SAVING THE ENVIRONMENT

April 7, 2008

JOHN SHATTUCK: Good evening and welcome to the Kennedy Library. I'm John Shattuck, the CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation. And on behalf of my colleagues, including Tom Putnam, our Library Director who’s here tonight, I want to welcome you to this very special forum on this cold and blustery, not very environmentally attractive evening, Saving the Environment. Maybe we could work on saving the spring. We’ll get to that in a minute, maybe.

I want to express our appreciation at the beginning here to the organizations that make these forums possible, starting with our lead sponsor, Bank of America, and our other generous supporters, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Corcoran Jennison Companies, the Boston Foundation, and our media sponsors, the Boston Globe, NECN and WBUR, which broadcast all these forums on Sunday evenings at eight. And tonight, we're especially pleased to have a national audience to which this forum is being broadcast by C-SPAN.

One of the things we like to do here at the Kennedy Library is to look at the big issues of today through the lens of history and very specifically through the lens of President Kennedy. Now, the issue of the environment was barely a blip on the horizon in the early 1960s. Pollution was generally accepted as the cost of running factories that powered the American economy, and the use of chemicals and pesticides on livestock and crops was seen as necessary for the farming that produced the country’s food.

No one thought then much about environmental hazards until 1962 when Rachel Carson published her famous book about pesticides, The Silent Spring. President Kennedy was disturbed by her predictions and requested government experts to prepare a report on the public health effects of DDT and other pesticides. The Silent Spring introduced Americans to the environmental crisis, and Kennedy in many ways was the first President to respond. Last year, we hosted a forum here on the centennial of Rachel Carson’s birth, and today we're going to examine how each of us can participate in a movement to save the environment that began more than 40 years ago.

I think our starting point, because we're here in the Kennedy Library, is the famous challenge of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” And Kennedy, of course, often would say that each of us can make a difference and all of us should try. But I must say, when the stakes are as high -- very high as they are in the struggle to stop global warming -- it’s often tempting to think that the crisis is simply too big. The speakers here on our stage, who I’ll introduce in a moment, are going to tell you that that's not true, because each of them has a powerful story to tell about what each of us can do to save the environment.

But before we go any further, I'm just going to do a little shameless promotion of the Kennedy Library, and I want to say that we are doing a little bit ourselves on the issue of the environment. Over the past three years, we've taken some modest, but important, steps to conserve energy by retrofitting our light fixtures, reducing our use of water, converting our heating system and upgrading our temperature controls. And as a result, we've cut our electricity consumption by 8.2 million kilowatt hours a year, and our water consumption by 473 gallons a year. Although the energy requirements for storing and preserving millions of documents and artifacts, as you might imagine, remain high, we're very pleased that we've been able to implement a number of basic energy conservation measures out here at the Kennedy Library.

So with that, let me now introduce our speakers, who will have much more significant information, no doubt, to tell you. I'm going to start with Mindy Lubber, who is at the other end of the podium here; she is the President of Ceres, the leading U.S. coalition of investors and environmental leaders working to improve corporate environmental practices. She also directs the Investor Network on Climate Risk, an alliance that coordinates U.S. investor responses to the financial risks and opportunities posed by global warming. Last year, Mindy organized the first ever institutional investor summit on climate risk at the United Nations. During the Clinton Administration, she served as regional administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency here in Boston. In 2006, she received the prestigious Skoll Foundation Social Entrepreneur Award.

Gary Hirshberg is President and CEO of Stonyfield Farm, the world’s largest producer of organic yogurt. We had hoped that Gary might bring yogurt with him today to distribute to all of us, but we’ll do that the next time. We all love it, of course. For the last 25 years, Gary has overseen Stonyfield’s phenomenal growth from -- as he was telling me earlier -- a seven cow organic farming school in 1983 to its current $300 million in annual sales. Before joining Stonyfield in 1983, Gary was the Executive Director of the New Alchemy Institute, a research and education center dedicated to organic farming and renewable energy. Writing as a guest columnist in Newsweek in February of this year, Gary tells us that his father and grandfather were New Hampshire shoe manufacturers and that as a teenager he, and I quote, “Figured out that the dyes and chemicals that gushed into the rivers from the many textile and shoe plants in our state were why we could no longer swim or fish without health risks.” He says he began Stonyfield with the basic question: Is it possible to run a commercial enterprise that doesn't hurt the planet and still be highly profitable? And I think he has answered that question very handsomely and wonderfully for all of us. He tells the story in a wonderful new book that's on sale at our bookstore, Stirring it Up: How to Make Money and Save the World.

Robin Chase, who is seated just two to my left here, in just a moment, I don't know how we got out of this alphabetical order that I had arranged [laughter], but you can see my alphabet is not as good as whoever arranged it, Robin is the founder and former Chairman of Zipcar, a company that has revolutionized the rental car industry and reduced urban car use by using wireless technology to give people on demand access to cars by the hour, an extraordinary concept. In her words, Robin’s aim is to revolutionize people’s relationship to their cars and improve the quality of urban life for all. Most recently, she founded and now runs Meadow Networks, a new company which seeks to apply wireless technologies to the transportation sector in order to reduce its dependency on fossil fuel and create more adaptable and cost efficient transportation economy. She’s received many awards and lectures widely on environmental innovation.

Finally, Richard Cizik is Vice President for Governmental Affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals and one of the most prominent evangelical lobbyists in Washington, whom I have known since we served together on a commission in Washington in the 1990s when I was in government. Since 2003, Richard has been active on behalf of what he calls creation care, a commitment to protecting the earth that he traces directly to the Scriptures, with a particular focus today on global warming. Richard has been praised and criticized within the evangelical movement for his advocacy of measures to stop global warming. His critics, led by James Dobson, have circulated a letter calling on him to resign. Richard responds by saying that it’s “time we return to being people known for our love and care of the earth and our fellow human beings.” And as a result of his tremendous advocacy, he's just this week been named one of Time’s Most 100 Influential Americans of this Year.

Our moderator today is my friend, Renee Loth, the Editorial Page Editor of The Boston Globe. One of New England’s most distinguished journalists, Renee has covered politics and culture for The Globe as an editor and reporter for 15 years. Before that, she was an associate editor of The New England Monthly Magazine and a reporter for The Boston Phoenix, and she appears frequently as a commentator in national and local media. So please join me in welcoming all of our panelists to this wonderful forum, Saving the Environment. [applause]

RENEE LOTH: Thank you. Thank you, John, and welcome, and let me be the first to wish everybody here an early happy Earth Day. We've got a couple of weeks to go yet, but I'm the first one to make that happy wish. And because John began with a little bit of shameless self promotion for the Kennedy Library, I thought I would follow suit and say that at The Boston Globe, we are happy today to announce that we have won a prize for criticism, the wonderfully talented Mark Feeney.

But also important for this audience, we were finalists -- which is a very big deal in the Pulitzers because you're competing against hundreds of other extraordinary journalists -- we were a finalist in the category of explanatory journalism for the excellent series on global climate change that Beth Dailey, Globe reporter, did over the course of the last year and she’s a terrific talent. It’s great to get the recognition for her, and really, she should be the one sitting in this seat tonight. But, I'm also happy to be here.

What we're going to do tonight is have a conversation with the excellent panel that we have for you. We're going to be speaking for about an hour here, and then we’ll turn over the proceedings to the audience. Because this is being broadcast by C-SPAN, we ask that you use these microphones that are located prominently here. Ask a question, I’ll recognize you and speak clearly and succinctly, that's a fancy journalism word for short. Your questions short and to the point and we’ll try to get to as many that way as we possibly can.

You know, when we think about protecting and preserving the environment, I think the tendency is often to think of that as government’s work. You know, we have the EPA and the DEP and this whole mess of alphabet soup government agencies that are charged with environmental stewardship. But tonight, what's so interesting to me is we have representatives here not of government, but of the other sectors of economy and society. We have the private market sector and the religious community and nonprofit sector represented here, all of them doing such important work in preserving and protecting the environment and possibly, need I say it, filling a vacuum of failure to do so on the part of our government, at least for the past seven years. End of editorial comment. [laughter]

So, I think we're going to have a really interesting conversation today that looks at all of the different sectors of society and the important work that they're all doing in environmental stewardship.

I'm just going to start off with a couple of questions for the panel, and then I really do hope that everybody is not shy and not even polite and sort of jumps in and keeps this conversation going. But I do want to start with Gary Hirshberg, who’s written this great book that will be available for signing and purchase later, that has as its subtitle, How to Make Money and Save the World. So, clearly Mr. Hirshberg, you are a believer in the power of markets to catalyze change. But I want to ask you a question of scale, if I may, and maybe I'm starting off with a particularly provocative question. But because you are the world’s largest manufacturer of organic yogurt, I wanted to give you an opportunity, really, to respond to one of my heroes, Michael Pollan, who in his best-selling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, soon to be followed by your best-selling book, of course, but his best seller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, raises a question about the internal contradictions in what he calls industrial organic. How is it possible to grow a seven cow farm to scale so that you can make money and still save the world? I mean, I just want to say … I have a little quote from him here. You know, he’s actually, I should say, quite kind of “Stonyfield” in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. But he does say that, in general, trying to bring these organic, natural food production companies up to industrial scale uses so much energy and requires ingredients from far away and ends up, you know, sort of undermining the logical inspiration for organic in the first place. He says. “My industrial organic meal is nearly as drenched in fossil fuel as its conventional counterpart.” So discuss. [laughter]

GARY HIRSHBERG: Well, first of all, Michael has to be nice to Stonyfield because I know where he lives. [laughter] Seriously, he’s a good and dear friend and I am also a big fan. And if I ever get to sell one one-hundredth of the books he sells, I will be a very happy man indeed. And we have, in fact, just had dinner ten days ago and have our semiannual debate, as you might well imagine. So I'm prepped, I'm prepped.

Michael raises really important points, and just if I could elaborate on your question before answering it. What he’s really asking is as we, as a species, have sort of worked our way into a cul-de-sac, I think, by seeing the environment as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the economy, as opposed to what it really is, of course, which is the reciprocal -- the economy is only made possible as a subsidiary of the planet -- are we just bringing the same old mistakes that we brought to conventional agriculture to organic? Are we being linear, are we just doing another fraction, are we being unconscious? You know, there's ever so many myths that drive the way we meet our basic needs of agriculture, of energy and so forth, specifically the myth of away, the idea that we can send waste to this place that's like Oz in my mind, it doesn’t exist. Or the myth that we can extract the earth’s crust, and so forth. And indeed, the recent sort of enthusiasm for local is different primarily by an obsession with the idea of food miles.