An Interview with David Orr by Chris Roth
For more than a decade, I have had the privilege of knowing David Orr, Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and author of the books Ecological Literacy, Earth in Mind, The Nature of Design, and The Last Refuge. The visionary force behind Oberlin's state-of-the-art ecologically-designed Environmental Studies Center (see "A Building Like a Tree,"TL 11.1), David is also a widely traveled speaker at conferences, and an influential contributor to such journals as Orion and Conservation Biology. He has been a leader in the reinvention of environmental education, advocating the incorporation of ecological consciousness into all areas of the curriculum and into all aspects of education itself, including the physical settings in which students learn. Increasingly in recent years, his interests have turned toward politics; The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror (reviewed in TL 14.3) is a treatise on the inseparability of ecology and politics, and a call to action to reclaim both from the hands of those with little apparent respect for either. Every winter, on my visit to my parents' home just a few blocks away from David and Elaine Orr's in Oberlin, our families get together for a meal and visit. This past winter, I also arranged a separate interview, which took place in David's family room late on the afternoon of January 4, 2005.
Per David's choice, we talked mostly about politics. I started by asking him to reflect on the role of the political and religious right in present-day American politics, and how the rest of us might appropriately respond.
DO: Let me run the clock back to 1980, when the Carter administration left office. It had published a document called the Global 2000 Report, which got a lot of attention but which also coincided with a right wing counterattack led by Julian Simon. Had the United States acted on that report, and other documents and studies available at the time, we would not have been nearly as vulnerable to terrorism and disruption from malfeasance or acts of God as we were on 9/11.
I think we've lost sight of this point--that the environmentalists all along have been right. Our batting average on the big issues of the time is extremely good. If we had followed those recommendations, the United States would be much more secure today. Our recent behavior in the world would have been much more just and much less erratic, had it not been driven by the need to guard our lines of supply in the Middle East.
What has happened over the last several decades in this country has been something of a coup d'etat. In the early 1970s, Louis Powell, who was a Richmond attorney appointed as Supreme Court Justice by Richard Nixon, wrote a memo which argued that corporations had to counter left-wing views about the war and society and civil rights and consumerism and other movements of the '60s and '70s. This memo became the main strategy document of the right-wing counterattack. The estimates are that right wing foundations put together about $3 billion to create a network of organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute and Rush Limbaugh's radio network of 600 stations. It took them thirty years to finally pull it off, and they did it successively, but at the end of thirty years we can look back and say that they've been hugely successful in their counterattack, that they've taken over the country.
You asked about the religious right. The religious right is a bit of a mystery to me because I have a hard time understanding what they believe relative to what I believe. The importance that the right wing churches have given to the Book of Revelation as compared to, say, the Sermon on the Mount, is instructive. The Book of Revelation is all full of verses about rapture and violence. Tim LeHay made a lot of money and gained a lot of notoriety for his twelve-volume series of books on the Rapture. There's actually a website, rapture.org, where you can go to and see how close we are to the event itself.
One of the curious things here is that the right-wing Christians and conservation biologists are in agreement that things are bad. Where conservation biologists look at climate data and believe that to be a sign of the unraveling of things, and therefore bad, Christian fundamentalists look at it and say, "Yeah, well that's cool, Jesus is about to come back." It's possible to read the data of dismemberment and decline and see radically different things in it.
But their power in society is largely derivative of the corporate takeover, and I think, frankly, that right-wing Christians are being shamelessly used. The right-wing corporate world that Dick Cheney represents will tell them, "Yeah, you want us to ban abortion, sure, we'll do that; and you want us to ban flag-burning, yeah, we'll do that; you want prayer in schools, sure, we can do that; whatever you want, but just vote for us." And then of course what they get are tax cuts for the wealthy, endless wars in the Middle East, and the corporate takeover of the entire planet. So I think that they're being used and not able to see that their confederates are some of the sleaziest political forces ever in American history.
I said in an article that will be in the paperback edition of The Last Refuge that this is James Madison's nightmare: it's the takeover of power by a single faction, which Madison warned against in his Federalist Paper #10. It's worse than he thought, because now that same faction controls the press, the intelligence agencies, and a good bit more. And it is a complete and total takeover. Whether this society can be brought back to some kind of Constitutional balance or not remains to be seen. It is clear that Madison's fears have finally, after 215 years, come to pass.
CR: How did the right wing manage to co-opt the ideas of populism and conservatism, and claim the moral high ground, while in reality their policies are totally the opposite of these things?
DO: Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter with Kansas? is an attempt to answer that. In that book he argues that if the Democratic Party or any other party does not represent the interests of poor people and working people, then all you have are kind of surrogate Republicans. Given the choice of "lite" Republicans or full-strength Republicans, people are going to vote for true Republicans. They'll find these wedge issues, and they'll vote single issues, unless Democrats give them real bread-and-butter issues.
I'm not as convinced about that view. It's a wonderful book and it's got a compelling viewpoint in some ways, but I think there's something else at work. In the late '80s there was a change in the rules of the Federal Communications Commission which permitted television or radio stations to hold a license to the public airwaves without having to meet tests for "fair and balanced" presentation of issues, to coin a phrase. And that ruling, by Ronald Reagan's FCC, was upheld in a two-to-one appellate court case in which the two votes for it were Anton Scalia and Robert Bork, right-wing judges of some note. Add to that the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed media conglomerates to own multiple radio and television stations and newspapers in the same media market, and you begin to see the outlines of a takeover of US media that is really quite chilling.
You look at the dials now, there is no liberal media left. The New York Times certainly can't describe itself as a liberal document. You've got some fringe publications, The Nation magazine, American Prospect, The Progressive, and a few others, but they have nowhere near the power that the right wing now exercises with Rush Limbaugh, who talks every day to twenty million Americans, and Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly, and MSNBC, and Scarborough and all these right-wingers. No one ever fact-checks them, they're free to say whatever they want, and they confuse the public because their opinions become "news."
So in addition to Tom Franks' argument--that the Democratic Party has become a lukewarm party relative to the interests of most Americans, which I think it has--there's also the problem that people just don't know much. After the election, the Bush voters apparently believed in large numbers, seventy-some percent, that Saddam Hussein was involved with Osama Bin-Laden in the planning of 9/11. Even though the president had admitted that there was no connection, to keep the fig leaf in place covering US policy in Iraq, right-wing media had continued in all kinds of ways to propagate the idea that there was a connection. If you studied, if you read much at all, you knew that there was no connection, and that it simply was implausible.
But Americans have become badly misinformed, and the reasons have to do with the takeover of US media by corporate interests. When Ben Bagdikian wrote his book Media Monopoly back in 1980, there were still fifty or fifty-one major media outlets. We're now down to six. If the internet steps in as a major countervailing information source, then maybe it will be ok, but eighty percent of Americans say they get their news from television, and television is badly corrupted, either cowed or bought. If you listen to Fox News, it's nothing more than a mouthpiece for the extreme right wing of the Republican Party. So I'm inclined to think, yeah, the Democrats have failed the spine test, by not having one, and the media takeover means that most Americans then are to one degree or another badly informed or misinformed.
CR: How did the Democrats come so close to winning?
DO: I think there are a lot of people out there like you and me, and I'm not entirely convinced that the Democrats lost. I think the Bush administration has played hardball. They don't rely on democracy; these people are not into democracy. I think if we could know the whole story, we'd find that the vote was manipulated. Whether it was enough to turn the election... In Ohio, the vote difference between Bush and Kerry was 118,000 votes. Was there 118,000 votes worth of chicanery? Probably. In Florida I think the same thing. Everywhere there were aberrations, huge discrepancies in the results, they always fell to the Republican side, and the odds of that happening... somebody at the University of Pennsylvania put that at one in 250 million. Is there chicanery here? Yeah, I think there was. Could you say that it was a national conspiracy? Well, it could be party zealots in a particular precinct, it could have come out of Ken Blackwell's office here in Ohio, the Secretary of State, I don't know. All I know is it's not likely to get investigated because the Republicans control everything there is to control.
This is Madison's nightmare, and so if there's malfeasance... In Florida in 2000 Tom DeLay's staff people and Trent Lott's staff people acted as thugs to stop the recounting of ballots in Miami-Dade County. The press didn't find that interesting at all. I think the level of intimidation ought to be of concern to everybody concerned about democracy, because we've become something that we weren't. It's happened progressively, but the election or the "selection" of 2000 was a turning point in this country.
And it takes you to 9/11, and then there are lots of questions about 9/11. It's time for people to begin to ask hard questions, and to press elected officials to answer those questions. But you asked how did we come so close? Assuming it was close and not a victory that was perverted... Apparently 57, 58 million Americans understand what has been going on, and don't much like it, and least a large fraction of the 59 million that reportedly voted for Bush and Cheney voted out of misinformation. They didn't know what they were getting, and this administration has been absolutely expert in confusing the public, with the Clear Skies Initiative, and Healthy Forests, and all these wonderful-sounding phrases concealing policies exactly the opposite.
CR: Do you think that those people are likely to start questioning, the more they find out?
DO: I think it's a test right now: how many body bags have to come back from Iraq, how much turmoil has to happen, how bad does the US economy have to get, how low does the dollar have to fall? And I think the bad news for the country at this point is that the election of Bush and Cheney, legitimate or otherwise, has set us on a course for disaster. The question is how that's going to be played out. I don't think there's a thing that can be done to stop it now. I think we're at the point that within a year or two we'll see massive civil disobedience, we'll see the deployment of secret police and democratic intimidation the likes of which we've never seen before. They do control the power; this is Madison's nightmare. And it's our unfortunate fate to live through it. It's also an opportunity for real citizens and patriots...
This will be the second American revolution, to see if it's possible to take America back from corporations, the very agents that Jefferson, and Lincoln, and every Democrat until recent times feared, and for reasons that they only dimly understood. But this is the second American Revolution. Instead of King George we now have a different King George and he is the representative of corporate America.
CR: Where would you suggest people put their energies: into reinvigorating the Democratic Party, or starting an entirely new approach?
DO: I don't know. If you look at the things that were successful...MoveOn.org in a matter of a couple of years has become hugely successful, and it mobilized millions of people and millions of dollars. That's one place. ACT turned out to be pretty potent also, and there are websites--Common Dreams.org, and Truthout.org, and lots of others--that are helping to balance the lies and distortions of a right-wing and mendacious media.
But I don't have any suggestions as to where people ought to put their energies. If people are inclined to work within the Democratic Party, fine; let's take the Democratic Party back. I think the theory that the Democratic Party ought to move even further to the right is a form of insanity at this point. You might as well join the Republican Party and throw in the towel. But there are a lot of heroes out there. Paul Krugman has become one of my heroes. He's one of the few people who from the very beginning of the Bush administration was telling the truth about what it was doing, and there are people like Molly Ivins, and there'll be lots more.
I think we're going to see a massive unraveling of the Republican administration. It is fragile beyond belief. They're going to have their day and their celebration, they're going to spend their forty million dollars to party and whoop it up, but they're going to run into unsolvable problems of their own making. Climate change isn't going to go away for them, and the trouble is it's going to be a catastrophe for everybody. But as people begin to realize it, then I think it's possible to change it. The Iraqi war...and the idea that the United States can dominate the world is a crock of BS that is almost inconceivably stupid. You'd have to go back a long way to find smart people doing dumber things. The US economy is very fragile; it depends now on the lifeline of support being thrown up by people willing to buy US paper, and as US debt grows and the dollar declines, that is going to diminish. I think that the Republicans are going to crash it though, and the question is what's left to pick up. You can't run the world on lies, distortions, violence, control, domination...that's completely nonsense. That might have worked for a time in the previous century or the century before, but not the twenty-first century.
CR: Here's a question I'd written down, and this seems as good a time as any to ask it: Are we simply a civilization and possibly a species in decline, who have overexploited our resources and sealed our own doom? Are the apocalyptic directions of world governments simply a manifestation of our species' own self-destructive nature?
DO: (Laughter.) Yes. (More laughter.) You can't run the film fast-forward on the present story line and come out with a happy ending, and yet on the other hand let me be an optimist for a moment. The environmental movement is now a global movement. In the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunamis there is this outpouring of support and sympathy and money and so forth. We find out--again nature reminds us--that we're a pretty fragile little enterprise. And if a tsunami had hit, let's say, New York City or Washington, the East Coast of the United States, the devastation would have been even greater. We're all vulnerable.
Before the Iraqi war started, 650 million people reportedly protested in various cities around the world. You couldn't imagine that thirty or forty years ago. Something like an ecological enlightenment is happening, and the evidence is all around, it's in thousands of organizations--yours, and hundreds of others on the West Coast and all over the world totaling millions of people involved. But whatever name you put on them--cultural creatives, progressives, whatever--there are a lot of people who know the score.
I also have to believe that the support for the Republican Right and the corporate world is diminishing pretty rapidly. You can't run the world like that. And even in the corporate world, it's dawning on lots of people that we are at the end of the fossil fuel era and we have to make a pretty rapid transition to something else: renewable energies in various forms. That's coming clearer to lots of people.
So if the human experiment is about to go belly-up, and you and I really believed that, we wouldn't be sitting here talking, we'd be down at the Feve [an Oberlin coffeehouse/bar] on our fifth bottle of wine by now. In our bones, I don't think we believe that it's the end time. I'm not ready to give up.
Is it technically necessary that we can't provide energy, food, shelter, employment, and so forth, for people? No. We know too much; the technologies are there to do it. It's the political will that's lacking. But we on the progressive side, at least in this country, have been nowhere near as ruthless, well-organized, or well-funded as a much smaller right-wing group that has taken the big megaphone. They control the media, they now control this country in virtually all respects, and they are a ruthless bunch. I think we would be fools to underestimate them. They've demonstrated what they'll do. But time will not be kind to them. They can't pull this off, because they're swimming upstream, or they're working against the laws of historical gravity, or whatever metaphor you want to use, but they can't pull it off. They can make a mess for a while, maybe for a long time, but they can't win in the end.
CR: So is there a place for people on this side to be equally ruthless?
DO: I don't like the word ruthless as a strategy. I think single-minded and dedicated is a better one.
But it is a problem that if you take Christianity seriously, and the whole idea of "turn the other cheek," and "blessed are the peacemakers," and so forth, it does cripple you. And of course one of the paradoxes of the Christian Right--there's James Dobson and all these people out there on the Christian Right--is that they are pretty darn ruthless, and they use the Scripture very selectively. I mean, they're going to be damn lucky if Jesus doesn't come back, because it would be a rude awakening for them. This isn't what he had in mind. You don't have to be too adept with the Scripture or well-read to realize that this is anything but Christianity playing itself out.
But no, I don't think we need to be "ruthless." I think that we have to be more truthful, more dedicated, smarter, better strategists, have a bigger picture, a better story, and work as hard or harder. And I don't think that adds up to the word ruthless, which implies a kind of willingness to run over whatever gets in your way, including the truth.
Bill Moyers has said this over and over again: one of the problems right now with the right wing is that they will just lie, lie, lie, lie...it doesn't make any difference; they will say whatever. And this is Karl Rove's strategy, and as long as people are too ill-informed to understand they're being lied to, it works. But it's like a balloon of hot air: all it takes is one pinprick, and it all comes undone.
But getting back to your point about the election, I think people were starting to sense that they were being lied to. The body bags come back, and there were no weapons of mass destruction, and we were told that the Iraqis were going to greet us as heroes out there, and nothing that the administration predicted has come about, and so now it's a race between circumstances and people waking up.
CR: In the presidential debates, Kerry made the point a few times that Bush was presenting things in black and white, focusing on being "decisive" and operating by the principle that "you've just got to stick to one position, and then people will trust that." Kerry was saying, on the other hand, that it's not always clear-cut, and sometimes people make mistakes, and admit it, and change their approach. But it seemed as if that didn't appeal to quite enough people to make a difference. It seems that people want something more black and white.
DO: I have a lot of respect for John Kerry. He's a very good man. He would have made a good president, but oftentimes in the history of Presidents, people who were really good presidents were bad communicators. Thomas Jefferson was a disaster as a speaker. Abraham Lincoln never would have lasted on television. Roosevelt wouldn't have made it on television--he was a cripple. Some of our greatest presidents had all kinds of liabilities that would disqualify them now. But with Kerry, I wish that Kerry hadn't voted for the Iraq war. And then when asked, "Would you do it again?," the right response was to say, "No, I voted for it once, based on a lie. I trusted the president, and the president didn't tell us the truth. I wouldn't do it again." You go from being called a flip-flopper to saying "he's a liar." Simple thing. But the media picked that up. On the Swift Boat guys, these nutcases that went after Kerry's war record, Kerry's right response was to get his crew behind him, go right before the camera within twenty-four hours of the first ad, look the camera right smack in the eye, and say, "Look, you can believe whatever you want to believe about what I did in Vietnam, but the record shows I was in the line of fire and I got hit. Where was George?" Get "Where was George?" out immediately. It's not rocket science. On so many of these things, Kerry's right response was a very direct and angry response. Make it simple, keep it straight, look right straight into the camera, and be done with it. And he didn't do that.
In the Vice presidential debate, the last question Gwen Iffel asked was "Why do you suppose the country's so divided, and so angry about things?" Dick Cheney said, "Well, I don't know why it is." John Edwards missed an opportunity; he should have turned to the Vice President and said, "You don't understand? Well, I'll tell you why the country's so divided. You govern only half of the country. You govern for your base, and more specifically, for the wealthy people that pay your bills." And then give specifics: environment, war, lies, and so forth and so on. "I'll tell you, Mr. Vice President, let me help you with this, let me coach you a little bit." And they didn't do it. They had the facts, the logic, and the data all on their side. They had a bona-fide war hero. They allowed the right wing to do what they had done in Georgia with Max Cleland, a triple amputee. But this other side is utterly ruthless and absolutely without shame. If it requires bringing down a legitimate war hero, they'll do it. If you show courage on a battlefield, well that's cool, but if you show moral courage after the battlefield, no, that's bad, you can't question anything.
And Kerry wasn't clear enough about it. He kept talking about, "I'm going to fight for you in the middle class." Well, that's cool, but it didn't get anybody's blood going. There were some very direct responses I think he should have made and put the burden back on George. I mean the real question was not whether Kerry was a hero or not, it was "Where the hell was George? Why won't he tell us?" They do not tell us. It's all this fabric of Bush lies and distortions and the result is that we have a fourth-rate, but very single-minded, ideologically-driven person as president, who has neither the intellectual grasp or the personal wherewithal...
Also, the thing about the housewives that voted for Bush because they thought that their kids would be much more secure with him in the White House...the right response there was to say, "Look, who was on duty on August 6 when the clearest warning that's likely ever to be given to a president was given in a memo, and where was George? He was on his thirty-seventh day of vacation, down chainsawing his brush in Crawford, Texas. Well, hell, we can hire somebody to go chainsaw his brush, we need somebody on duty in Washington that happens to read those memos and those warnings and can act on them." But they didn't do that. This administration--assuming the best about them--were a bunch of Keystone Cops--and then they came out with their bull-in-the-china-shop foreign policy, and got the whole world upset with the United States, and for good reason. It will take us years, decades, to restore, if we ever can, what they screwed up.
Say it, in as many words, just say it--and they didn't do it. But you knew they wanted to. They didn't believe that the American people wanted straight talk. But if you look at the campaigns that worked around the country, Democratic populists running in Republican areas who won, every one of them was a straight talker. What we need is a kind of Harry Truman strategy. You know, "Who the hell are you clowns running this country? And look what you've done, you screwed up, you got a warning on August 6, you had warnings from the Germans, French, Russians, the Israelis, the British, you didn't act on them. Three thousand Americans died as a result. You want to claim the right to run the country on the grounds of competence? You've got to be kidding." And you know John Kerry knew that.
CR: I read or heard somewhere that there is a reason that very few Senators have actually succeeded in being elected president. The nature of being in the Senate for that many years means that you're constantly compromising and constantly not speaking the truth, just as a survival mechanism.
DO: Well, I think it's called politics. And Republicans have spent forty years denigrating politics and government. And these clowns come out here from governors' offices--clowns is too strong a word--but these folks come out of the background of being governors, where they're more like CEOs. George Bush has this command style--he's used to giving orders, and people see that. And the trouble is, a Senator voting on legislation is going to compromise, is going to vote for things and against things. You get a bill that has a rider that you don't like, so you vote against a bill you otherwise would have voted for, and then eventually in a political campaign, somebody says, "Well, look, you voted against such-and-such," and so it's hard to then go back and explain everything about your record. The minute you try to do that, you're dead meat; you can't do it. Even somebody who's been governor for a long time...Bush's record as a governor for six years was pathetic. Of all modern governors, he executed more people than anybody, and often on grounds that we now know should have been questioned.
But again, without an active press, you don't know these things. The internet is kind of a wild card in this, as are Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, because they talk to millions of people every day and they go out and they can lie through their teeth as they do routinely, and there's no fact-check. Nobody comes along behind Rush Limbaugh and says, "Well, OK, no, look, let's check what he said: here, well that's wrong, and this is wrong, and this is wrong, and this is completely off the planet"--nobody does that.
CR: There were a couple contenders in the Democratic primaries--Dean was the most well-known, Kucinich--who were more straight-talkers, and who didn't win the primaries. In retrospect I'm wondering if a lot of Democrats are thinking, we should have gone with someone who was more that way...
DO: Well, I don't know. I liked all the Democratic candidates; I was proud of the Democratic Party. You listen to those debates, and they were good debates, they were good people, they were asking good questions. And I don't know what you do to win. I don't think Dean would have done any better than John Kerry. He could have done worse.
The Republican Party isn't the party that it was under, say, Dwight Eisenhower, or even the party that it was under Ronald Reagan. It has cannibalized its moderates. So now it's a group of extreme right-wingers who are extremely disciplined. The campaign is run by Karl Rove, who is extremely ruthless. When Rove says he'll do whatever it takes, take him at his word, he will do whatever it takes, including dirty tricks, voter fraud, and whatever. We know that collectively, they will use their friends in the Supreme Court to get things done. And I think the country needs to face the fact that we've turned our governance and the conduct of our public business over to a group of fanatics. They have an agenda, and it isn't just abortion stuff. I mean, all that I think is being used.
These are people determined to take over, to loot the country as much as they can. And tax cuts for the wealthy, corporate tax breaks, Halliburton's no-bid contracts, war in the Middle East where it just so happens the oil is...and we're asked to believe that this is a fight for freedom? Give me a break. How dumb can we be? We've been dumbed down. Television is part of this, and the takeover of the media is part of it. Anybody who talks about issues seriously gets hammered--anybody who admits, "My God, the world is complex, well, fancy that..." I wish George had known that before he bumbled himself into Iraq. At least thirteen- or fourteen-hundred young Americans that have come back in what the Pentagon now calls transfer tubes would have had adequate reason to wish that George had known more than he knew--George and his neocon advisers who obviously blew it. They didn't know what they were getting into, and whether Dean could have surmounted all that, I don't know. I'm giving you really incoherent answers; I've gone back into my little zone of anger about the election. (Laughter.)
I have never been as angry about anything as I find I'm angry about this...I mean, it's something that I find everybody I talk to is angry about. And anger morphs over into depression and I don't know what that's going to morph into.
But the starting point is to get the name of the disease right, and this is a coup d'etat. We don't know where it's going to end. We don't know what they're going to do this time around. They've now had this quote "mandate" that they believe that they've got. But George Bush governed the first time around like he had a ten million vote mandate. It didn't make a bit of difference that he had in fact lost an election. He governed like he had been anointed by God himself, or herself, as king...
CR: Well, that's what he believed.
DO: And that is genuinely scary...that we now have the union of political power and religious zealotry. There is no good example historically where those things have been joined. It doesn't work out well. It leads to a kind of fanaticism, a stupid kind of fanaticism...
And on that note, David and I realized that my mother was waiting for us to come to dinner. Our mealtime conversation was considerably lighter and genuinely optimistic in tone, focusing on the youngest members of our respective families...who are both perhaps our best reasons to care about the future, and also our best hopes for that future. In the days which followed, David wrote an essay, "The Imminent Demise of the Republican Party," which became the most-forwarded article on the Common Dreams website for three successive weeks. More recently, he wrote a follow-up Part II on the same topic. Obviously, David's anger has morphed into something productive, resonating with many of us who have not given up hope for a better future. Find those essays at www.commondreams.org.
(c)2005 Talking Leaves
Spring 2005
Volume 15, Number 1
Family Values