WB: In 1965, my friend Gurney Norman gave me my first look at a strip-mining operation. That’s nearly fifty-five years ago, isn’t it? So there I stood on the mountain behind Hardburly, Kentucky, and I saw the bulldozer go in on a wooded mountainside, and throw loose the whole surface of the world. I found that hard to bear. That brought me to something like defeat. How could a human being do that? How could anybody take a machine and destroy the world with it?

As often in my life, I got a book just when I needed it. A friend sent me Georges Bernanos’s Last Essays from the years just after World War II. What disturbed him was not the military humiliation of his country, of France. And he was not appeased or heartened by the Allied victory. What most impressed him, and deeply, deeply disturbed him, was the emergence out of that war of what he called “machine civilization.” He anticipated that the machine would make humankind over in its image.

TD: This is what Bill [McKibben]’s talking about in Falter — we have reached a new level of that.

WB: We’re always at a new level of that. Hitler and Hiroshima reached a new level of that. If humankind can make a weapon, a machine that can destroy not only all the other machines, but us too — I don’t see how climate change can ante up any higher than that.

TD: The level of machine control of human beings now is not bigger than that, it’s not a bigger, more catastrophic, explosive end, but it’s more insidious in so many ways. We’re not just blowing things apart; we’re changing our own DNA in a way that makes human existence meaningless.

WB: I don’t think humans have any power over meaning. Meaning is given to us. We can’t make meaning.

TD: I don’t agree with that. We make meaning all the time.

WB: The ability of humans even to discover meaning is very limited. They counterfeit meaning all the time. You drove here in your vehicle this morning. I’ve got my old vehicle down there on the road. Old country people, we can’t live without burning fuel. We know what that means, but we didn’t make the meaning. We’re a long way from solving this energy problem. The clean power people would cover the whole world with solar collectors.

TD: That’s an issue right now in Rhode Island, where the incentives for solar power have been structured to make it cheaper to cut down a forest and put solar panels out there, than to put it on the miles and miles of mill buildings and parking lots that we have.

WB: You’ve seen pictures of these windmills? They’ll go to a mountaintop and do exactly what the strip miners did. Those windmills are really a threat to the earth. You’ve got to have a permanent platform for them. You’ve got to have a permanent road to them, because they’ve got moving parts. Unlike solar panels. Friction. They’re going to have to be replacing those big blades, over and over and over again. We’ve got three solar panels out there on our hillside; how long will it be before those things make as much energy as it takes to make them? If you need a bolt for your machine, then you’ve got to think about what it cost to make the bolt. And then you’ve got to think about what it cost you to go pick it up. And so on and so on.

Anyway, we’re back to despair. Georges Bernanos, in his despair, said that the state actually is the weakest point of this machine civilization. And your only real power against it is to withhold belief from it. Every time you refuse to believe in it, it’s weaker.

TD: A lot of people have refused to believe in the state, and it’s become increasingly weak.

WB: But if the love of your country doesn’t move you to do something to take care of it, no matter how small or unnewsworthy, then I don’t think you have any protection against despair at all. It really bothers me to hear Trump and the other politicians all invoking fear. Even the people on our side, they’re all telling us: be afraid, be afraid, be afraid. We’ve got to refuse that too. I don’t think this recourse to fear is going to amount to anything. I trust instead people like the great Kentucky farmer Henry Besuden, who said, “If a man loves his soil, he’ll save it.”

TD: What has been weighing on me is how to make sense of that, when that land is lost. There is a lot at this point that is irretrievably lost.

WB: Walmart put a hundred dairy farmers out of business in Kentucky — two of them in this county, good young people whose grandparents had farmed those farms. People they loved had been farming there before them. And we’re telling the young people, “You can be anything you want to be.”

TD: I know a lot of young people trying to get into farming, a whole generation of people inspired by your work, but the deck [is] stacked against them.

WB: They’re hard up against it. They’re driven to the economic margins in the first place. They can’t come out here and buy prime land for five thousand dollars an acre. They don’t have five thousand dollars an acre; they can’t make five thousand dollars an acre. I know my responsibility in this; I take it very seriously. I’ve written a lot of letters, saying, “Don’t do it.”

TD: Don’t do what?

WB: Don’t try to farm if you don’t know how, if you can’t find the teachers you need, if you can’t afford loss of income. I’ve had letters coming from people: “I’m going to quit my job and move to the country and farm.” And what do you say that’s responsible? Oh, by all means? No. You have to say, “Don’t do it.”

TD: Is the path that they’re on, working for some corporation, any more dangerous or destructive than them failing at farming for a little while before they figure it out?

WB: And damage the land by this ignorance? And let the stress destroy their marriage? And then go back to work for the corporation?

TD: Maybe learning something and then trying to do it better.

WB: That failure, reducing yourself to nothing, is high tuition. What’s the gain? I think the test is whether you’re willing to do the small thing that needs to be done, and can be done, by the right standards. This is not going to cure a big despair for the fate of the world. It’s only a part of the cure. If you’re going to indulge that big despair, you’re up the creek without a paddle. It’s possible to learn to farm if you find good teachers — and, at present, if you have an off-farm income.

TD: Does that mean that you just have to ignore what’s going on at scale? Taking all those steps forward, doing things the right way in your community, moving things forward with your localism, but looking around and seeing that you’re on a big treadmill that’s moving all of it backward — how do you not say, “We need to turn off the treadmill”? Especially when you see others falling off.

“Live so far as you can in opposition. You’ve got to live and love.
You’ve got to find the answers in your heart.”

 

WB: Well, the next thing you do is blow it up?

TD: I would be very tempted to go down that path if it weren’t so abundantly clear that our opposition is the greatest force of violence in history. [Our opposition] has mastered that game better than anybody, would love nothing more than for us to play, because they know that that’s where they can win.

WB: What I would like to do, better than anything, would be to shoot a drone. How far above my land does my title extend? If I don’t at least own the air to the tops of the tallest trees . . .

TD: If that turns out anything like that legal question in the opposite direction — how far underneath your land do you own — it won’t turn out well for people that want to stop big corporations from exploiting what’s underneath them or above them.

WB: You’re speaking of the history of the broad form deed in the Kentucky coal fields.

TD: And the split estate, with fracking issues throughout Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and everywhere else.

WB: You can acquire the “mineral rights.” That’s what the broad form deed gave to the coal companies: the right of access to their property, the coal. For many years the Kentucky courts continued that as the right of the company to destroy the surface. Finally, an organization called Kentuckians for the Commonwealth made a campaign against it and got it overturned by 80-something percent of the vote.

TD: But even if you’ve got the mineral rights for a certain piece of land, if that’s part of a big shale pool underneath, they’re going to suck the oil out of there whether you sign the papers or not.

WB: Those are the people who have the wealth and power, and there’s no easy, immediate answer to that, except to live so far as you can in opposition. You’ve got to live and love. You’ve got to find the answers in your heart.

TD: But that gets more complicated every day, to learn how to live and love with a dying world and a broken society. Exponentially tougher when you’re talking about farmers in Honduras who can’t grow anything anymore because of how dramatically the climate has changed. Or farmers in Syria, who are forced off of their land because of the drought and watched their country be destroyed by civil war as a result of that mass migration. We’re just at the beginning of that. We will see hundreds of millions more of those sorts of refugees forced into migration and—

WB: You realize, don’t you, that you’ve won this argument?

TD: What is localism’s answer to refugees? To those whose homeland is not livable anymore? Whether that place is underwater, has turned to desert, was destroyed by American imperialism and our desire for more resources?

WB: You’ve won this argument. The argument for despair is impenetrable, it’s invulnerable. You got all the cards. You got the statistics, the science, the projections on your side. But then we’re still just sitting here with our hands hanging down, not doing anything.

One of the characteristics of the machine civilization is determinism. You’ll find plenty of people who’ll tell you there’s nothing you can do, it’s inevitable. You can’t make an organization to refute that; you’ve got to do it yourself. You’ve got to cleanse that mess out of your heart. Among our own people, the only communities who’ve done that have been the Amish. Their communities have survived. We were living very much like them when I was a boy here, doing our field work with horses and mules — [A device in Wendell’s pocket beeps].

TD: There’s a machine talking to you.

WB: I’ve got this damn thing. It’s called a “flip phone,” I think. It’s fixed so I don’t have to hear from anybody except Tanya.

TD: You want me to erase that from the recording so nobody knows you have a cell phone?

WB: I just pushed the button down. That kills it. This county here was full of self-employed people, full of people who were living without bosses. There were a lot more people going to church here then than now, and I’m sure they were all hearing, from time to time, Jesus’s two laws: love God and love your neighbor. And the difference between us and the Amish is that they took that law as an economic imperative. If you love your neighbor, you can’t replace your neighbor with a machine. And that so far has worked for them. But the key to it is love. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to like your neighbor.  It means that you know what the commitment to love requires of you, and you’re going to keep the commitment. The Amish in fact keep the commitment.

TD: Right.

WB: David Kline just published a book called The Round of a Country Year. One of the remarkable things is that it’s a happy book. David’s family, his neighbors, they’re cooperating all the time, and nobody’s overworked. Somebody will start a task, somebody will come to relieve that person. At two o’clock in the afternoon, somebody comes with a fresh team of horses and finishes the work.

TD: So take that community as an example. That happy community that is working sustainably in that way. Now let’s say, even a small fraction of the 80 million Bangladeshis whose homes are less than ten meters above sea level, who are losing their homes right now, every day — a small portion of them, just a few hundred thousand, show up at that community. How do they respond? What is that community’s response to that mass migration?

WB: Well, we can’t answer that because it hasn’t happened yet.

TD: But there’s a knock on our door every day. The people who are coming from places that are no longer livable — in large part because of the actions of this country and others like it. We have to have an answer. I see folks like David Fleming, who are explicit that a local economy requires barriers to entry. He’s pretty explicitly opposed to immigration. And when we look at the pattern of migration, the military has an answer, the xenophobes have an answer.

WB: What’s the military going to do about it?

TD: When it became clear that all those people in Bangladesh are going to lose their homes, India built a border fence all the way around Bangladesh. A nineteen-hundred-mile, partially electrified border fence. Over the past decade, there’s been a proliferation of border fences, between rich and poor areas, across the world. The military’s answer is genocide — we’re going to make sure these people die right where they’re at. So if we’re going to live in love in this time in history, we need to have a better answer.

WB: Well, here we are, wasting time. What are we doing here? Why aren’t we out somewhere else doing something else? Why are we just sitting here talking?

TD: Because we don’t know what to do. That’s what I’m trying to say. It’s really complicated to live in love, at this time.

WB: We do know what to do. We need to take care of the responsibilities that we’ve got.

TD: Where are the boundaries of those responsibilities, though? In this interconnected age, when we have benefited so much from an extractive, interconnected, globalized world?

WB: The effective boundaries of responsibility are your own limits. There’s so much you can do, and you ought to do it. That’s all. But to sit here and hypothesize the worst possible thing that could happen and decide what we’re going to do about it, or what the Amish are going to do about it, seems just a waste of time.

TD: As we’re already seeing those impacts, I would disagree. Because we’ve avoided having that conversation, but those who profit from the exploitation of other people have thought about it. So when those unprecedented situations happen, they’re the ones with the plan on the table, they’re the ones people turn to because they’ve got answers.

WB: Because they think the answers are simple.

TD: Right.

WB: Well, I think the burden of our conversation is that the answers are not simple. They depend on people taking responsibility. If you’re absolutely convinced of the evil of certain people, you can become John Brown. You can go to those people’s houses at night and drag them out of bed and kill them. He was a professed Christian. But Jesus didn’t tell you to go and drag anybody out of bed because they’re evil. If you believe in the real answer, if you believe really in honoring the being of all the people and all the creatures who have being, including the rain and the rocks, then you can’t have simple answers.

TD: But it doesn’t mean not confronting them. Jesus didn’t say, Go drag violent or dangerous people out of their bed, but he did say, Turn the other cheek for it to be struck as well. And I think we often forget about that last part, about it being struck as well. We’re not turning the other cheek and walking away. We confront that force of violence with our vulnerability.

WB: You going to do that in Bangladesh?

TD: There’s a way of confronting those power structures that would put kids from Honduras in cages. To confront them with that force of our vulnerability. To arouse the empathy of all those who can see. The genius of that instruction from Jesus is that empathy is the strongest part of human nature. Going out and hitting somebody, dragging them out of their house, doesn’t rattle anyone awake from a culture of violence. But that force of vulnerability is so countercultural, the empathy rattles people out of their sleepwalking.

WB: Jesus didn’t tell us to be ashamed of being unassaulted. He didn’t say we should hunt up somebody to slap our face.

Not too long ago, a bunch of us sat in the governor’s office. Maybe that rattles some people, I don’t know. But do you know the score on the opposition to strip mining in this state? About a hundred to nothing. It’s a wipeout. We haven’t won a damn thing. We’ve walked our legs off, made speeches, written essays. I wrote my first essay against strip mining in 1965. I don’t mean that I shouldn’t have done it. Not at all. The triumph is that the counterargument has lived. I’ve helped a little to keep the idea of husbandry alive. The other side hasn’t scored so far as to wipe out the opposition. I think you helped that. I think I helped a little bit. However bad it gets, anybody willing to act with goodwill, in good faith, with some competence in acting, can make things a little better. I don’t care if it’s the last day of the world. That’s my faith.

We don’t have to go to Bangladesh to find desperate people. Eastern Kentucky’s still poor. We’ve had two political parties in this state in my time, both of them were for coal. And that money has left here. Suppose we say, Well, coal’s finished. What else do we have? We have people. We have streams. We have the forest, and we have some bottomlands along the rivers and creeks that are arable and could produce food and income for the local people. Why don’t we do an inventory up there, see what we’ve got?

TD: But even looking at what is available is blocked. In West Virginia, it’s the same story. Every year in Obama’s proposed budget, he had money in there specifically for economic diversification of West Virginia, targeting the coal mining areas. But every single year, the congressional delegation cut that money out of the budget. Every single year, they said, “We don’t want our people to have any other options,” because they’re beholden to the coal industry. That’s both Democrats and Republicans.

WB: You’ve got two bunches of officials, one as hypocritical as the other. So you need to look for a way to bypass those people. There’s the forest up there. Do you have to harvest timber from that forest by way of skidders? A new one costs about $300,000. From what I’ve seen, there is a better way of forestry. Logging with horse or mule teams to minimize the incidental damage. Employing the right kind of energy, increasing work for people. And worst-first, single-tree selection. Worst-first singletree selection means that you go into these degraded woods, which is about all we have in Kentucky, and you look around, and you see what trees are, by a fairly reliable definition, worst. Misshapen, diseased. Enough of that low-grade stuff to pay for getting it out. The idea is not to make a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza, but to go back again in fifteen or twenty years with the same proposition — look at every tree, take the worst, leave the best. You keep the forest ecologically intact. Every time you go back, the quality is better.

“Well, I think the burden of our conversation is that the answers are not simple.
They depend on people taking responsibility.”

 

TD: And so we should apply that to the politicians, is what you’re saying?

WB: No!

TD: Go in and take out the worst first.

WB: If there are arable lands along the creeks and the rivers, the people in those regions ought to be eating from that land. So it’s very discouraging to go up there, drive along those creeks and river bottoms, and see them in soybeans.=

TD: Down the road from here a couple miles, there’s sixty-three acres for sale, all monocrop corn.

WB: That used to be a diverse farm, and the plunderers got ahold of it. You may have noticed that there’s a long, steep hillside along there that has to drain down to and across that bottom, and there are no waterways across it.

TD: So it just washes out the soil and drowns the crops?

WB: World destruction is a discounted cost of production. Two or three people have been ruined there. It’s unsustainable even from an economic point of view. Nothing good can be said for it. Farming now pays a lot more to the people who buy the product and furnish the so-called inputs than to the farmers, and that’s probably been the way most of the time from the very start of agriculture. The village cultures of the Middle East got rid of their crop surpluses in natural ways: I’ve got too much of this, you’ve got too much of that, let’s trade. But then came writing. And after the writing, the bureaucrats, the people who could keep track of the crop, predicting production and so on.

TD: Maintain a debt ledger.

WB: That’s right. And so the first city-states grew upon crop surpluses that could be cornered by the worst people. Farmers thus became a captive population, and a lot of the wars of those times would be for slaves to add to the workforce. So that goes way back. Now I’m reading about the Aborigines in Australia, who had a much better land use record until the English got there in 1788. Archaeologists have found grain mills there that go back thirty thousand years, which means these people were baking bread thirty thousand years ago. They were building very sophisticated fish traps. They were keying the stones of the traps into the bottoms of the river so that the floods wouldn’t move them.

They also had a working relationship with killer whales. They built two fires along the shore, and some fellow would walk like a hungry old man on his last legs, back and forth between those fires. And that would let the killer whales know that the humans needed something to eat. And they’d drive the other whales in and beach them out. For their reward, they got the tongues out of those beached whales. And that relationship went on after the white people came. The white people were taking part in it until one of these settlers killed the lead whale of the killer whales. That ended the partnership immediately.

TD: Do you think that kind of deep relationship with the nonhuman world is still within us? That we can tap into that?

WB: Oh, sure it is. It’s called sympathy. Sympathy is part of imagination. We still have that capacity in us. We could see the need for it, cultivate it, and recover it. After all, a thousand years is not very long.

TD: The next thousand years will be, though.

WB: The unfortunate people who are going to live for a thousand years are going to get pretty damn tired of it. But — oh, there’s a warbler out there on the grapevine.

TD: I saw him earlier. He’s eating your grapes.

WB: No, the grapes aren’t ripe. I don’t know that bird.

Guy Mendes: What’s the yellow bird?

WB: That’s a wild canary or goldfinch, male. Purple finches are eating at that feeder. So you see, the world is still furnishing beautiful birds and flowers, and it’s showing us human goodness, and it’s making us love each other. And we would be wrong if we don’t let ourselves be happy because of those things.

I had a student one time who told me she wasn’t going to be happy until everybody was happy. I was up there on the hillside one night, thinking about that girl, wondering what would be better use of adding one more unhappy person, and I made a poem:

 

 

 

 

O when the world’s at peace and every man is free
then will I go down unto my love.
O and I may go down several times before that.

TD: I don’t know if I ever told you this. When I was in prison, there were all these people who had paid attention to my case and my story. So I’d get all these letters, like a dozen a day, and so many of the letters would start out saying, I really don’t know what to write to someone in prison, because they hadn’t had that experience. But it was remarkable how many of them said, I don’t know what to say to someone in prison, so here’s this poem by Wendell Berry . . .

WB: I’m grateful to them for that. And grateful to my poems if they were any comfort to you.

I got a letter from a woman, she talked about self-creation and autonomy. She wanted to know why her relative gave up his job and went home to help his dad farm. I suggested that they might have loved each other. That they might have loved their ranch. But then I said, “You were born into dependence and you’re going to die in it.”

TD: There’s been such a cultural trend that that father who said, Come home, I need you — to even say that is an expression of failure. To need other people is increasingly defined as failure, when that’s the fabric that holds us together. It’s such a gift for that son, to be needed.

WB: My son fell and hurt his head, fractured his skull. He was laid up for quite a long time, and his neighbor came right straight over and began taking care of his cattle. That was not something my son could repay him for. In a sense, in the right sense, it was prepaid. His neighbor knew that if he needed my son, my son would be there. If my son should make some gift to the neighbor, that would be an acknowledgment, not a repayment.

TD: And an expression of gratitude. If you start with the understanding that all that we have is a gift, then everything we offer is an expression of gratitude. And the neighbor who came and helped him out, that’s why it was prepaid. Everything he already had was a gift. His time was a gift.

WB: It’s a pretty complex business. You begin to see the complexity of this interdependence of neighbors and all that’s involved. You can despair: how will we get it back? Plenty of people will tell you the loss of it in so many places was inevitable. Bernanos said that we would never accept the destruction of our machines, but we accepted the massacre of thousands of people. He’s really telling us that it had already happened to us. It was too late, in a way.

TD: What was it too late for?

WB: To stop the coming of the machine civilization. It was already there. The nuclear bomb was the announcement.

TD: I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about what it means to be “too late” to stop climate change. And I feel very strongly that it doesn’t mean that it’s too late to continue to live in love in that way, and continue to do the work that we were called to do.

WB: Right! So if you received notice from the archangel, “This is the last day of the world,” what would you do? Get up and go to work? My grandfather told my father, “The day after I die, get up and go to work.”

TD: I had to learn that when I was getting ready to go to prison. Initially, it looked like things were going to happen quickly.

I had a trial date that first year, and so when October came around, I was a month or two away from trial, and I thought, Does it make any sense for me to plant garlic this fall? Because I’ll be in prison by June. I thought about it for a while, and I planted the garlic anyway. Somebody will be here to harvest that garlic, right? Then my trial kept getting delayed, and, next June, I harvested that garlic.

WB: What a disappointment!

TD: Then that November, a month away from trial again: Should I plant garlic again? You never know Sure enough, the next year, I was still around to harvest it. I got locked up right after that.

WB: It was the Shakers who were sure the end could come anytime, and they still saved the seeds and figured out how to make better diets for old people. Thomas Merton was interested in the Shakers. I said to him, “If they were certain that the world could end at any minute, how come they built the best building in Kentucky?”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “If you know the world could end at any minute, you know there’s no need to hurry. You take your time and do the best work you possibly can.” That was important to me. I’ve repeated it many times.

TD: That’s why the despair is not paralyzing. Knowing that it’s too late to prevent collapse, knowing that we’re not going to stop the catastrophic end, knowing that we’re going to die — it doesn’t mean that we stop. It means that we live in this moment as fully as we can.

WB: I had a neighbor here, a happy man, a very good man, who said something to me that I lined out as a poem. It is a poem:

Something better, something better!
Everybody’s talking about something better!
The important thing is to feel good
and be proud of what you got, don’t matter if it ain’t nothin’ but a log pen!

That’s my argument in favor of this world, against the determinists. I depend on what I know of human goodness, but also on the flowers and the butterflies and the birds. The otters and the swallows — a lot of their life is just spent having a hell of a good time. The animals, so far as I can understand them, have a great deal to say in favor of life. It’s a good world, still.

 This article originally appeared:

Spring 2020 issue of Orion Magazine

This article originally appeared:

Summer 2018 issue of Orion magazine (used by permission)

Vanguard, the biggest retirement fund company in the US and second-biggest asset manager in the world, is sinking our ship with $300 billion invested in fossil fuels. We decided to breach right in their backyard with a playful de-branding booth decked out to share the truth about the mega investment firm’s role in climate calamity and enlist new mates aboard the movement to change how they invest.

Our interactive sinking-ship station will appear at events throughout Philadelphia and Malvern, PA (where their HQ is), all summer long. Stop by to salute our knowledgable crew mates and win real prizes at free games: spin the wheel to avert certain doom, toss coins to see where your money goes, navigate the reef of stranded assets, slam-dunk the planet into the oil drum, take a whirl at the life-ring toss, and rearrange musical deck chairs before it’s too late! You could win big, even though we all lose until Vanguard changes course.

See photos of catastrophic fun here, and join us at an upcoming event (more dates forthcoming). Drop a line to bring the crew to your jawn!

In Andy’s old haunt of the Castro, the “Bush campaign” went around with “Diversity Compassion Orangutan,” the conservative answer to… well, compassion for diverse people. With the visual aid of DCO, they explained a program, modeled on SETI@home, to preemptively (as in Iraq-attack) annul all gay marriages.

That’s about all there was to it. It doesn’t make sense today, but it didn’t make sense then either!

Chevron’s plan for the “We Agree” offensive was first leaked to Amazon Watch, when ecologist blogger Lauren Selman received a casting call to appear in one of Chevron’s new split-screen television ads. Selman used the information she gathered to help our campaign. (Read Selman’s blog post here.)

Another leak came shortly after, when Chevron’s ad agency, McGarryBowen, in a typical moment of corporate brain fog, asked DC street artist César Maxit if he could help wheat-paste some new Chevron posters.

Instead, Maxit sent the Chevron files to the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), and offered to help however he could.

When news of Maxit’s leak came in, Andy and RAN campaigner Ginger Cassady had been on their way to San Francisco to begin planning an action against Chevron. They quickly switched gears, and began plotting how to almost immediately release Chevron’s $80 million campaign, before they could.

Holed up in a Sausalito houseboat, several people from Rainforest Action Network and Amazon Watch, along with Andy, succeeded in just barely pre-empting Chevron’s multi-million dollar “We Agree” ad campaign, producing a satirical version of their own. The activists’ version highlighted Chevron’s environmental and social abuses—especially the toxic mess the oil giant left in Ecuador, which Chevron had been attempting to “greenwash” for years.

They then sent out a press release from a spoof Chevron domain, which launched the fake “We Agree” site mere hours before the real Chevron could launch its own, real campaign. Our fake site featured the four “improved” ads, as well as downloadable PDF files to be used in real-life wheat-pasting.

Nine hours later, after issuing its own super-lame campaign-launch press release, Chevron decried our hoax in a predictably curt and humorless manner. Shortly thereafter we issued a much better counterattack on Chevron’s behalf, laying out their actual arguments in their Ecuador case — in the most baldly transparent way we could muster.

Throughout the course of the day a slow vaudeville unfolded on the web, as a number of press outlets, from industry mouthpieces to the AFP, produced some accidental mash-ups of “real” and fake information. It all sorted itself out in the end.

We then it took it one step further, and launched an online contest for submissions of print, web, and even tv ads further satirizing Chevron’s blatant greenwashing. Hundreds of submissions poured in and were posted online, effectively derailing Chevron’s shiny new and expensive campaign. Funny or Die also produced a hilarious video (see 4’32”) that we featured in our project reveal video and later rough cut (which sadly never made it into a movie).

Our continuing efforts ensured that Chevron’s PR strategy backfired so severely it could never recover. Most importantly, it gave many news outlets worldwide an excuse to further highlight Chevron’s embarrassing and atrocious environmental and human rights record in Ecuador. The ultimate goal was, of course, to force Chevron to its knees — which hasn’t yet happened, not quite….

 

This article originally appeared:

https://theyesmen.org/

I moved on from La Casa to help start another shelter in Oakland, which we called A Safe Place. Both of these organizations still exist, much bigger, much better funded. 

All the fundraising we did in these two groups we made up as we went along. I decided to learn more about fundraising by apprenticing myself to someone who was good at it and who worked in a traditional and successful environment. I approached the Director of Development at Pacific School of Religion, Dick Schellhase, and basically told him that if he would take me everywhere he went, I would do anything he said. PSR was just beginning a $13 million capital campaign, and I got to help with that campaign as well as assist with all the ins and outs of the annual fund. Dick was a great teacher, and he taught me the ropes of traditional fundraising. He also arranged for me to attend a five-day class of the very new FundRaising School, founded by Hank Rosso and Joe Mixer. Hank became my mentor, and some years later I began teaching with him at the school. 

MY FIRST DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR JOB
In 1978, I got my first job as a development director with the Coalition for the Medical Rights of Women in San Francisco. It had just received a three-year grant from the San Francisco Foundation to hire a development director and pay some program and fundraising costs. The challenge was to move the Coalition from almost total reliance on foundations to almost total reliance on membership for all its operating costs and ongoing programs. The amount of the grant went down by half each year, and the idea was that grassroots fundraising would increase by at least 50 percent each year to make up the difference.

We were able to become quite self-sufficient over the three years and, more important, during that time we tripled our budget! This showed me that not only could a social change group raise significant money from a broad base of members, but that in fact it was more lucrative to go that route.

By 1980, people were starting to ask me how the Coalition had done it, and I began to give talks on how to build a broad base of members. In early 1981, toward the end of our self-sufficiency drive, I was invited to attend a Training for Trainers program sponsored by a D.C. organization called the Youth Project and paid for by the Mott Foundation. At the first training, which lasted a week, twelve of us from all over the country gathered at a summer camp in the Wisconsin countryside. We were trained by some of the finest people in the business: Joan Flanagan, author of the first (and classic) book, The Grassroots Fundraising Book; Heather Booth and Karen Paget of the Midwest Academy; Si Kahn, an organizer and singer from North Carolina; Hulbert James, a long-time civil rights organizer; and Mary Harrington, who was the creator of this program.  

We learned about fundraising, organizing for change, and how to train others. Ice-breakers, games, role-plays, case studies, dyads and triads — all these were new training tools and we learned how to use them all. 

This group met again three times during the following two years. Part of the agreement for getting the training for free was being willing to conduct fundraising
trainings, so I started being a trainer. 

THE START OF THE GRASSROOTS FUNDRAISING JOURNAL
In the spring of 1981, with the self-sufficiency drive complete, I left the Coalition in the able hands of another fundraising coordinator and a great board and went out on my own as a consultant and fundraising trainer. I had met Lisa Honig some years earlier when she was the development director at Equal Rights Advocates, a public interest law firm in San Francisco. We were interested in figuring out more ways for social change groups to make money — especially ways that in themselves would help fulfill the group’s mission. 

We could see that creative fundraising was going to be a greater need as the country moved into the Reagan years and experienced the first round of profound government cutbacks in funding to social services. With the exception of Joan Flanagan’s book, The Grassroots Fundraising Book, the limited information that existed about raising money was written for organizations that were much larger and more mainstream — urban hospitals, universities and large arts organizations, such as symphonies and opera companies — than the organizations we worked with. In particular, there was almost nothing for grassroots organizations that were challenging the status quo. So, we decided to start a magazine, the Grassroots Fundraising Journal, whose sole job was to document the many ways social justice groups could raise money from individuals. Volume 1, Number 1 came out in February 1982.

I MOVE AROUND, THE COUNTRY MOVES RIGHT

Over the next ten years, I moved from one side of the country to the other. First, I moved from San Francisco to Inverness, a small agricultural community. There, while publishing the Journal and working with some of the many local nonprofits, I learned how rural and small-town fundraising differs from big city fundraising.

In 1986, I moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where I served as the Executive Director of the newly formed Appalachian Community Fund (ACF). ACF was a member of the social change network called the Funding Exchange, whose member funds worked primarily with wealthy, progressive donors to raise money and with community activists to give away the money as grants to organizations working for social justice. ACF was working in the Appalachian counties of four states — Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. 

I DREAM OF ENDOWMENTS

As fundraising got harder throughout the 1980s, it became clear that progressive foundations needed to ensure themselves of a steady income by creating endowments. Many resisted the notion of having endowments – money that was invested in “the system” in order to create interest – not wanting to imitate mainstream foundations. However, the ability of the Funding Exchange’s foundations to guarantee a certain amount of funding every year to the communities we served was difficult when each year our fundraising started at zero. ACF, for example, could grow to a decent size raising money in the region and from people who had left the region, but its ability to make a significant difference would require a much greater infusion of cash — cash that would come from the interest off an endowment.

To make this happen, June Makela, then the director of the Funding Exchange network in New York, and I proposed that all 14 funds of the Funding Exchange work together to raise $15 million over five years and then share the interest evenly. We argued that some regions, such as New England or San Francisco, would be able to raise money more easily than a region like Appalachia or the deeper south. Yet some of the money would come from fortunes directly or indirectly derived from mining or timber or cheap labor found in those very places. It was another way of redistributing wealth, which is the ultimate goal of progressive funding.

After a year of discussion, all 14 of the funds agreed to the plan, which was modified to a fundraising goal of $10 million over three years. I moved to New York City in 1989 to run this campaign — at that time the largest amount of money ever raised for something as left wing as the Funding Exchange.

It was not an easy task. The sheer size of the campaign brought out the best and the worst in all of us. Nonetheless, we managed to hold the fundraising together for the three years of the campaign and reached our goal. Most of the money came in gifts of at least $10,000; many were much higher. Most of the donors to the endowment were sophisticated and wanted this campaign to work, and most of the staff and boards of the local funds worked hard to see that it did.

As the endowment campaign wound down in 1992, I left the Funding Exchange, exhausted, but pleased with the success of the campaign. My partner, Stephanie Roth, and I took a year off and traveled around the world. Of course, you can’t really take time off from fundraising, so we did training and consultation in about 16 of the countries we travelled in, and learned even more about how local groups figure out how to raise money from their communities, often under very difficult circumstances. We came back to the United States in 1993 and settled in Berkeley.

Stephanie and I decided we would focus our attention on two things: the lack of racial diversity in the fundraising world, and expanding the reach of the Journal and our books on fundraising and social change. Over two decades, the fundraising profession had gone from a world of, mostly, white men to one of, mostly, white women. It was time for another sea change. We helped to start an organization called the Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training, whose mission is to change the color of philanthropy by placing people of color in social justice organizations and teaching them to be fundraisers. We expanded the Journal, and we published several more books.  

The Grassroots Fundraising Journal is no longer in publication, but all articles are available free through a Creative Commons license at this website: https://www.grassrootsfundraisingjournal.org/

HOW THINGS LOOK NOW

Much has changed over 45 years, largely with technology and the internet introducing a whole new set of strategies for fundraising and opening up many new ways of relating to donors.

Some things in the fundraising world haven’t changed at all, except perhaps to get worse: in that column I would put our continuing inability to talk about and deal honestly with money; the failure of our leaders and the nonprofit sector as a whole to demand progressive taxation and the restoration and expansion of government services; and the ongoing struggle of the fundraising profession to diversify across race and age.

Other things haven’t changed at all, except perhaps to get better: the generosity of people, particularly ordinary people with little or no discretionary money. The sector itself is challenging the traditional organization of boards and staff, trying out new models that might work better, and examining and attempting to dismantle the structures of white supremacy that inform so many of societal structures. And of course, there are vast quantities of information, in print and on-line, on all kinds of fundraising so that people don’t have to make it up as they go along.

What will never change? The best way to get money is to ask someone for it in person, and people feel good when they give. People want to be engaged, they want to be useful, they want to be appreciated, and they want the world to be better. Fundraising is the way to make all that happen.

I got into fundraising by chance; I stayed in it because it kept offering me adventures, particularly the ongoing greatest adventure of working for social change. At its core, progressive fundraising is about a radical redistribution of wealth. The ultimate goal is a society described in the Torah as one in which “The person who had little did not have too little, and the person who had much did not have too much,” and “Everyone beneath their vine and fig tree lived in peace and unafraid.”

This article originally appeared: Grassroots Fundraising Journal