Introduction:
(Portland, OR) – Dennis Hayes is currently the President and CEO of The Bullitt Foundation, a philanthropic organization based in Seattle, WA and dedicated to promoting sustainable communities and human activities.
Hayes is likely most widely known for being the organizer of the first - and now iconic - Earth Day. In 1969, at the age of 25, he was selected by Senator Gaylord Nelson to be the National Coordinator of the inaugural Earth Day in 1970; an event which saw over 20 million people hit the streets across the United States to express their concern for the environment. Today Hayes continues his involvement, serving as Chair of the Board for the Earth Day Network. Incredibly, Earth Day is now celebrated as a secular holiday in over 180 countries around the world.
A dedicated conservationist, Dennis Hayes’ commitment to environmental values has spanned decades and seen him assume many prominent and influential roles in government and in the private sector. He has worn many hats, including those of professor, lawyer, author, scholar, and visionary, to name a few. He has received dozens of awards from numerous organizations, including the prestigious Jefferson Medal for Outstanding Public Service from the US Government.
Hayes generously took time out of his busy schedule to meet with Becky Gavigan (freelance Video Journalist) and Paul Kilpatrick (Partner, Business Development with Sustainability Television™) to discuss various topics, including his environmental roots, B.C.’s privatization of rivers, The Bullitt Foundation, and Biomimicry, amongst other things.
Throughout the interview, Hayes graciously fielded questions with deadpan humour, thoughtfulness and patience. His depth of character, integrity and perceptiveness were evident throughout and his engaging and considerate demeanor was greatly appreciated.
[This interview was videotaped in Portland, Oregon for Sustainability TV™ in May of 2009 at the ‘Living Future Unconference’ for green building professionals, hosted by the Cascadia Region Green Building Council.]
On Becoming a Environmentalist
PAUL KILPATRICK: I think it would be nice to have some background information for those that are unfamiliar with you. What were the early influences that got you interested in the environment?
DENNIS HAYES: I suppose what brought me into a concern for the environment was a kind of a long convoluted story which I will not impose upon you; but the short version of it is by the age of 19 I was in a world class feldschmertz. I was looking at the world in a way that I saw everything as black and bleak.
At that point in time the world the arms race was in full measure between the United States and the Soviet Union. We had the ability to blow one another up thirty or forty times over, and we were engaged in serious experimentation - and the world’s leader in this was the United States (in chemical and biological warfare).
We had huge problems bubbling up in the civil rights area, particularly in the American south where peaceful people trying to get a right to a job, a decent education, a right to vote, were being pounded into the ground with police truncheons and police dogs and having fire hoses spurted on them; and on and on. We were just at that point getting into a war in South East Asia that I was fairly convinced we were on the wrong side of, and on and on. And I was basically looking for some way to make sense of a world that seemed to be going crazy.
I read a lot of the usual philosophers, mostly of the left: Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse, and of the right. I took a look at particularly at the enlightenment people; Adam Smith, John Steward Mills, and Montesquieu…and none of it really seemed to me to explain what was going on in the world, or anything that gave me much of a vision of what I could be doing that would be better than just sort of killing myself and going away. [laughing] I mean I was really, really depressed.
So, I went out hitchhiking around the world for three years; all over Africa, all over the Middle East. I was hitchhiking through places where I would be shot on site as an American today, but it was all much more casual then.
I remember one place (Tehran) where I developed a real taste for deep fried cauliflower on buns. I wouldn’t have expected this because I’d never much liked cauliflower, but this was quite tasty because of the deep fried stuff. So I ate this for about five or six days before I learned that it was actually sheep’s brain, at which point my delight for it was significantly reduced. [laughing]
In any case, one night in Namibia I became an environmentalist. I had earlier taken a course in ecology (mostly studying dragonflies) and in the process of it, read through Eugene Odum’s first book “The Principles of Ecology” and mastered the basic concepts. And it had been a course like any other course, like Peloponnesian wars or chemistry, you know…I did it, got some of it salted away and I went on with my life.
This night in the middle of Namibia, I’d come back from a town on the coast called Lüderitz and I’d hitchhiked back to the main road that goes between Windhoek and all the way down to Cape Town, South Africa. And I was at that point heading south, my driver was heading north, nobody else picked me up and I went up over a hill and it was in the middle of the desert and it had been incredibly hot all day and I was pretty hungry and it was really cold at night, and there are a lot of cold creatures around there and I was the warmest thing around – and none of them particularly attractive bed mates.
There was a full moon and bright skies in the way that you can only have in the desert – I think I could have played football; it was that bright out there. And something happened…where that course on ecology all came back into my mind and started to register in ways that answered some of the things that I was concerned about with the way that society was developing. Which is to say that those principles of ecology applied to everything from mice and bunny rabbits to elk and grizzly bear; they applied to orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas, monkeys. They applied to primates, and maybe ought to apply us as well.
And in my mind was thinking through how you would construct a human society that would observe many of those same principles about diversity and resilience and super efficient use of energy and energy transactions, and so on. There wasn’t really a vocabulary for what we now call urban ecology or industrial ecology then, but in my own vague, weird way I thought that makes more sense to me than a Marxian analysis of what’s gone wrong. And it has within it some elements that are Darwinian and not particularly attractive for how it would work, and maybe you want to have an overlay of human morality on top of that. But there was something sufficiently important in all of that that I basically got up the next morning knowing what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to figure out ways to apply these ecological principles to human circumstances.
And if your other questions elicit that long and answer I realize this is going to be a two question interview. [smiling] But that’s how I got there.
Creative Activism and the privatization of British Columbia rivers
BECKY GAVIGAN: One thing I’m interested in getting your opinion about; right now we have an issue in BC with the privatization of our rivers. There’s a lot happening, with about 600 rivers licensed to corporations thus far.
There are many passionate people concerned about this, including myself, and I think you are a good person to ask about this. I guess back in the day, rallying, petitions, and writing letters were effective tools…what can you suggest to people now who want to create a movement - and I know we have these technologies online and we have video - but there is also a lot of noise too and a lot of people fighting for many different things using whatever they can. What do you suggest for a person now?
DENNIS HAYES: Self immolation [laughing].
It’s important to try to do something that’s colourful, creative...dramatic. There might be something you can do on those rivers that involves hundreds of people swimming down through the rivers and asserting their ownership in it as public bodies of water. But something that is non-harmful and yet makes it photographable.
In Chicago they dye the Chicago river green every St. Patrick’s day with something they say causes no harm at all and disappears really rapidly, assuming that that may be true since the mayor is actually trying to become and environmental leader. Something like that. If you dyed a river some colour and used that to somehow imply public ownership, then you’ve got something that is hugely photographable. You get the thing jacked up on attention.
Do you know about Mr. Floaty?
GAVIGAN: No.
HAYES: Well, Victoria flushes its sewage out into the straight of Georgia and it has now signed an agreement to move to secondary sewage treatment over the course of the next eight to ten years (I’ve forgotten the exact timetable). There were all kinds of pressures and things that came from the federal government and elsewhere to do something about it, but a part of it was a guy who shows up at every single public hearing, any meeting on sewage, as an eight foot tall plastic piece of human excrement [laughing]…and he calls himself Mr. Floaty, and it gets a lot of attention.
And we have the Vancouver-Whistler Olympics coming up and I think the thought that there might be a dozen Mr. Floaties meeting every group of Olympic athletes, and more importantly, every reporter coming into Vancouver airport at a time when your hosting the Olympics to announce to the world “super natural BC” and suddenly Mr. Floaty is talking about untreated sewage in 2010 going into the Straight of Georgia. It just was oblique pressure, or maybe fairly direct pressure.
I don’t know what will work in any particular circumstance. It has to be something that will inspire the local audience, but there’s an enormous amount of creativity out there. People just feel like they’ve got permission to get engaged in this, and I think maybe you’re role in this is to say “if you’ll do something at all interesting on this issue, we would love to cover it”. That gets people to think about doing something interesting.
GAVIGAN: Okay, thank you.
The Bullitt Foundation
KILPATRICK: You’re still involved with the Bullitt Foundation today; could you talk about the Bullitt Foundation and explain what it’s about?
HAYES: Sure. A woman named Dorothy Bullitt, whose husband died at a relatively long age, found herself with some amount of assets (but limited). She was a widow with a high school education and three children; she had basically been raised through preparatory school to be – in those days – a good wife at the time (late 19th / early 20th century). It turned out she had a talent for business. She had to figure out how to handle a few real estate holdings through the great depression, and instead of kicking people out of the buildings, because there was nobody else that could come in and rent them, she would take stock in their companies in return for the rent, some of which turned out to be valuable stock later on in life.
She had this kind of crazy idea to set up a radio station to bring classical music to Seattle. Remember, this is the Seattle where the term “skid row” came from, so this is a lumberjack town…a forestry town, a really rough and ready kind of place. But she wanted to bring classical music there and it turned out the station was some success and she built a couple of other stations.
And then she learned about television and got very excited by the concept. She went to the east coast and literally tracked David Sarnoff, who was then running RCA, around until finally he just basically gave in after – I get the sense from the family stories – weeks of her stalking him around up and down the east coast. He sold her a license to open up what I think may have been the first network affiliate on the west coast, and the radio stations became King Broadcasting and then this became King Broadcasting Radio/Television Ltd.. So she went into cable television, television production, had a couple of magazines, opened up a stations here in Portland (if you’ve got NBC affiliate here, it’s KGW which is a King affiliate), stations in Spokane, Boise, and in Vancouver, BC.
When she died she had the largest broadcasting empire in the northwest. Her children, all of whom had some of their own assets by that time, but still, remarkably generously, put the overwhelming bulk of her estate into a foundation. And they did that before deciding what to do with the foundation. They had various people come in and talk to them about things that they might do, including things like youth and poverty, education, the arts, (which had actually been a principle interest of Dorothy Bullitt), and the environment; through some process that no one has ever explained to me, I was chosen to come and give the presentation on what they might do on the environment. Afterwards they decided to become an environmental foundation and they asked me if I would like to become president.
KILPATRICK: What year was that?
HAYES: [exhaling] Boy, it was a long time ago…1992 or ’93 maybe. I never dreamed I would be here this long.
We’ve been a regional environmental philanthropy since then and of late have shifted our emphasis entirely out of the natural areas (wilderness, free rivers…those sorts of concerns), because they are pretty thoroughly covered by other philanthropic institutions that have been set up over the last ten or twelve years, and we are focused upon, if you will, the human environment; going back in some senses to that night in Namibia, of how do you get urban ecology and industrial ecology, and the incorporation of ecosystem services all incorporated in a coherent governing structure. So we now focus upon people.
Biomimicry
GAVIGAN: Today I learned so many things about ‘Biomimicry’ from Janine [Janine Benyus was a keynote speaker at the conference]. Collecting water from fog for instance, or various natural ways of extracting metals from water…and so on. What are your thoughts about Biomimicry?
HAYES: Actually one of her things was to get electricity out of a river, and that she was going to do it without the dams that have you worried, but just using a run-of-river technology that takes advantage of a particular nature-based configuration.
Well, there are any number of things that nature has been beta testing, some of them for millions of years, or hundreds of millions, or even billions of years. Nature has a pretty rigorous testing system. If it doesn’t pan out, well, it disappears, generally by being killed. So it’s a more rigorous testing system than most of our human failures come up against. And the idea that we should learn from that is so commonsensical that it’s hard to understand why it isn’t more common than it is.
I don’t mean at all to imply that it hasn’t been done a lot throughout human history; we have learned from what beavers do, we have learned from what bees do, we have reasoned by analogy from things that work. But by and large have tended – pretty much in all of the different religious cultures and emphatically in the Judeo-Christian culture – to think of ourselves as apart from nature; there is all of the environment ‘out there’ and then there is us. So, I don’t know if we’re trying to build a city that is created in the image of God or something, but we ought to be thinking about a city that learns something from a Douglas Fir forest, and from a coral reef for instance.
So for example, in Portland, if I wanted to take a building out there and cover the entire south wall with solar panels, there is absolutely nothing in Portland that would stop somebody else from then going up and building a building that is three stories taller and directly to the south, at which point, since no sunlight would fall directly on my solar panels they wouldn’t produce any electricity. All investment would be shot.
That doesn’t happen in a forest. Trees are shaped in a fashion that makes the sunlight more available to the trees next to it; they have ways of getting sunlight and nutrients and what-have-you to the understory.
And so, to pattern ourselves on natural processes and to take advantage of all of that makes a great deal of sense. Now there are certainly some places I believe where a human intellect and human creativity can come up with some new experiments that may be more effective than what nature does. You could make a case that – and in fact there is a case: nature has some things that have some of the characteristics of fiber optics, but nature doesn’t have anything like our fiber optical cables that can carry a terabit a second of information. That’s just astonishing. You can take a 500 page book of colour photographs and transmit it to Bangalore in roughly the amount of time it takes you to blink your eye. We are smart little monkeys. We’ve figured out ways to do things.
There are ways to use nano-technology to do some of the things that Janine Benyus (author of Biomimicry) talks about with eye structures of butterflies that collect photons and trap them in a place where they will tend to last a little bit longer and be more useful at night time. We have done that ourselves with the design of a very, very thin film (on a very small scale so far) that I think ultimately is going to be something that doesn’t just increase the visibility of eyes but will give you a thin film you can put all over structures allowing you to relatively efficiently and very cheaply generate electricity whenever a photon of light from any source hits it.
I think we shouldn’t be limited to what nature has done before. But, nature’s done an awful lot of stuff and we would be silly if we didn’t learn how she makes her lubricants, her cements, her modes of construction, and so on.
Nanotechnology
GAVIGAN: Do you know much about nanotechnology?
HAYES: Well that’s an area where there really is a lot of proprietary information as to who has done what, but I know a fair amount of it as it applies to efforts to harvest sunlight, to store electricity, and the batteries and ultra-capacitors to try to create quantum wires to transmit electricity super efficiently.
My huge fear is that people tend to think of nanotechnology as a category, much as they think of technology is a category. And if you do a couple of things stupidly in that category then that stupidity translates into the entire category. If I were going to try to introduce a brand new field into the American economy with materials that are smaller than any we’ve used for any purpose before – materials that literally could go right through your skin (because they have characteristics in various kinds of biological processes that we not only don’t know, but that we don’t understand how they operate, much less what their consequences will be) – the last place that I would introduce this stuff is with makeup for women to put underneath their eyes. It just seems to me to be so foolish! [laughing, but sounding exasperated]
We haven’t had catastrophes yet, but it would be in my sense are real catastrophe if people were using some exceedingly small nano-based things for something that got into human bodies and did bad stuff; or something got into some kind of industrial process and jammed it up. And that then shut the whole thing down so that we could not create, for example, my solar-skin, or my quantum wire, or other things that don’t have any of those other disadvantages attached to them.
GAVIGAN: I don’t know too much about it but I’m interested in it. I think in Europe they’re going to want things to be labeled if nano-technology has been used. I think that will end up being the next step. I think people are going to want to know more about it.
HAYES: I think that’s right. Okay, I may get myself in a little bit of trouble here, but…a common thin-film solar technology right now is cadmium telluride (used to make the film). It’s the cheapest solar collector out there; it’s not super efficient but it’s getting more efficient with each year and getting more long lasting with each year. The company that manufactures the greatest quantity of it is an American company and it’s by far the most successful in terms of its stock price.
And I’m in favour of it; I think we should be putting it in a bunch of places and learning from it. But there you are using a technology that includes cadmium which is an enormously toxic material. Toxic no matter how you become exposed to it (as a worker, or if something happens to the materials). There was cadmium poisoning in the Kanto Plains in Japan a few decades ago and the Japanese term for the medical condition of cadmium poisoning is “itai-itai”, which means the equivalent of “ouch-ouch”, because it’s enormously painful disease.
And so, we’re mixing cadmium with tellurium, an extremely rare material that doesn’t hold the potential to deliver a large fraction of humanity’s energy requirements, even if we used everything we could find in the entire world for this. That to me is an opportunistic thing; it will feed a certain niche; you want to do a bunch of it because you’re trying to get as much solar out there as possible because that’s how you figure out how to integrate a solar collector into a smart grid; that’s how you figure out all kinds of other stuff, by getting affordable things into the field.
But in terms of problems with Europe, they don’t allow you to put things with cadmium into the market in Europe, but they made an exception for these solar cells, so you do that anywhere and in fact that’s the big market for them right now (Europe). It would seem to me to be completely screwy if they would let cadmium telluride go into all sorts of applications, including right on buildings in Europe, and refuse to allow silicon to go onto the same buildings - using the world’s second most abundant element in a way that’s completely safe – just because there were some nano-structures on the silicon.
I admit, it could well happen, particularly if it turns out five years from now half of the women that put this nano stuff underneath their eyes are going blind. But it has nothing to do with it except that it’s in the same broad category of being very, very, very small particles.
[Our thanks to Dennis Hayes for sharing his time with us and to the Cascadia Region Green Building Council for organizing the event.]
