transcribed by Kristin Sponsler
Hi welcome to Peak Moment, I'm Janaia Donaldson.
Peak oil and climate change are only two parts, two aspects of a much larger transformation happening on our planet.
Janaia Donaldson: My guest today is the editor of a magazine that’s been watching those changes and documenting them. I’m with Sarah Van Gelder, who is the editor of YES! Magazine. Thank you for joining me.
Sarah van Gelder: Thanks for having me.
JD: Well tell us a little bit about Yes!. How did it come to be and what’s it about?
SG: We started up ten years ago, and we started up because we felt there was a lot of things going on in the world that were positive that weren’t being told, and we felt that there were important stories that we wanted to get out. And a lot of people asked how can you be telling such positive stories during such difficult times?
JD: Because all the rest of the news is really telling us all of what isn’t working?
SG: That’s right. And it’s true, there’s a great deal that isn’t working. But if all that you pay attention to is what isn’t working, then you don’t really figure out where to go with that, and a lot of people end up withdrawing because they don’t want to be involved in something that’s not working. We are seeing that epidemically, people isolated and separating, and denying.
JD: Yes, that’s what’s happening. But you are calling YES! a journal of positive futures, which is exciting. What are you finding happening when you do tell the good news? What do you see?
SG: Well, the good news is that people are awakening to what’s not working about our current system. So we are not just telling good news in the generic sense. We are not just talking about puppies and sweet things that make people feel good. What we are talking about are the ways in which people in their everyday lives, in their communities, in their families, and as activists on the world stage, are creating a different possibility for our future. So the story that we get from the media about how inevitable it is that we will have war, how inevitable it is that we will have poverty, and that most people's lives will be spent in meaningless jobs, and if they are lucky, they will be able to retire, those kinds of stories are becoming increasingly pervasive, and they are simply not the only story that is available to us. We have much greater possibilities available.
JD: Well you know you have been watching. One of the gifts of YES! is, of course, you are independent media, you don’t have advertising, so you are free to tell the stories that you want to tell, and I would imagine that a lot of your input comes from the ground, from folks who are doing those projects. I mean, how do you get your stories, I should add that on. You do each issue on a topic, around a theme? Tell us how you gather that information, those stories?
SG: Well, let me tell you about our current issue, which just went to press last week. The issue is called Health Care for All, and the reason we wanted to do the issue is that it is so clear that the health care system is broken, and it is so clear that Americans care passionately about getting a better system. So that was basically what we had to go on, that we knew that businesses can’t continue to pay these enormously increasing premiums. We knew that people were suffering terribly, that they were going bankrupt in some cases.
JD: Because of health care costs.
SG: Because of health care premiums, or health care crises or even if you are covered by insurance, you can end up in a bankruptcy because of all the deductibles, because of all the co pays and the limitations. So we knew that people were suffering a lot, and we knew that the midterm elections were coming up, and we thought, you know, there’s got to be something happening here. So that was sort of our framework for looking into it, and sure enough, we found out that all across the United States there are grassroots movements, as well as national movements, for universal health care. And you wouldn't know it, if you paid attention to the corporate media because it is not being reported, and you also wouldn't know it if you paid attention to the political debate, because with very few exceptions, the political leaders are not willing to talk about it. They are willing to talk around the edges, the Medicare prescription program, and what’s not working there, and maybe little adjustments, but in terms of actually taking on the question that Americans overwhelmingly want addressed, they are not touching it. Well, we can touch that one, because we are not getting any advertisements from the pharmaceutical industry. We are not taking any money from the big drug corporations, so we just got right in there and told the story about all this grassroots effort that is going on, that we were amazed to discover. We did not know when we went in there that there was so much of this. We knew about a few isolated instances here and there, for instance, San Francisco, the city of San Francisco just passed a universal health care ordinance that is basically going to make sure that everybody in the city is covered, and there is a statewide movement in California, and in many other states as well.
JD: I am heartened. I am glad that I am in California! It should be everywhere.
SG: And the other thing that was so remarkable about this as we got into it, was that we heard about a commission that was set up by Congress to hold town meetings around the United States in dozens of cities, Fargo, North Dakota, Memphis, Tennessee, not just the big cities, but all through the heartland and the coasts, and they were basically coming up with the same set of agendas that the political leadership mostly wants to bring to us, like “Are you willing to pay more to maybe get a little more security out of your health care coverage and not get a lot worse?”. And people in all these town halls were saying, “No, that’s not the question. The question is, we are already paying plenty, and we can have universal health care for what we are already paying.”
JD: Yes, yes, yes.
SG: So in town halls all across the United States, people were rebelling when these questions were presented to them. So, remarkably, the American people are way out in front of their so-called leadership, and yet, they don’t know about each other, they just know about….
JD:…their own little effort.
SG: Exactly.
JD: Well, that’s part of what the gift in your magazine is, you are making connections among those voices.
SG: That’s right. And that is where the hope comes in, because if people feel like somehow this world is going crazy, and it’s only me, and my friends, and a few other people that get it, that’s deeply discouraging. But when people find out that it’s happening across the world, that it’s part of this global effort, this global movement for a different kind of a future.
JD: I think people in that way sense that there is something bigger of which they are a part, even if it is only their own little local activity…
SG: That’s right.
JD:…almost like a global consciousness of its own arising, that is more about living healthy, living well, taking care of the planet, the topics that you are covering. Which would be fun to have, to let our viewers know. What kind of themes and topics have you covered?
SG: Oh, a wide variety.
JD: All over the place.
SG: Health care is the one I just mentioned. We’ve done the prisons, an issue on the prison system, and called it Is it Time to Close the Prisons? Because the United States incarcerates two million people…
JD: More than any industrial nation.
SG:…any other country, per capita, way more than China, way more than any other country in the world, and there is absolutely no benefit, no reason for it. So we did one on prisons and what are the alternatives to incarcerating so many people, and so we looked very carefully at the different groups that are in prison, and why, in every case, with the exception of a few people who are pathological, in almost every case, there is a better way, and a less expensive way, and a more humane way, and a way to benefit society, that these people can be worked with in a different way. So the prison system is one. We've done an issue on food and agriculture, on education, on democracy. We did one which is called A Conspiracy of Hope, which is about the grassroots globalization, which is coming up with a different idea of what globalization should mean than the corporate globalization model.
JD: And what’s that other idea? What’s the grassroots saying that globalization is?
SG: That there is tremendous yearning and delight in encountering other cultures…
JD: Yes.
SG:…and so people want that kind of globalization. They have this wonderful sense of growth and inspiration when they encounter another culture being authentic. What’s a mistake is the globalization that tries to homogenize all those other cultures by imposing a Madison Avenue or a Hollywood version or a corporate version on everybody.
JD: Exactly. Our delight when we got a chance to visit Thailand was meeting authentic Thai shops and people and so on, and it was like don’t show me McDonald’s, that doesn’t belong here, Pepsi-Cola, that doesn’t belong here. This is a different culture.
SG: That’s right. There's a political and an economic side of that. The political side is when one small group gets so much power in the world that they impose their will on everyone else, and the economic side is when that power enables them to disproportionately take the resources from those other countries to bring back to the wealthy of that country or of other countries, and actually institutionalizes and creates greater poverty and suffering.
JD: So that is in a way going to be one of the shiny sides of something like peak oil. As that gets more expensive, that's going to be a mixed blessing. You did a whole wonderful issue on oil and natural gas, and in all the articles that you did there, any view, any perspective that you have on how that might affect us?
SG: Certainly it’s changing everything. The fact that oil is now so expensive, the good side of that is already that it is making a lot of the alternatives far more economical. So that’s really a hopeful part and things like the way that wind energy is taking off and to some degree solar energy, and certainly conservation, and there’s just enormous potential there. And one of the most exciting examples of that is, I think, the Apollo project, which is happening both at a national scale but also at a local scale. The Apollo project has been initiated by a number of labor unions in conjunction with big environmental groups, and they’re basically saying that we could do something as ambitious as sending people to the moon. We could set ourselves a goal of being energy-independent through clean energy and conservation in ten years, if we as a nation wanted to come together and say that was our goal.
JD: And that would be a major task. Ten years is a long time. Energy-independent in all forms? Are they saying that? Not just buildings, electricity, home heating, but our vehicles as well? That's an ambitious and exciting vision.
SG: Exactly. It’s very exciting, and it galvanizes people. It is one of those issues that comes out of the political polarization, and galvanizes people who are working people, and they can see that the jobs, the jobs that you would need to do to do this right would be family-wage jobs and they would not be the kind you could export. Because a lot of those jobs are conservation. It means going and retrofitting buildings, and it means putting in insulation, and small-scale energy generation distributed, which is one other benefit is that it is far less prone to sabotage and terrorism. You can’t undo distributed energy.
JD: If every little community has their small wind and solar and whatever they have, or biomass, then, the terrorists, it’s very different than a nice nuclear plant sitting there waiting to happen. Another accident waiting to happen.
SG: Exactly. So the unions love it because it means jobs for their members, secure and long-term, the environmental community of course loves it because it is a serious take on climate change. It's not just sitting back and saying "Oh well, we’re just going to have a very different world and it may not work for our kids." It's not saying that. It’s saying we can take this on seriously. We are by far the largest contributor to climate change in the world, and we can take this on. We don’t have to be in despair about this.
JD: Now what we see is that that is sort of from the grassroots, but that is good. I mean I am pleased that we have the labor unions and the environmental…I mean, we have some good-sized groups involved with that. Still, we don’t have the political will. What do you see happening on that front?
SG: But we do have some national leadership. Our local Representative, Jay Ensley, is among the Congressmen who have been pressing for this. But still, I think the gas and oil industry and the coal industry are still powerful enough that they are preventing it from happening nationally. But the other thing that is happening is that it is being implemented locally. So local groups are saying you don't have to wait for the political shift, which we desperately need, but we don’t have to wait for that. We can start implementing it right now, and that in fact is part of what is creating the political shift.
JD: Of course, because it is basically the leaders leading after we are already doing it, and they can jump on the bandwagon and be the heroes.
SG: So let me just tell you a couple of examples. There are college campuses that are getting their universities to adopt the Apollo goals, and say, OK, our university is going to be implementing the Apollo project. There's cities that are doing this, and so, particularly in cities where there's a lot of poverty, when the cities make a commitment to the Apollo project they are creating jobs locally, and you are bringing together the people who have been social justice activists at the grassroots level and the people who have been the environmental activists, creating jobs, creating a cleaner city, and keeping money local, because all that money that would otherwise be going out to energy corporations is staying local and being spent locally.
JD: So it is a win all the way around.
SG: And when you can implement it locally without waiting, then it can spread like wildfire, and I think that is going to happen. I think it is in the mist. We are beginning to meet with folks in different communities, and the scale may be small, whether it is food security or energy conservation locally, people are taking the initiative, even if it is not part of the Apollo project in name, the same goals are here.
JD: Which is what, grassroots democracy, a return to grassroots democracy?
SG: Democracy is essential, and the wonderful thing about democracy is that it is not just a question about going out to vote, it's a question of people challenging each other to come out with the very best solution they can that works for the whole. It’s not my back yard versus your back yard, it’s what we can do with our entire community, and that’s why, at a grassroots level democracy can be so powerful. And we’re still learning. There are still so many techniques to be learned about how to really draw the community together into the kind of deep dialogue you need to achieve that kind of understanding.
JD: You’re doing some of the volunteer work in your own community, so you’re sort of testing out. Not only are you busy up the wazoo with YES! Magazine, which has got to be a big endeavor. It comes out quarterly?
SG: Quarterly.
JD: And it is a good-sized magazine, let’s show folks here what we’ve got. It’s the Summer issue? And it says, “5000 years of Empire. Ready for a change?” That was David Korten’s work, right?
SG: Yeah, he did the lead article for this issue.
JD: And David is part of, we should go back for a second, the foundation, or is related to the folks of the foundation of the people who are behind YES!?
SG: That’s right. He’s the chair of our board.
JD: OK. So let’s stop for a second. YES! Magazine, what’s the website? How do we find you?
SG: OK, www.yesmagazine.org. And pretty much all the issues we’ve been doing for ten years are available article by article on our website.
JD: That is fabulous.
SG: So we just want to get this material out and so we give it away. We also sell back issues there and subscriptions. There’s also have a teacher program and we specially encourage teachers to use our material and we provide them with support to use our material because, again, young people are coming up feeling hopeless, and we want to show them that yes, the things that they see happening are truly happening in society, and yes, there are still things that they can do about them.
JD: Well, you mentioned how do we take the troubling times we’re in, and how do we use that energy for transformation? And it seems to me that every issue you give us gives examples of people doing that at all kinds of scales. So I would ask you, what do you think are the biggest challenges we've got facing ourselves?
SG: There are challenges all over the place. You could probably talk for three hours about that.
JD: Both the challenges and also what gives you hope. We’ve got to give the good news too.
SG: Well, you’ve mentioned some of them having to do with energy…what the implications of peak oil may be. I think that climate change is a tremendous one, partly because the feedback looks are so large. The things that we are doing today we will feel the impact of years from now. So it is much harder to turn around because it takes so much longer and because oil and coal now, too, of course, are so embedded in our economy, the way we’re functioning now. But, you know people are really smart and really creative and we can figure out the solutions. But we’ve gotten into this mindset of entitlement. George Bush, Sr., was very famous for saying at the Earth Summit in Rio, “The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” Well, it’s got to be.
JD: The planet isn’t going to survive….
SG: That’s right.
JD: …in the way that we would hope it to in the future.
SG: I mean, whether you use the terminology of biology or use the terminology of Gaia, there is this living planet that makes our lives possible. And we are biological creatures, even though we are so industrialized that sometimes we forget it, we still breathe air, we still drink water, and we still eat food that comes from the soil and comes from the sun and the air, and those are realities that we cannot forget about. So if we drain the aquifers that are supplying the irrigation water for our food, we will feel the effects. It doesn’t matter how much industrialization we have.
JD: That’s right, that overlay...I have the image of, it’s like standing in the ocean and the waves come in….we are eroding that base that we are standing on by using up the aquifers and the oceans and that thin, thin, skin of the atmosphere. It is much thinner than we had ever imagined relative to this planet.
SG: So entitlement is irrelevant in that situation. It's sort of like we were on a spaceship that…the spaceship image is somehow easier for people to imagine than the whole planet. Because it seems like the planet is just always abundant, always willing to keep giving us and giving and giving and giving. And still is….like its capacity to give is being undermined by what we are choosing to do. So entitlement is irrelevant, it is almost the cry of a baby that just keeps saying feed me feed me feed me. And we have got to outgrow that. We are far too powerful a presence on the planet. We have now got to steward the planet if we're going to be able to survive.
JD: Your spaceship notion….we stepped across it.
SG: We are on a spaceship, there are limits. And entitlement doesn’t fit, it’s like we’re all here together. And, you know on the…I think, on Planet Earth we kind of assume well, maybe me and my family or my community or my people will do OK at the expense of the other people. But we’re now understanding, I think, that there is no “other”, that we are all in this together, and that if any group of people’s existence is threatened, they don’t sit by and let that happen. The blowback is tremendous. So there is no peace without justice. I know that that’s a bumper sticker saying, but I think it's true. There has to be justice if there's going to be any... and that includes in the sharing of the world's resources.
JD: What you are talking about is the recognition…
SG: Well, it’s the image of the planet from space gave us that….symbol. It’s a closed system here, that spaceship Earth. And everything is connected to everything else. And that, I think, started to let us see that the ripple here affects the other side. Well, that global warming here affects the Katrina, or the tsunami. The interdependencies…
JD: What gives you hope? Why do you keep doing this work?
SG: I mentioned earlier that I have tremendous respect for people’s capacity to be creative, to solve problems, and to understand what’s going on. And again, when you scratch below the surface on so many issues, people know what’s happening. The question is, what they're always asking is, is there anything I can do, is there anything we can do? And the message that the corporate media and so many of our political leaders are giving us is essentially, No, there is nothing you can do. And that’s where negative advertising is so destructive. It's like, oh, the democratic system really doesn't work that well, and oh, you know, the best you can hope for is a tiny little incremental change, but it's really going to get worse. So that's the message that we keep getting, and it's simply not true. We have the capacity to do far better than that. We have to willing to look straight in the eye of what’s getting in the way, and one of the things that’s getting in the way is the concentrated wealth and power that has this embedded interest in continuing this status quo. So we have to be very cognizant of that. I don't want to be naive that we can just make up our minds. But essentially we can make up our minds if we are willing to do that as a large group and to work with each other and to develop the political power that we still have access to as we the people of the United States.
JD: Even in these times of diminished civil rights and so on?
SG: Absolutely. We still have the right to do that. But we have to be able to work together. If we’re all working separately and we’re not understanding one another, then we have a problem. And that is one of the reasons that YES! has taken the approach that we’ve taken. Instead of just focusing, say on the environmental movement, or on one movement, we’ve been saying, you know, in each of these cases these issues are connected. And, in each case, it affects everybody, wherever they happen to be on the political spectrum, their children’s future is at risk. Whatever color they happen to be, whatever nationality, certainly people have different kinds of things that are most uppermost in their minds at any particular time, and we have to address the entire package of what’ll take to have a future that works for everybody, and if we can’t do that, then we won’t be able to muster the political energy to make the change that needs to happen. So we have to be reaching out to people who are not like us and working together on what kind of future we can create.
JD: I am sure that you see it happening because you are documenting it. Where would you, if somebody were listening and hasn’t gotten involved yet, what kind of guidance do you have for them to find where they can just begin in some small way? Do you have any sense?
SG: Yeah, I think that people do the best when they follow their heart. So the thing that they are most connected to that they can care the most passionately about. So it may be some gathering place in their community so there can be a stronger sense of community. It may be calling together two or three friends. You know if you get three or four people in a room, and you care about the same thing, you can make change happen. It doesn't take starting some huge organization on a national scale, and you can do more than write a check to the organization you care about, although that's helpful too. But you can get involved and say this is the kind of a future we want for our community.
JD: And share that vision, and talk about it, and begin to do some things that move in that direction, even though they are small steps.
SG: And sometimes a group will get together and action won’t be the first thing they do. Maybe they need to study together for awhile and maybe they need to share from their own hearts and their own experience for awhile. But once they’ve done that a few times you start seeing where the energy comes together and where the possibilities are that they may not have realized were there. And then you start taking it out, and people start recognizing, OK, here is some leadership happening, here is somebody that has a positive vision, I want to be part of that.
JD: Yes, it starts attracting, there's some energy here, and people say, Yeah, I want to be part of this. So what you’re talking about is, in a way, there are a lot of forms for just entering into this consciousness of we've got change and we can make a difference, to solve what we need to do, whether it’s, and it uses everybody’s skills or talents. Everybody doesn’t have to a political leader kind of leader to do that. I love the notion of having it be empowering all the small, local efforts. From your catbird seat, if you've ever, when you envision the planet, in this sort of last minute here, the way you dream it, what's that like?
SG: Oh, well, it’s hard to do that in a minute! I think that what is most important to me is that the human capacity, that our ability to be really smart and really creative and really caring about one another, if we can tap into that, if you see that sort of coming to the fore, these miracles happen, and people come out just in awe, and if we had more time I would tell you about my own community experience doing that, but people come out transformed, and when we keep being told, No, people are actually pretty greedy, and pretty isolated, people actually come to believe that. So, again, that is one of the things that we're doing in YES! all of the time is showing people taking that kind of initiative and making that difference, bringing their heart and their spirit and their intellect and everything to the fore, and showing how powerful that is.
JD: Thank you, thank you for this conversation, and thank you for what you doing in YES!, and keep it up. You are a gift to all of us.
S: Well, thank you. I enjoyed it.
JD: This is Peak Moment. I am Janaia Donaldson. Join us next time.
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