevail. That, I believe, is how the universe is made and what we are made of.”
George Sibley teaches, writes, and organizes in Gunnison.