Adopting Technology Interview with Denis Hayes

Find additional tools and tips for greening your nonprofit through TechSoup's GreenTech Initiative, where social benefit organizations can share and learn more about technology choices that can help to reduce our overall impact on the environment.

In April 2000, environmentalists in 181 countries came together under the Earth Day banner. The first Earth Day, in 1970 was celebrated in just two nations, the United States and Canada. Denis Hayes, National Coordinator of the first Earth Day and Chair of the most recent one, argues that the power of technology, specifically the Internet, made it possible. To get a deeper appreciation of the positive contribution that technology has made to the environmental movement, we spoke with Hayes by phone in mid-September.

As one of Time Magazines "Heroes of the Planet," Hayes has evolved from a student leader to one of the elders of environmentalism. His career as an activist, scholar, lobbyist, government innovator, attorney, and philanthropist has spanned four decades. From his current position as Chair of the Earth Day Network and President of the Bullitt Foundation based in Seattle, Denis spoke of the powerful role technology has played in improving the efficiency of environmental organizations. He discusses the key technology being used by activists to protect our earth and identifies some of the challenges that lie ahead. The conversation includes a discussion about how the Internet is contributing to greater awareness of global inter- dependency as well as details the positive and negative impact technology can have on our planet's environment. In addition to discussing his own technology use, Denis concludes the interview with advice for environmental groups on how they can best take advantage of the technological revolution.

Rob Stuart:

As the organizer of Earth Day 1970, 1990 and 2000, you have been a leader in the citizen-based environmental movement. Based on your experience, where does this movement stand today in relation to its use of advanced information and communication technology?

Dennis Hayes:

As you know, Rob, the environmental movement, like most movements, is always shy of cash. So, to the extent that technology can multiply our productivity, the movement has embraced it with enthusiasm. Consider the grantees of the Bullit Foundation. Ten years ago, just three of our 180 grantees had e-mail addresses; none had Web sites. Today, all of them use email as their principal mode of communication, and 99 percent of them maintain a Web site. Today, most of them carry cell phones; ten years ago, none of them did. Today, a growing number have pocket organizers; ten years ago, maybe one of them had a Newton. Most of the time today when people come in to make a presentation, they bring a PowerPoint presentation and a laptop: and it works!

RS:

It's been more than 30 years since the first Earth Day. How did you use technology while organizing in 1970 as compared to how you used it in 1990 and last year organizing Earth Day 2000?

DH:

In 1970, our great technological leap was to buy a few electric typewriters, instead of all manual typewriters. We used carbon paper sets because we couldn't afford a photocopy machine. When we wanted to communicate with our mailing list, which got to be close to 60,000 people, we used a mechanical Addressograph machine. By the way, all those names and addresses were typed out on to little metal plates by a guy who is now a United States Senator, Kent Conrad. We mechanically fed envelopes through a machine that fed a tray of metal plates that addressed them. In 1990, we composed our letters on the first generation of Macintosh computers, which we received as a gift from Apple. Our mailing lists were kept in a mainframe machine on tapes off-site. We made some moderate use e-mail, although none of us had laptops then. Our international efforts in 1990 consisted almost entirely of snail mail and telephone calls. We'd look for graduate students willing to come to our offices at 3 o'clock in the morning to call the friends and relatives they had in the remote countries to convince them to organize local of Earth Day events. By 2000, a big part of our initiative was to drive traffic to our Web site where people could download materials and connect with organizers in their cities and around the world. Communication was almost entirely based on electronic mail. On April 22nd we cooperated with RealNetworks to Webcast the Washington D.C. Earth Day rally from the Mall. Considering that most of our network coverage was usurped by Attorney General Janet Reno's decision to send in a swat team to snatch Elan Gonzales that morning in Miami, it was fortunate that we had Web based communication to carry the events of the day live. In short, the technological transformation from 1970 to 2000 was awesome: from pounding out letters on a Smith-Corona manual with a carbon set to communicating in real time with people around the world via the Internet.

Marc Osten:

Was their any notable impact? For example, did more people turn out on Earth Day because of the advanced technology use?

DH:

Actually, Marc, that's the most important point I'd like to make. In 1970, Earth Day was almost exclusively held in the United States and parts of Canada. Everything was 'broadcast', rather than 'narrowcast', and we were largely focused on persuading the media to give coverage to the events. The issues in 1970 were geographically circumscribed: protesting air pollution in Los Angeles, fighting a freeway in Washington, D.C. , stopping a toxic waste dump from polluting groundwater or a power plant blowing out noxious fumes. So we had thousands of organizations focused on something that was ruining their neighborhood or community, and only tied loosely together with a broad set of values that had to do with building a diverse, healthy, sustainable, planet.

MO:

So what happened? What changed?

DH:

By 2000, we had built Earth Day into a global phenomenon, with a huge emphasis on international issues. 181 nations participated, including the first ever national grassroots environmental campaign in China. More than a thousand groups took part in the Philippines alone. The dominant theme linking Earth Day 2000 together was global interdependency, with a special focus on climate change. Technology made it possible for groups around the globe to think of themselves as a global community. People in South Africa, who were protesting a polluting petroleum refinery, could find common cause with people in Nigeria, who were protesting a polluting oil field, who could find common cause with activists in Los Angeles, who were protesting the air pollution that was coming out of these refined petroleum products. It was all knit together in a way that would have been impossible if you had tried to do it with correspondence mailed in 1970.

RS:

Denis, can you give us a couple specific examples of how Earth Day uses the Internet?

DH:

We publish a daily news service, Grist Magazine, which is largely targeted to 18-35 year olds. It is written with humor and a feisty attitude that makes it fun to read. Every day, Daily Grist reduced the most important environmental stories from around the world to a single, trenchant paragraph, with hot links to the newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals where the stories originated. Grist also maintains an award-winning Web 'zine of environmental opinion, which ranges from a superb weekly Washington DC-based muckracker column to perhaps the best popular coverage of climate science and policy on the Web. It also has weekly diaries of environmental activists from around the world, giving readers insights into how their colleagues spend their waking hours. We maintain free, downloadable Organizers Guides; we sell a few T-shirts and books; we maintain lists of Earth Day events and organizers around the world. At times, we have hosted moderated global listservs. I'd very much like us to begin posting superb, downloadable educational materials. The The Earth Day site, knits together an enormous network of talented committed people and organizations that share a common set of values. These groups, which can range from large national enterprises to tiny village clubs, typically have no other connection with one another other than that they belong to this network, and every April they unite to address some global issue.

Earth Day Network has engaged in some Internet campaigns to mobilize people to influence members of people in power to ratify international agreements, preserve threatened wilderness areas, ban harmful substances, promote renewable energy sources, or pledge to make their next car a super-efficient hybrid. We've cooperated with Internet campaigns developed by others: more often than not Rob.

RS:

e.g. those to preserve roadless areas or challenge the absurd definition of what organic farm products should be. E-mail and the Web allow for a level of organization and swiftness of response that was simply inconceivable ten years ago.

RS:

We've talked a lot about the Internet, what are some of the other technologies you see environmentalists using with success?

DH:

Geographical Information Systems, or GIS, have had a transformational impact. In the past, we would put these transparent plastic overlays on maps to illustrate what kinds of birds, fish, insects, and mammals live in various parts of forests, for example. Now all that data can be put into sophisticated computer programs, compared with satellite data and digital mapping from airplanes, and arrayed to make clear, powerful presentations. For example, we can overlay proposed roads and pipelines and housing tracts to demonstrate how unrestrained sprawl would affect regional biodiversity. We can pinpoint how contaminated runoff will affect water sources, as people apply fertilizers and pesticides to their suburban lawns. You can change the parameters with a hypothetical urban growth boundary and see how it would affect the results. These displays can be printed on large, beautiful, multicolored, topographical maps. Such visual representations are vastly more understandable and persuasive than the calculations we did on slide rules 30 years ago, telling people "If we keep going the way that we are going, this is what it's going to look like in five years, ten years, forty years."

RS:

Are there other new technologies that you think will have positive impacts in the future? What should folks be aware of?

DH:

It is almost always better for the environment to move electrons and photons than protons and neutrons. To the extent we can use sophisticated communications, e.g. high-speed, high-quality video conferencing, instead of transporting bodies from one place to another, everyone wins. Here's an case in point:

A woman jumped on a plane this morning , went through a two hour security check, flew from Portland to Seattle, climbed into a taxicab, and came to my office. Five minutes before this interview, she left and started to retrace her steps, climbing into a taxicab, going back to the airport, and flying back down to Portland. All for a one hour meeting! This all had a vast impact on global climate, a massive disruption of her day? She is an old friend. We trust one another. This was absolutely a meeting we should have been able to hold as a video conference. There is a huge amount of dark fiber in the world, and it's dirt cheap to send photons to Japan or India. Transmitted sound is getting better; visual displays are improving dramatically. As soon as we solve the "last mile" problem and a few other glitches, I think the next phase of the information revolution will start accelerating.

I'm also a big believer in electronic books. The publishing industry has made astonishingly little progress since Guttenberg. Although publishers can rush out a paperback in two weeks to capitalize on some media frenzy, like a Presidential sex scandal, the norm is closer to eternity. From the time an author submits a final, edited manuscript in digital format until a book appears in a bookstore is typically six to 18 months. With e-books, the same book could be available worldwide that same afternoon. If the generic e-book category becomes the medium of choice for daily newspapers, magazines, newsletters, etc. as well as books, the pressure to log all the world's forests, and destroy the ecosystems they support, will diminish precipitously. A small, lightweight electronic tablet can pack a dozen novels, another dozen non-fiction tomes, a couple months of stacked up magazines. When a vaguely familiar name pops up at the end of a mystery, the reader can instantly search the text backwards to remind herself who the character is. I don't know when all the pieces will come together: but it will arrive as sure as tomorrow's dawn.

RS:

We've talked about some of the positive impacts-what about negative impacts of technology on the environment?

DH:

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Silicon Valley is literally riddled with Superfund sites. Some other technologies are, of course, far worse. When I was in high school, the epitome of high technology was "clean, safe, cheap nuclear power." America's consummate technology company, General ("Progress is our most important product") Electric, turned much of the Hudson River into a PCB -laden toxic sewer. But it there is no such thing as a free lunch, some lunches are clearly less expensive than others

For example, in terms of environmental damage per unit of GDP, it is hard to imagine anything less harmful than software. A bunch of smart people earn money developing and debugging a program. A bunch of other smart people earn money marketing it. The "product" itself is largely congealed intelligence, sent down a wire to a modem. There is no significant difference in the environmental impact between selling one copy or 100 million copies. A lot of energy is needed to manufacture extremely pure silicon fibers, but a trivial amount is needed to send photons around the world on those fibers for the next century.

To go back where I started, even chips are not particularly dirty compared to, say, steel or plastic, and they aren't inherently dirty at all. Today's fabrication facilities don't randomly discharge toxic wastes into the ground water the way yesterday's fabs did. Still, there's a lot of room for improvement: especially in overseas factories. We need to turn them into safe, non-polluting, closed processes. Wastewater should be reused and reused and reused and reused: filtered internally, recovering valuable trace materials: and not just dumped into the groundwater or into a nearby stream. That's why we need government regulation, and stiff penalties for those who poison their neighbors. That's why we need an environmental movement.

MO:

So what should the movement be doing to address environmental impact of technology?

DH:

An environmentally responsible high tech sector should have the same attributes as any other sustainable sector. It should design products for durability: for easy repairs, re-use, and recycling. Prices and regulations should be structured so that once a commodity enters into the stream of commerce: when we've invested the energy and raw materials to fabricate it: that that investment is not just thrown away to become a burden on the environment. The plastics, aluminum, highly-refined silicon, and doping agents should remain in the stream of commerce, ideally forever. This approach is emerging in parts of Europe with custodial chains on everything from clothes to automobiles. The manufacturers are required to view their product with a custodial relationship to it, so at the end of its useful lifetime, it has to be made into something else. We are already seeing that in this country with regard to automobile batteries. The next step, sometimes called industrial ecology, where the waste stream of one industry becomes the basic inputs for a different industry, is acquiring traction as a result of groups like the Natural Step, the Natural the World Resources Institute

MO:

Denis, I'd like to shift gears back to some discussion related to how environmental groups use technology. Particularly I'm curious what you think we need to do to help nonprofits overcome some of the barriers to effective technology use?

DH:

We need to support the people with strong social and environmental values who have gone to work for organizations whose primary role is to help environmental groups use technology. For example, supporting the work of groups like TechRocks, One Northwest and other technology assistance organizations is essential to helping environmental groups. The other thing we must do is get the tools into people hands. One thing we've done for our grantees was give them one or two computers, an Internet hook up and a little bit of training. Sometimes groups didn't appreciate it a first but a year or two later I'd be told that the computer had changed their lives. Once you got them off their duff to explore a little bit, they embrace the technology.

MO:

That makes a lot of sense but Denis, many groups out there are simply not using this stuff in a strategic manner. What do think people in the environmental groups need to be thinking about to take the tools and use them for real power building?

DH:

Marc, I think everybody is struggling to try and figure out what works. For example, everyone thinks that the core of everything is a Web site, but have no idea how to get anybody to visit them. Massive sums of money and great information that go into them are dramatically underutilized. I think that some of new streaming media technologies being developed by the private sector will be embraced as they come out by the environmental groups. Recently I was looking at a bunch of corporate sites to see what we could do to sell people on the idea of alternative transportation. I decided to see what they were doing to sell people the conventional transportation. Mercedes has a thing where you can build your own movie where you can add this frame and that frame and create your only little movie with your own soundtrack. There is nobody in the environmental community that is going to do something like that today. But tomorrow we will.

RS:

Any cautionary notes that nonprofits need to be aware of as they are moving down this road?

DH:

There are inherent vulnerabilities in technology systems. We are beginning to see virtually everything being attacked, either by malicious groups or those who are indifferent and want to show off their technical skills. It will be a constant relentless battle to stop these kinds of things into the future. We have been hacked in ways that were designed to be destructive at Earth Day, which is not exactly the group that inspires the greatest number of enemies around the world. So you need to have redundant systems, store files away from the office, back everything up at least 2-3 times a week. Assume that if you are having any impact that there will be people trying to destroy you and your records. Make it difficult or impossible for them to do any damage.

MO:

That's good advice: what else would you advise environmental groups or concerned individuals who are thinking about deploying technology tools and strategies to help protect the environment?

DH:

There are a lot of very smart people in communities all over the United States who care deeply about the environment and understand technology. Virtually every group that we deal with has the ability to find someone willing to join its board of directors or an advisory committee, as a volunteer and take even the smallest grassroots organizations to a higher level of technological sophistication. Also, nonprofit technology assistance groups will happily sit down with you and help you ask the right type of questions for your organization. ONE Northwest has led a genuine technological revolution among environmental groups in the Pacific Northwest.

People in environmental groups generally know a great deal about forestry or marine biology or solar energy or recycling or urban design or sustainable agriculture. They are lawyers or scientists or economists. I've seen environmental activists waste weeks of valuable time trying to build intranets.

My advice is to find experts who want to help you. People with a deep knowledge of technology will connect you to the world better, faster, and cheaper than you can do it yourself. Let them!

Denis Hayes can be reached through the Earth Day Network.