Want to climb a mountain? - Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope - Interview

In the autumn of 1973, 29-year-old Carl Pope came to work at the Sierra Club as an air-quality, consultant. Pope had already served tw' years as a Peace Corps volunteer in India, three years as political director of Zero Population Growth, and trod just signed on as executive director of the California League of Conservation Voters. For the next 19 years, in a number of capacities, Pope put his unique political and intellectual acumen to work at and for the Club. Last fall he was named the organization's fifth executive director. We sat down with him recently alter he had been in Iris new office for only a week, to pick that part of his brain--and it's no small part-- that ruminates on how to save the world.

Sierra: Let's start with the bad news. How much time does the planet have?

Carl Pope: In 10 to 25 years, if we continue on our present course, many natural systems will have unraveled beyond repair. If the current pace of primary-rainforest destruction keeps up, for example, the forests will be gone in 20 years; within 10 years all of the temperate rainforests in North America will no longer be ecologically sustainable. A doubling of the world's population is ensured; unless we change birth rates in the next 20 years we'll have yet another doubling.

Knowing all that, how do you manage to get up in the morning?

Well, we know that gigantic changes can occur very rapidly, often in the face of significant inertia. Remember, it took only three and a half years to dismantle the Soviet Union.

The analogy has some weak spots, of course. In the Soviet Union, the crisis was felt on a daily basis--it was not an event scheduled for the future. The environmental crisis is almost always something that is about to happen-- and by the time it happens we might be too late to fix it. The global response to the ozone hole, for example, is now acceptably fast, and that's because the ozone layer is thinning right now. If it were going to begin depleting in five years, say, it would be much more difficult to phase out the guilty chemicals.

More and more the Sierra Club seems to be dealing with technical issues such as ozone depletion, global warming, international trade, and population growth--issues quite different from the Club's historic focus on wilderness preservation. Given the time pressures you cite and the absence of pretty pictures to remind people of these crises, how do we make such complex problems seem more immediate?

We've begun by electing Bill Clinton. Leadership at the top levels of U.S. government is terribly important, both because the United States has been the environmental leader in the world-- while you can argue that in the last 12 years we've lost that role, it's historically true--and because the U.S. is the greatest single shaper of worldwide cultural attitudes. The one area in which our balance of trade is very healthy is ideas.

In some sense it's the role of organizations like the Sierra Club to find ways to take practical, concrete concerns and connect them to broader, more abstruse problems. Children in California, Texas, and Arizona, for example, would continue to be at risk from toxic chemicals released from factories in Mexico if a bad trade agreement were put in place. The Sierra Club needs to link these daily, real-life problems with global cycles and mechanisms.

How do we do that?

One of the most effective ways to do that, frankly, is politically. To some extent, when we elect people who will be responsible about the concrete, the local, and the specific, we also elect people who will be responsible about the abstract, the long-range, and the distant, because the ethos of responsibility is part of their character. Not many members of Congress who are highly responsible about protecting the natural areas and values of their constituents are going to be wildly reckless when it comes to the ozone layer.

We must also keep sight of the moral component of what we're about. A reasonably good definition of morality is that it's a force that makes us care about things that don't affect our immediate self-interest. One of the concerns I have about some of the current emphasis on using market mechanisms to clean up the environment is that it runs the risk of shifting the focus away from the moral imperative to do something about pollution. Economists are fond of arguing that rational investors and rational markets would in fact value future outcomes strongly. The savings-and-loan scandal demonstrates pretty conclusively that investors do not in fact look rationally at future outcomes. So I don't think we're going to be able to "account" our way into environmental reform; we're going to have to achieve it on the basis of righteousness.

So far, both Bill Clinton and Al Gore seem to suggest that we can have it all: economic recovery, economic growth, and environmental quality. Do you believe we can achieve a sustainable world with no change in the way we live?

The Clinton/Gore message is that leadership and technology will solve our economic and our environmental problems alike. That's only a partial truth. There are clearly aspects of the American way of life that cannot be sustained indefinitely. The addiction to the automobile is the most detrimental thing, and a preference for detached single-family suburban houses is the second--nothing else really matters except maybe our preference for eating lots of meat, though that seems to be changing. I would judge that the vast majority of the pure consumption component of environmental degradation is associated with transportation, housing, and food. Everything else we consume may be destructive because we use the wrong technology, but that can change. We can all have clothes and computers--we can even throw them away too often--at acceptable environmental cost, because they aren't the problem.