Huey Johnson: Green Planning at Nation Scale

I am Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation and our speaker tonight I go back a ways used to be on the Board of Whole Earth Catalog back within the Point Foundation and we were just swapping stories about 1972 when Whole Earth’s put some money into taking a bunch of poets and Indians and ne'er-do-wells and one respectable person which was Huey to Stockholm for the UN conference on the Human Environment, the first one. And we’re all doing parades for Wales and making an encampment with a hog farm outside of town where they wouldn’t let the hippies into Stockholm. And we had a kind of a side show called Life Forum. Well, Huey was there. He was, I guess, Western Regional Director in the Nature Conservancy then. And while we were fussing around being sort of protesting on the side, he got into the big tent and played with the big dogs. He did that. I was just hearing by waiting until the guards went the opposite directions and then he sprinted and dove over a hedge and broke into the building and knew some of the heavyweights inside who made nearly got him passed the barrier at the Nixon administration that put up for people like him. That’s fairly typical Huey Johnson. Get into where the action is and make stuff happen. It happened again. I was working with the Brown administration and a couple of years in, he wanted a fresh Secretary of Resources. The California Resources Agency is pretty much like the Department of Interior…the interior is big and is certainly is powerful in this very green state. And so, I got to make the phone call to Huey Johnson to invite him, that would he mind coming to Sacramento and serving his state as Secretary of Resources. He modestly accepted and California was permanently changed by that. I am particularly interested in hearing what he has to say tonight because almost all of my green friends has been going kind of active in this direction, much as we did in Stockholm, putting on a show over here and doing parades and trying to do profound thoughts and stuff. Huey is over with power guys where the money is, the laws are, the institutions are, where the really long-term stuff is. There is a book of his outside called “Green Plans: Blueprint for a Sustainable Earth,†and a version of that is what he is talking about tonight. Huey Johnson. Thank you. My subject tonight is the culmination of years of obsession. It seemed to me that there had to be a good way or good ways of managing the environment for the good of the earth and humanity and eventually, after they threw the rascals out of office in Sacramento at that time, I wandered around the world looking for what must be a better way. And I actually found it. It is interesting if we’re looking at a 10,000-year clock at Long Now. I think to look back too because particularly in the environment, there is a chance that things get repeated and history is that way and the question about China and Rome, ancient civilizations, the question about China is “Why were there a number of dynasties instead of one?†The answer is, they would have dynasty blooming along just fine until the population grew beyond the capability of the land’s food to feed it and then things fell apart internally. Rome, same thing. One of the six reasons that Rome declined was an environmental one. They did a poor job of irrigating there wheat belt in North Africa, its salt builds up, they couldn’t grow wheat anymore, couldn’t feed the mobs bread in Rome. They were upset and that soon became the end of it. And if you look through history, we’re going to appreciate that in this country, we ended up in a treasure trove of resources and we haven’t taken much care of them. We observed the decline and had some challenges and problems with it. The west is littered with ghost towns or boot mining boom towns and many other examples of decline, clear-cut forest from the eastern seaboard right through in the west. And about the time of that change in the century, Teddy Roosevelt came along and he was a great visionary. He had, rather than going to a public school, he had kind of gone on private outings and his family took him to North Africa and he was introduced to the Sahara as a young student. And it began to interest him and he is a naturalist and he really started an important direction. The philosophy that went along with him up to that point, John Muir who started the Sierra club, inspired generation and many generations hence and we then enter the important era of trying to manage things beginning we’ll say, in the early 1900s. Roosevelt put together the first meeting in history of all the state’s governors. It was about this subject in natural resources. Then things continued to progress and I can remember when we were in Sacramento, air quality wasn’t really that big an issue. We knew they was smog but we were busy doing other things worrying about energy and water and what-have-you and all of a sudden you couldn’t see and now we realized that is an unhealthy condition. Mercury alone is responsible for 600,000 babies a year in the United States being affected before birth and we are facing a condition where China is building a new coal plan every week it said and where the fumes from that drift across the Pacific and come on into California. And so, the problems continue to mount. California exists. We are a desert. It exists because we built dams in all the Sierra Canyons and the water is allowed to trickle out. Water that is, from the winter snows usually and that could become a problem. The mercury point, this is Minamata, first example of the disease in this case, a village in Japan getting its water from a stream that was being polluted upstream by mercury poisoning. And then we had the important awareness factor of being able to look back at the earth. We thank Stewart Brand for that. He understood the importance of doing it and worked hard and demonstrated it and got it done and that was very important. And then, we progress…there are a couple of points I want to make for you that you probably are unaware of. One is very valuable asset you have - they are the public lands. Every citizen of this country has more than two acres equivalent in the public lands by extent of being a citizen and those lands often have very valuable assets on them. Forests, water, grazing lands, timber, and mining. Well, you don’t know that because the people who are enjoying the profit don’t want you to know that and if a grazing parcel of public lands were a private parcel, you would pay $15 to 25 for what is called an animal unit. That’s what a grassland it takes for one steer to walk around and eat and grow. And the public lands charge the fellows who have that, they’ve inherited most of them, $1.35. And so, the loss is the taxpayer’s problem. The other problems…recently, there was an interesting expose in the press. The Department of Interior Office that manages oil, you saw that, they were caught with drug practices and interoffice sexual practices with oil industry executives and one thing or another and a bunch of them retired in a hurry. But there is a very valuable asset, it is something you should be aware of, it’s a latent political issue. Somebody had to wake up and jar our politicians. One problem we have is the politician’s benefit they get. When a guy gets a gift from the public of $14 worth of free grazing, because he only pays $1.30, he’s pretty smart and he hires lobbyist and they donate part of that back to the political people and little is said. Diane runs fat and happy on that source. They’re western governors, the guys considered rudest and toughest in Congress ran happily on that source. Another point of historic transition was the Abramoff expose recently. This for the first time really gave us a clear contemporary look at the problems involved in America’s resources. He particularly worked for the Department of Interior, the mining lands and timberlands, and what have you and there he is embracing our good president. And then we come to the important factor of water again. California’s existence hinges on water. Stewart and I were in Sacramento in the 70s, we had a drought and we got to be pretty sweaty. We ran a pipe over the Richmond Bay bridge so Marina would have some more water and we’d sit all day while everybody in the city, the mayors would come in and the agencies would come in and they would grouse away at each other. And in this case, 80% of California’s water is claimed by agricultural interest. The balance is claimed by cities. This was apportioned back just at the turn of the 1900s and it was done in a way that there were two uses for all time. It’s going to be agriculture or development. Environment didn’t get any that’s why one of the key reasons the salmon collapse recently in the ocean here because they have to come in, go up the streams. They have to have water that was cool enough and deep enough to spawn Recently, we had a remarkable experience from my point of view. An investigative reporter, Mike Taugher, did this story and it is immensely important, important enough that we have award that we would like to give him. I hope he’s here. I haven’t met him as yet. Mike, you’re in the audience? Come on up. One of the examples of integrity, the prize comes with a $1,000 check but he declined the check saying that he would feel he would risk his reporting integrity, I guess. Okay, there is that. Would you mind saying a few words for us? You’ll get a copy stories, very impressive. Thank you. I didn’t know I was going to be saying anything. I guess I would say that thanks first of all, second of all, I think that water is the story in California. It drives how California exists, its economy and its natural resources and it's in limited supply and there is a…it’s become a zero sum game, and it is being fought over and next year or two I think, a lot of big decisions are going to be made that will I think, shape the future of California – its economy and its ecosystems. Thank you. You might hand it to him to do that. Thank you very much. Well, you’ll have a copy of that article and it's in-depth and it’s wonderful. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a successful story like that. The Southern California water interest dominates politics in California in my view and you’ll see why. This is one of the communities survive and thrive by the water that is pumped 600 miles south where we gather it up here. The important message that I’ve been obsessed about all these years looking for a better way to do it kind of had a break when a UN commission chaired by a Norwegian doctor and commissioned to find a better way of measuring resources going around the world and they did a successful job. The message is very much the same. Some of the problems you have as a state trying to retain quality of life for all of us is things like time, you can clearly see the dilemma of the time in office compared to the impact. The picture that was on the screen when you arrived is Lake Tahoe and the lowering of Lake Tahoe during the drought period that we have right now. This better way of doing things called the Green Plan, I found going to Norway and I was really dazzled by what they had in the way of resource management policies and so on. They said, “No, no, no, no. You’re too easily impressed. You got to go the Netherlands. That’s where they’re doing it right.†After that period, this model they have, so we call it green plan has been involved in number of other countries. New Zealand particularly has a green plan. Theirs is a bit different in that they are an agricultural nation and they export clean, green products. Mexico City has a green plan. We took a bunch of Mexican clinical officials to Holland a few years ago and that has resulted there. European Union has adapted the Netherlands’ example, hired the Dutch specialist who designed that program and it is doing very well there and EU as a result is now setting standards for the world on environment. The European Union establishes its laws and regulations for the 500,000 customers that make up the EU and then they say in the rest of the world who wants to sell stuff here has to conform to our rules and thus, Mr. Bush and the boys ran into trouble and even Silicon Valley was warned a few years ago that the European Union was not going to let a lot of electronic equipment because it had heavy metals that were not allowed there and the result was Apple computer had to withdraw some of its products that were selling in Europe, for instance. And this is an important example and it is tragic in another way. The US was the leader in the world ethically, technically, and we faded in the background. Singapore is a wonderful place to visit in part because of their green plan. They have probably the best green plan going that the traffic is…no traffic jams, everything is controlled, and they have a quality of life that is superior to our own at the present time. The main thing a green plan does is manage all the parts of the environment. We traditionally have managed our environment as though we were managing one part of our watch. My watch is 82 parts but if I only do one part a year, at some point, the watch is going to stop running and I want that watch to keep time. I don’t really care about whether one part or another’s clean. You have to keep all the parts working to keep the watch keep in time. Well, we’ve learned the hard way after the same thing on managing the environment and these are terms and themes that the Dutch Dutch system used or uses. It’s interesting because it also is managing complexity. I’ve never seen a government able to tackle complexity and make it function successfully and define it and put it together in ways that other people can pick up and copy. They want you to do that because if climate change gets worse, they’ve taken one third of their landscape from the sea and they could have water over the walls of their dikes and be wet again. So, they’re very cooperative. Another interesting factor in their approach is that they sit down business and government, went in a room, business approach government in this case. It all started when the Queen gave a speech in 1998. She is allowed one speech a year not written by the bureaucracy. The Dutch royalty, it turns out like all European royalty learned their lesson from Napoleon and they don’t let the royalty get away with saying a heck of a lot independently. And in this case, the queen said, “It’s Christmas Eve and I’m setting aside my normal speech where I give Susie an award for taking care of the Tulip bulbs and Joe an award for keeping his finger in the dike and we’re going to deal with a very serious problem. Our scientific community has come together. They have done a thorough study of Dutch environmental quality standards. We have the best in the world except there is one problem, they’re not good enough. And there is a very real chance that we will have no Dutch great grandchildren. That was a pretty sour message for Christmas Eve and the next week, people started meeting and amid those were the Dutch’s big business leaders and they sat down and said, “Hey we ought to do something.†About that time, they got an invitation from an Eastern European country newly freed from the Soviet Bloc and that new free country wanted to know how to run their affairs in a free enterprise system. They looked for somebody to come in and tell them how to run it and they looked at Germany and oh they wanted to be like Germany. they didn't want to be like the US and so on. But the Dutch, now there you go, they're successful economically; the children are taken care off; good healthcare, housing, everything. Let’s be like the Dutch. So they sent a jet. Business leaders got on and went back to this place and they landed. They got off and they looked around and son of a gun! Everything was polluted. Streams were dead, children playing in them. Air quality was terrible. The Soviets had had their heavy industry located there and paid no attention to environmental quality. They were supposed to stay a week or something. That night in their hotel, they had dinner and they said, “Gentleman, this is what we thought we wanted. No regulations. You know, we can’t help these people. We really, really can’t. We better go home and think this out.†And they did. They told the host the next day, “We’re sorry we just can’t help you. We got to go home.†And they came home and they sat down together and then they went to the government and said, “We want to propose the most radical move imagined for us. We want to propose cooperating.†For years, they have been plotting lawsuits the way we do and they were smart enough to say, “We know how to take care of it if you’ll set the standards but it is going to require some negotiating on our often backward battles over the years in one set of regulation or another.†And then nonprofits were used to sit outside, a pack of snarling dogs pitching, saying that they were not doing good enough demanding perfection of what was going on inside and when they progressed, they would pass out whatever their decisions was and the NGOs would look at it and send out a media release and commanding it or criticizing it or whatever. And the business interest pressed government to be darn sure they gave grants to the NGOs, the environmental groups so they would be vigorous in there, and that was critical to the success of the whole plan because environmental movement was able to threaten those who wanted to leave, any business representatives, and they would really bring pressure to those who didn’t want to go in the first place and that really is what turned things around One of the things then in managing complexity is to admit as with the watch, you got many parts. We in the west tend to manage one thing at a time. This year, we managed water. Next year, we’ll manage air then maybe we’ll get around to energy. In the meantime, water policies start falling apart behind us and so on and the problem we discover is that if you’re talking about water policy you have to talk about energy policy because in order to ran the pumps to send the water 600 miles down Southern California over a mountain range to boot, you have to burn some fuel to get the electricity and that pollutes the air and we always have ignored the connections there and the connections of course are far greater than that. In defining complexity in simple terms, I’m going to ran through a few slides to demonstrate that. They have a social contract, they call it, where they understand generally what they’re trying to achieve and the public is behind it politically and willing to fund it. They have to have each generation be responsible for recovery during their time and not just passing it on. They started it out. The very first thing they did was list these eight points and they became the premise of what they are going to build on. Interesting one is no waste export that means nothing leaves Holland that's manufactured there. If you got bricks, you don’t send them to some poor country in Africa. You get rid of them in Holland. Another thing they did was be honest about the impact of their programs and their effort and they went right out global when they were doing any of their planning. These were some of the challenges that they really focusing on realizing they probably could have an effect on actually. And these were points that they focused to manage. Of all the problems they had, they decided they had to correct these first as they started out down the road of total recovery in 25 years is their goal. At every level, salmon back in the Rhine, transportation problems taken cared of, health problems taken cared of, the works, and they're doing it. They’re in their 20th year now. Squandering is wasting resources you know putting an extra layer of tin on a tin can when you could get by with one. They would believe you don’t need to use the quantity of resources that we use in society. And they’ve been very effective with that. It’s interesting, there’s a side story with that. I go back, the reason this worked pretty well was luck, but they had a Ministry of Environment who was the head executive in this large consulting firm called McKenzie, American consulting firm, well its all over the world. The guy in Holland was conservative and grumpy and he said, “Damn government†he said, “I’m going to ran for office†and he ran for office and the next thing he knew he was the Minister of Environment and he didn’t know nothing about the subject and some young people in these Dutch agencies had been dreaming for a chance to carry out an idea they had. So, they came to him. They said, “Mr. Minister, here’s our idea and we think if you’ll follow it, Holland will be an example for the world.†And they had 82 things to be managed that would return environmental quality in Holland. And this guy who was an expert made a million dollars a year or better as a salary working for them said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. If I were advising General Motors, I wouldn’t let them have more than five points because the human mind can’t handle all the intricacies of interrelationships of more than about a few points. You can’t manage something that’s too big,†he said, “So you guys go back and you come in with five and I’ll do it.†And they came back and they stuck on eight finally. And he said, “Where in hell did you get those 82 points?†He said, “Oh we got it from USEPA that’s what they’re following.†Interesting experiments have been very successful for them. The idea of green taxes, they get about 15% of their tax take each year now from green taxes and it’s really neat to visit there because these things are prominent. The kind of bottom line for them, they came up with these terms several years ago. They normally saw economic growth and the problems for industrialization pollution and what have you growing with it. And what they decided they could do was to have the economy grow with the problems to drop. And that’s this design. You can see I think the…that’s the economic growth and this is solid waste. They’ve taken cared of solid waste. It’s no longer a relevant problem for instance. They put a lot of beauty and philosophy into their stuff and in order to get things going, they went to the right place. They went to the US and bought two US public relations firms over to Holland and put together a campaign for them to get these things sold and maintained by the public. Another thing they do is print everything in English and they’re much like the Germans. It’s as though they’ve been assigned the task of building a better Mercedes than the Germans. And they do a book on the tires and they do a book on the steering mechanism, a book on the seats. You go face down in your soup real quick trying to keep up with all the printed stuff that comes out from them. I’ve tried diligently and it’s a challenge. I actually went face down on my soup once I was over there and there was a wonderful guy from Wisconsin named Gaylord Nelson. He was a senator and he invited me to be his guest at some award banquet where he was getting an award and it just happened that I could take a plane from Amsterdam to Milwaukee and they cocktails beforehand. He was very handy with pouring drinks and playing poker as I got to know him and playing poker all night in the Wisconsin woods. So, anyway I chartered my place to the speaker’s people and damn I was tired, I was just biting my lip trying to stay awake. The next thing I knew, I was asleep. He was very generous in joking about it. A long time to come. Another fascinating success, New Zealand, just tore up a lot of their laws and restructured their government around managing resources. And in that case, they had a long debate in their parliament and finally at about midnight, they got no place after many days and one grumpy old senator said, “Damn it, I’ve had it. This is all time I’m putting in on this subject.†So we’ve ruined our years and he said, “You guys are just trying to put together a grab bag for all those social problems in New Zealand and I’m not going to buy it.†And they said, “What would you buy Senator?†And he said, “What you want to do is manage this stuff more effectively from what you’ve been talking about.†And they said, “Yeah it’s about a call to management action were voted as such.†And they did. And it really is successful and has turned around their country’s approach to managing resources and enhancing the quality of their citizen’s lives which is much of what government ought to be about. Each of these topics of course has a chapter. I have a book out there and it is one of many that’s available on the subject. They practice good management again. They delegated from their central government definitions which they’re going to do right down to local and city councils and theirs are working very well. We’ve had a problem but that problem is about the end thank goodness and at least Mr. Obama’s team has this particular collection of things and they’re starting it, we hope. Then suddenly about the time I started to relax a little bit, here came climate change. In the last summer, an example of that, we had 1,000, forest fires all happening in one day we couldn’t even get enough people together to fight them. You have to be in a forest fire to appreciate the terror of it. I went roll ahead. There in Sacramento I was responsible for fires or floods or something other and if the state and federal governments are going to work together in the problem, I had to sign off on it. And one day they’d call me and there was a fire happening in Southern California. A plane picked me up at the airport in Marin and flew us down. They put us in the fire truck and we went rolling down the highway, it was closed because of the fire and these guys are very macho firefighters. They were showing off of course but damn, flames were belching over the road, 100 feet in the air. It was just like any imagined hell. We came to a spot, they ordered us out and we looked off the edge. And there down a canyon was the wind creating a blowtorch effect. The wall of fire is as high as this ceiling. So, you hear screaming and there were 300 houses down there that were being torched by that. And boy, I’ll tell you, that kind of thing and floods the same but nature bets last and we tend to get carried away sometimes with our ability to control things. But as we learned in New Orleans, in other places, we haven’t quite gotten there yet. And right now California faces these problems of drought and water problems and we have the worst water loss of any state in the nation. And they’re purposely kept that way by those guys in Southern California that manage to…that article Mike wrote notes that they…one water district, the Kern Water District, long time problem water district in my view, managed to take off with 100 million dollars of a water bond issue and that’s what the article is about and what these researches are about. It's the first time, it goes on a lot, but it's the first time I know of it it’s ever been documented and still isn’t being paid much attention to. Well, we get to a good part. California had the luck of having a governor and a legislator that cared. A woman named Fran Pavley was an assembly woman now running for the senate and she carried this bill, AB32. And this AB32 is as good as anything going on in Europe or any place in the world. If it were passed and operated as it could be. It’s a very important moment for this thing because October gets your last view. Today was the deadline for commenting on air quality as part of it. The administration skipped today as the deadline. The special interests are maneuvering like mad trying to weaken it and I think it is the most important legislation this past century and a lot of it if it’s carried out will enhance the quality of your lives and if you have any grandchildren, guarantee they’ll have a place to live too. These things take years to put together because they’re so many rooted interest that you have to bring around, work out and so it took five years, in the Dutch case about four years, New Zealand’s case ardent work on those issues to get them in definable shape. The 12% I would add came pretty much from the Jerry Brown administrations days in Sacramento. That was a goal we had. It has been a while. So there are a lot of factors involved with this AB32 and we’re going to actually hand you a piece of paper with an address to be in touch with to comment on this idea and why, what you think about it or if you think it’s important. Normally, we’ve only passed bills to deal with one resource. A hundred bills, several thousand bills are introduced a year in Sacramento for instance. And for really the first time, we’ve woven them together in a comprehensive, very important recovery plan for the vitality of the state. But as you might expect, there are some flaws and one that you might write about to go all through these things. There’s just sick as heck in fine print and whatever. You get to the points you realize where’s water. Water is ignored in the thing. It has one point it says, “Well we should charge $50 to hook up water fee to hook up to a new building and that’s it.†So one thing you could do is say, “For god’s sake governor, let’s shape up and correct your water problems and include, you can’t really have environmental management if you’re not managing your water in a desert state,†the only place where the state mascot is found. We have an office here at Fort Mason Resource Renewal Institute. We would be glad to answer any questions in the future that you might have and an additional point I would add exciting to me, for years I’ve felt, when I grew up as a child I grew up in Northern Michigan and the great thing to do is go ice fishing. So I’ve bugged a friend of mine over the years who has a travel agency saying, “I’d like to go ice fishing in Lake Baikal in Siberia and he agreed and I’m going to lead the trip in March if anybody wants to go. Who’s got the news? Thank you.