Matt Adam Williams highlights four inspirational men who are working to save the natural world.
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Mother Nature’s beauty doesn’t stop it from being under threat. Some of the most incredible habitats and wildlife the Earth has to offer are struggling to survive, this includes ancient forests in the southeastern USA, orangutans in Indonesia, polar bears at the poles and the list goes on.
But even at a time of great crisis for nature, the movement to protect and restore the environment may never have been in better health.
We can all draw inspiration from a wave of people across the world who are putting their smart suits, muscle, passion, compassion or scientific obsession on the line to save nature. I’m going to begin by looking at men who, through their spiritual or emotional devotion to the natural world, challenge traditional male stereotypes and have inspired me in my life.
And because the women battling for the environment are forgotten or maligned by the mainstream more often than even these men, I’m already writing a follow-up piece on The Women Saving Mother Nature. Let’s jump in:
1. Van Jones
As one of the leading voices on the issues of social and environmental justice in the US, Jones is a figure it’s hard to ignore and who has occasionally attracted controversy. He went to Yale to study law and even during his student days became involved in activism.
Jones’s campaigning ranged, over the years, from early work on police abuse to issues of race through to environmentalism and the ‘green economy’.
He recently worked as President Obama’s ‘green jobs’ adviser, looking at how to create employment that could benefit the environment and also support an economic recovery. However, Jones was forced to step down from his White House role after what he termed a vicious smear campaign against him, led in part by TV personality Glenn Beck.
He now leads Rebuild the Dream, a platform looking to promote a socially and environmentally just economic recovery. He also set up Green for All, an NGO whose work focuses on creating ‘green-collar jobs’ which benefit the environment and help lift people out of poverty.
Van calls for an environmental revolution that is inclusive and equitable. Rather than middle-class eco-chic, he argues that we need a tide of change that ‘lifts all boats’. Government investment in renewable energy technologies and efficiency of homes and offices could build the low-carbon economy the US needs and also create thousands of high and low-road green jobs in the process.
In his book, The Green Collar Economy, he writes that:
“The public image of the environmentalist is all about eating organic food, driving a Prius, and buying solar panels. And that’s incredibly narrow and alienating. In the South Bronx and other poor neighborhoods, people don’t have a sense of belonging to the environmentalist identity. It makes low-income communities of color say, “We can’t do it, we can’t afford it, it’s something that we can never aspire to – nor do we necessarily want to.”
And that just won’t work. Sustainable and green alternatives will really only take off as we reach economies of scale. And to do that, we need everyone’s participation.
“To have everyone participating and benefiting equally – that’s the alternative to eco-apartheid. That’s what we call eco-equity: equal protection and equal opportunity in an economy that respects the Earth.”
He’s a regular panel member on CNN’s Crossfire.
He says the framework that guides him is the advice of his father that the best way to be smart is to take complicated things and make them simple, in order to empower other people.
2. Bill McKibben
350, perhaps the world’s leading climate change organisation, has been at the forefront of a fresh injection of energy into the international climate movement. The organisation’s name comes from the safe level (number of parts per million) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in order to have a stable climate. The actual atmospheric level currently stands at around 400 parts per million, so we need to take this down, not higher.
And McKibben, a writer and environmentalist, is the figurehead and driving force behind 350. His uncompromising determination and his charming manner in front of crowds make him a poster boy for the global climate change movement. He was recently arrested in the name of fighting for environmental justice, most recently when protesting outside the White House against the Keystone XL pipeline.
A 2012 article in Rolling Stone magazine, remarkably popular compared to some of their more usual content, was seen as a landmark declaration of intent against the fossil fuel industry. Entitled ‘Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math’, it examined the scary new numbers showing that fossil fuel companies can only burn one fifth of the fossil fuel reserves on their books without taking us past ‘safe’ environmental limits – even this would have huge consequences. This amounts to a massive financial bubble that either has to burst or break the planet.
McKibben is reluctant to take on the mantle of a Leader of the climate movement, saying that we need many leaders. His humility here is, again, an inspiration. But many see him as such an important figure that Leadership may already have been thrust upon him.
McKibben told me that:
“Men have too often proved themselves in combat with the natural world – but we look to the great example of forest rangers, wildfire firefighters and others (sometimes men, sometimes women) who show what muscle and grit can do to protect our most beautiful places.”
350 is now supporting the Fossil Free campaign that’s inspired by the anti-apartheid movement – it’s calling on institutions like churches and universities to withdraw their investment from fossil fuel companies. It has spread from the US to Canada and the UK, where students are challenging their institutions to clean up their act. McKibben’s work continues to inspire hundreds of people around the world, all of whom want to protect nature.
3. Satish Kumar
Kumar spent the early part of his career as a Jain Buddhist monk and followed this up with an 8000 mile on-foot pilgrimage from India to the US. This pilgrimage was a protest against nuclear proliferation. His journey has led him to Devon, UK where he finds comfort and inspiration in the natural world, as editor of Resurgence magazine, looking at our human connection to nature. At the age of 50 he completed a 2000 mile pilgrimage to the UK’s holy places.
Kumar believes that we need trinity of soil, soul and society that recognises that, without healing our relationship to nature, we can’t heal our relationships to ourselves or each other. He puts equal emphasis on all three of these elements, but brings by far the most spiritual angle to our relationship with Mother Nature out of the men profiled here.
He told me that:
“Men like me can easily get driven into a busy life to satisfy our ego and desire for success. In order to modify our masculine drive, I find that going into nature is the best way to be calm and connected. Walking in nature helps us to break off from our frantic and busy life and see how nature can blossom and have fruition through stillness and silence. No wonder that nature has been associated with the feminine, we call her mother nature. When men are in nature they are in beautiful company – a best way to feel love and harmony.”
4. Mark Avery
Dr Mark Avery is one of the leading conservation figures in the UK. He worked for 25 years as Conservation Director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the largest conservation organisation in Western Europe with a membership that stands at over 1 million.
Avery now spends his time as the UK’s leading conservation blogger and as an environmental consultant, taking an informed and often wry look at conservation issues, combining this with thoughtful reflections on special moments in nature. What’s most inspiring about Mark (whom I’m lucky to personally know) is that he understands and believes that nature conservation should be at the top of the political agenda in the UK.
Reading a book that might be termed his memoir, Fighting for Birds, you get a strong sense of the meticulous and passionate scientist he is–from being part of a school’s natural history club in his childhood, to his early research career in southern France. Over that time he learned to ply the trade of lobbying and advocacy, spending many years working to charm, persuade and harangue politicians, farmers and business people.
Of his feelings about nature and how these relate to his masculinity, Mark told me:
“I think I am quite mixed up about this. I am now, in my mid-50s, completely happy to say that I love nature, but I wouldn’t have said that 20 years ago (although it’s always been true). I’m now confident enough about myself, my achievements and failures and my strengths and weaknesses to say what I think and in the way I want to say it. That comes with age. I would always have been able to say that nature, particularly birds, were interesting and important to me but to take the next step and use more emotional language took more time. I am a scientist by training, and still think like one a lot of the time, and that, as well as being male, has made me dismiss or suppress more emotional language about nature.”
His scientific, pragmatic and cool-headed approach has led the RSPB to some landmark achievements. It spearheaded a campaign for legislation to turn parts of the UK’s oceans into nature reserves (although the fight continues). And there were some huge land acquisitions and new nature reserves during his time. The organisation also established Hope Farm, a commercial operation showing that it’s possible to turn a profit from the British countryside while increasing numbers of farmland birds – critical given their drastic declines in the outside world.
He’s a vocal advocate on illegal persecution of birds of prey as well as a range of other topics, and Mark now acts as a mentor as part of the A Focus on Nature project, passing on his knowledge and expertise to a younger generation.
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–Photos: Feature/Frederic Jon/Flickr, Van Jones/AP, Bill McKibben/AP, Satish Kumar/TEDx, Mark Avery/TN
Some years ago there were lots of magazine articles in Germany whose tites were all variations of “Climate change is masculine“. Some essay to that effect even made it into official school reading curriculums. The cited reasons (if I remember correctly) included the use of bigger cars and higher meat consumtion.
So who is claiming women are forgotten or maligned as saviours of the planet? They get that role by default.
Same with the economy, incidentally.