Spirit in Action
Activating the Activists
Steve Chase originated and serves now as the director of the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program in the Dept of Environmental Studies of Antioch University New England, training future generations of change-makers of all sorts. Steve's early inspiration was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, but a transforming moment is when he got kicked out his Boy Scout troop and welcomed in by Quakers - at age 13.
- Broadcast on:
- 24 Jan 2010
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- other
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives Of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, Creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots And produce sacred fruit in your own life [music] Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along For today's Spirit in Action program we'll be visiting with Stephen Chase, Director of the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program In the Department of Environmental Studies of Antioch University, New England What that means, more or less, is that Steve is educating his students to go out And change the world, advocating for the common good Not only in terms of a narrow definition of environment But including inextricably linked issues like peace and social justice I think you'll find Steve to be an inspiring and delightful teacher and storyteller As he conveys the knowledge about what has empowered his efforts to mend the world And the principles that can strengthen others to make a powerful difference on our planet I interviewed Steve before an audience at the Friends General Conference gathering Of Quakers at Johnstown, Pennsylvania this past month Join me now for a visit to the deep and thoughtful end of the pool With Steve Chase of Antioch University, New England Steve, I'm so glad you could join me today for Spirit in Action Oh, I'm really honored, I'm glad to be here You know, the thing that brought you to my attention is your work at Antioch I'm going to get there pretty quick I'm going to trace back the roots because I'm not sure which came first, the spirit or the ache Which happened first, did you get a spiritual grounding That led you to be active in social change or was it the other way around? It was exactly at the same time One of the things I say is that I didn't grow up a Quaker, I grew up a Boy Scout I loved the weekly meetings of scouts, I loved going out camping I really liked that we were about being honest and brave and courteous and kind And having tremendous cheerful, careful, safety And somewhere in there loyal to God and country And when I was about 12, the God and country part started getting strained for me Because my Scout Master's view, it wasn't even my country right or wrong It was God is on the side of our country and our country is always right I was really inspired by Martin Luther King as a kid And I was originally very much for the war in Vietnam as a way to stop tyranny and defend freedom And my brother came home from college one time and he had joined students for a democratic society And had been going on lots of anti-war marches and was being tear gassed And I was furious with him and I got up from the table And just said, "You're a traitor to your country, I don't even want to eat with you" And I turned to my mom and said, "You don't believe this, do you?" And she said, "Honey, there's a lot more about this war than you know" And so I started setting up, originally my motivation was So the next time my brother was home for dinner, I could crush him in a debate At the age of 12 you're doing this? Yeah, yeah, I was a very patriotic, serious guy, I guess And as I studied, I realized that the war was not a just war It was a war of torture and assassination and mass murder and it had nothing to do with freedom And so this put me at odds with sort of the notion of what is patriotism that was in my local Boy Scout chapter So where it turns into activism and Quakers is in my little town, Galesburg, Illinois There was a Boy Scout Jamboree in the town square And so we had activities all day and I sort of finished up mine And I noticed that there was a group of people standing silently with anti-war signs at the edge of the square And I said, "Well, if I really believe the war is wrong, I need to stand up" And this was the first time I'd seen anybody in my town stand up against the war And I said, "I have to take a stand" So I walked over and joined the Silent Peace Vigil which was organized by the Galesburg Friends meeting Almost instantly my Scout Master came over, grabbed me and pulled me out of the Vigil And he started shaking me and he was yelling at me and he was calling me all the things I called my brother You're a communist, you're a traitor, you're a disgrace to the uniform, you know, don't come back to Scouts And so he stomps off and I loved Boy Scouts and I was no longer a Boy Scout And this older woman came up to me and put her hand on my arm and she said, "Young man, I just want you to know You'd always be welcome at a Quaker meeting" So I was sort of intrigued, called up the number in the phone book and talked to somebody, found out who's house it was going to be in And I went the next week and I felt really at home and what I loved was instead of the way my Scout Master viewed things Which is God is on our side no matter what That the notion that I got from the Friends was we need to get on God's side And we need to start being about peace and justice and care for the earth And that just meant so much to me, the mixing of spirituality and activism as a completely integrated thing And so that was, I was about 13 and what I discovered is there was a 300-year history of standing up for abolition Civil rights, women's rights, peace work, reforming, prisons And I was just so excited to be a part of this 350-year-old tradition that, you know, in Christian terms, is trying to build the kingdom of God You know, God's reign of justice and compassion And that's part of what King inspired me, because he talked about the beloved community Which I always thought was sort of the same thing And that's always been my guiding vision and it really found a home once I joined Friends I didn't go to any church at all until after my dad left home when I was 10 and then my mom sort of felt I should have some religious training So we started going to the Episcopal Church and I never felt at home there, it was all about I guess the contrast I would put it is in the Episcopal Church in that little town in Illinois Everything seemed to be about beliefs about Jesus and I was interested in the faith and practice of Jesus And that's what Quakers focused on, that's what they felt in that little meeting that that's the central part of our faith It was the first time I'd ever heard a woman give ministry in a religious service because all I knew was the Episcopalians They only had men and it was even more than that because in a Quaker setting, for my mind There's an element of it's very democratic and egalitarian is that anybody could minister If they felt deeply moved by the spirit to talk Even me as a 13 year old kid, I didn't actually give ministry a meeting until I was about 14 or 15 But it's a pretty rare in my experience, a faith community that would include young people Essentially older children as well as women that there was that real spiritual equality And that's sort of part of the vision too, I was inspired by King and the movement towards equality And here's a faith tradition that embodied it more than I had ever seen So you said 68 was a big year, it was a big year for a couple of assassinations In that course of that year, that's when Martin Luther King and actually Bobby Kennedy both weren't they? That's right, I forget exactly what month Kennedy was killed, but King was killed on April 4th in 68 I turned 13 on May 6th, 1968 And then when I did this Boy Scout January, it was just a month later in June So there had been massive anti-war demonstrations, King was killed The world and the country was shook up, God was troubling the waters And there was a really open question about whether the gains that had been made During my early childhood that I wasn't even involved in, but I could see around me Were they going to continue, were they going to be defended, but no new things may Or would they be rolled back, and in some areas all three things have happened Was environmentalism part of what was coming in for you or not? I mean I connected with Boy Scouts Well, it was, my dad had moved away when I was 10 to Californians So I'd go out in summers and we'd go backpacking in Yosemite And he would tell me about John Muir and the origins of the Sierra Club And that meant a lot to me But what really, I have to say, it was social justice and anti-war concerns And actually feminism, when I turned 13th on my birthday My mom, bless her, gave me a copy of Betty for Dan's The Feminine Mystique For my birthday as my birthday president And that was sort of the classic of the second wave of feminism in the United States And the inscription, I opened it up when I opened the present and I opened the book up And I just love this, she said Stevie, she still called me Stevie then Stevie, today you've become a man, your job is to become a good one Please read this book So I had a great mom Did she influence it when you've made this change to Quakerism And to being anti-war and a social activist Was she supportive of this? Was she supportive of you before that? She was absolutely supportive of me My mom was not a joiner But the town beaches in Galesburg, Illinois in 1968 were still segregated I guess earlier when I was younger And she would take us to "The Black Beach" And we would have policemen come up to my mom And tell her that she was at the wrong beach And she should drive around the lake and go to the other side And she said no thank you, we're just fine here And she would talk these policemen down to leaving her alone And so she was a great role model in a lot of ways I remember her calling me in to watch the news with her during, I think it was the Birmingham demonstration What was that, '63? So I would have been a young boy and she just wanted me to see these things And she just said, you know, I kind of like you to grow up like that And so she was really supportive I once got kicked out of a civics class in ninth grade Because I disagreed with the teacher Because he was talking about how horrible the caste system was in India And I agreed with him on that And I said but we probably should look at what the caste system is in the United States In terms of race I think I used the word racism and he said Well we don't use that word in this class And I said racial bigotry, no we don't use that word in this class And I said, well I'm talking about people in the ghetto Oh we certainly don't use the word the ghetto And I said, okay, people who aren't white Who live in substandard housing in urban areas And I was getting sarcastic and nasty and he kicked me out The school wasn't going to let me go back into a civics class Which was required to graduate unless I signed a statement That I would never disagree with the teacher again Oh my goodness, this is America This is America, a very small town in America My mom came in with me after I was suspended from school And I finished my five days out And she came in and talked with me and the principal I remember her saying it's a civics class You can't not allow free speech If you're going to talk about civics in the United States There's no way my son will sign this, he doesn't want to I would not allow him to do that against his will And she was great, she said And I just have four words for you A-C-L-U And what was great is I was sent into a different teacher They wouldn't let me go back and I was happy not to go back And my teacher was a very principled conservative He and I disagreed but I really learned that people I disagreed with Can be thoughtful, can be committed, can be moral We just have a different view of things and what became so obvious to me about this Was it was on law day, national law day And so he gave this ten minute talk about law and order and how we should do it And he finished his talk and he said, "Steve, I'm wondering if you'd like to get up and say a few words about civil disobedience" And he let me That's wonderful And I had tremendous respect for him and he had tremendous respect for me And that's where I really got a vision of what a democratic community could really be Even if we disagree, we're still part of the same community and we can treat each other with respect I have the same respect for principled conservatives I had the experience in my hometown, Eau Claire, actually Altuna, which is a neighboring community I was invited into high school there to talk to Acevix class about conscientious objection The teacher himself was National Guard He had had a military person in to speak and he says, "we need to prepare these minds, we need to give them a balanced view and hear the counterpoints And let them think and decide so they can really be committed to what they do as opposed to a knee jerk or following That's a great example of truly democratic education Right, just wonderful Now, it sounds to me like maybe your home life prepared you to be an organizer To give you the courage to stand up and talk in front of a group Yes, but you at the age of 12 or 13 But a lot of it was also my meeting My mom was great, my dad was very helpful in thinking about ecological issues because of all the backpacking we did So there was tremendous family support But there was something very profound about being in my meeting Once I really got serious about this, it was great to have older people who had been doing peace work and justice work for a lot of years And doing it out of a very deep faith base And this helped them avoid burnout, it helped them avoid rancor and demonizing their opponents What I liked about them is that sometimes, you know, sometimes pacifists try to mystify that they're, well, there really isn't an enemy There really aren't opponents You know, for me, that was never Jesus' view Jesus said, "Love your enemies" Jesus never said, "Pretend you don't have any" You know, the Empire, the Roman Empire, the collaboration government in 1st century Palestine And even the religious authorities in the temple that were collaborating with the Roman Empire Were enemies of the poor, the captive, the oppressed That was Jesus' mission to say, you know, "Now's the time for good news for the marginalized and the oppressed" But this Quaker meeting, I learned public speaking there, with ministry, I learned leadership skills When I was 16, I was Assistant Clerk and would facilitate meetings Assistant Clerk, it's 16 Yeah, my goodness All of that really, really helped me And then I got very active, I guess it would have been in 1972 or '73, with a group that started out called the Quaker Action Group And then morphed into movement for a new society I think I have the distinction of having organized the only high school chapter of movement for a new society But that, again, was a real commitment to thoughtful, radical, fundamental social change through nonviolent action And there was a lot of emphasis on political education in the group and on activist training And so that's where I start seeing the power of activist training, improving the power and capacity of movements And for me, the big story that really clicked for me about why activist training is so important was Rosa Parks My understanding as a kid of what happened when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus Was that she was just a middle-aged seamstress whose feet were tired And one day spontaneously got fed up with racism and just refused to give her seat up to a white man and moved to the back to the bus The reality that I found out later was she had been a volunteer for the NAACP for about 12 years So she'd already been a civil rights activist And that she had gone to a training program the summer before she refused to move to the back of the bus At the Highlander Training Center, it was an active training center for the labor movement and the civil rights movement And so she's at this 10-day workshop where they're talking about civil disobedience They're even studying case histories of bus boycotts in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that had happened five years or so before And Miles Horton, who is the director of the center, then says to everybody, "It's great being at Highlander Because it was one of the few places that black and white people could meet and talk and be equals in the south at that time It was liberated territory." But he said, "The way you graduate from Highlander is you have to go home and do something And so what she did, essentially to get her symbolic diploma, was to refuse to move to the back of the bus And that sparked the Montgomery bus boycott. And that just made it really clear to me that training is important So it was incredibly inspired by the Highlander Center And because of my sort of growing interest in social activism I also became very familiar with sort of the Dean of American Pacifist, A.J. Musty and his work And I don't know if he was ever a Quaker, but he was a fellow traveler and went to a lot of meetings And may have been a member of a meeting at one point But he, in the 20s and 30s, was the director of the Brookwood Labor College Which was a two-year program in upstate New York to train labor advocates and organizers So it was a residential college, two-year college, and they were training organizers And what I discovered is I was studying labor history in my 20s and 30s That the move from a very sort of rigid, conservative, skilled, white guy, the union movement To a union movement that was militant, had progressive goals, organized men and women, people of color, skilled and unskilled That the graduates of Brookwood Labor College were hugely influential in that important shift And so, at this time, I was just thinking, well, why not at an actual college or university? And I was a student, I was a doctoral student at Antioch University in New England in Keene, New Hampshire And so I proposed to the faculty that we create an environmental advocacy and organizing program That we train public interest advocates and grassroots organizers And that the focus would be on climate protection, ecological sustainability, social justice And the democratic control of corporations And their first question was, well, where else is this being done in the country? And I said, there's nobody doing it now, but there was one program that started in 1972 at the University of Michigan It was by a guy named Bunyan Bryant, who was probably in 1972 the only African American environmental studies teacher in the country And so he developed this training program, and he helped me enormously when I was thinking about this He showed me his files, I went out and spent a week with him and he talked to me about what they did And after the program had stopped there But it stopped probably in about the mid-90s I am just so grateful of Antioch University for not laughing me out of the room You know, there's a student in their doctoral program that says, let's create a new master's program That doesn't exist anywhere in the country and might be very controversial And they took me seriously, they slowed me down and they made me make a much better plan And designed the curriculum better, which I'm very, very grateful But that's just kind of the innovative service-oriented mission-driven nature of Antioch University where I really love teaching Steve, you said you were a doctoral candidate at that point What had your studies been in? What were you actually being prepared to do when you chose your own path? Part of my academic background is a little sketchy because when I was actually accepted to Antioch College in 1972 or '73 I guess Then I became a teenage dad and so college went out the window and I had to go to work to support my family So I did two years of trade school, a printing trade school, I worked as a printer for about 15 years And then I heard about Antioch University in New England and they had a non-BA special admissions If you could prove you had extensive life experience and you got extra recommendations So then I finished my master's in environmental studies there and it was a self-design program in green economics and environmental advocacy And then I, I guess it was '96, started the doctoral program and I ended up doing my dissertation as a curriculum action research To create the program, it's called Activist Training in the Academy Developing an environmental advocacy and organizing program But the, you know, the interesting thing is I hadn't finished before the program started and they made me the director It was only a couple years later, did I finish my doctorate? So you envisioned creating this, are you trying to replicate what the other programs created or what the labor school did? Is that what you were trying to do in your job there at anti-annada? Well the idea was to draw inspiration and figure out what would be appropriate and what would be useful And one of the goals I had was I wanted environmentalists to think about questions of politics and questions of economics It's not enough to say no, you know, don't develop this, don't do that You really have to think about well what are the unintended consequences of policy and might it cause job loss And is there a way that unions and environmentalists could figure out policies that would help eradicate poverty Increase job security for working people and solve the problems of public health and public lands And to help rich people get richer? That wasn't so much, you know, as a Quaker, that's not much one of my goals But it is one of the forces that frequently works against you when you're our organizing that So how do you finish that? I mean, how do you work that out? Well, I think that, you know, I'm definitely not anti-business, we need goods and services to make life enjoyable, survivable And just a fitting existence What I love about the possibilities of a good workplace, it's where people can work together and realize their potential for creativity and service And it can provide the stakeholders with a reasonable financial return So I'm all for that and where I see a problem is, well, it's probably too long to go into But there's this long history of the growth of corporate power in the United States At the time of the revolution, there were maybe six corporations in the new United States And they had very strict restrictions on them, they had to get individually chartered by their state legislatures They could only last for about 20 to 30 years And then they could have to go back to the legislature and see, they couldn't give any money to politicians They couldn't even give money to non-profits They had to serve in the public good and if it was deemed by the legislature that they weren't, their charters could be pulled And their assets could be sold off This is a history that's completely unknown to people in the US, isn't it? It's pretty unknown, it's always really shocking when I teach the course, I teach a course in corporate power, globalization and democracy And so people are not learning this And then in the late 1800s, the Supreme Court uses the 14th Amendment, which is to free the slaves And then it claims that corporations as legal fictions, as artificial persons, are covered by the 14th Amendment Which gives constitutional right to all natural persons And in the second line of it, it just mentions persons, it doesn't say natural persons And so there was this reading back into the Constitution, this notion that corporations should have free speech rights That's when corporations were allowed to start giving money to political candidates, because that's free speech And there's a whole slew of other things And so instead of controlling the DNA and the nature of the corporation, most progressive forces were sort of outmaneuvered And could only think about, well, we can try to regulate the behavior of corporations We've sort of lost the battle of can we define them in the public interest And then the third stage that I go over with the students is that the rise of sort of free trade regimes, NAFTA and the WTO Then is a way to even destroy the regulatory capacities of government and people's movements And so there's just been this vast expansion where it's no longer just good business But it becomes corporate role in it and it threatens democracy in profound ways And creates the externalities of global climate change and disruption, toxic pollution The degradation of huge tracts of land and the rain for us I think can be tied pretty directly to not just business, but business that has this kind of power and its only motivation is private property For shareholders who actually have no responsibility for running the corporation, they're free and clear And if the corporation does something, the shareholders are not liable, they have no responsibility It's a really important thing I think for people to understand And what I wanted to do in the same way Brookwood Labor College helped train activists that could transform the labor movement Into something more progressive and big picture I was hoping that our program could be a part of the movement that's really trying to transform the conventional environmental movement To really take its place as a strong progressive movement that's working in an alliance with the labor movement, civil rights groups and church groups And a variety of sort of coalitions that can build the clout that can get what people really want done If you've just joined us, you're listening to a spirit in action interview with Stephen Chase He's the director of the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program, part of Antioch University, New England I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and this is a Northern Spirit Radio Production And one of the things that means is that you can go to my website, northernspiritradio.org And listen to this and my other programs, also finding useful links and other info there And you can also post comments about the programs Right now, we're going to return to our visit with Steve Chase in a lecture hall of Johnstown PA University Before an audience of the Friends General Conference Gathering To learn more about the ways and means of teaching and living social and environmental change and activism I want to learn some more about what the content of the class is Sure But what I'm really curious about right at this moment is You've got students, you come in, they get a master's in this Can they get a job? I mean, is there a position or do they just have to become part of hippie itinerants that go around and tear down the system? Well, it's so funny because one of the other things One of our marketing advantages is we're the only environmental studies program in the country that specifically trains public interest advocates and grassroots organizers But the hard thing is people don't often think about Graduate school would be one of the places you could get good training for this And a lot of people have the notion that all of activism is completely volunteer work But throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s and 90s There's been a vast explosion in the number of NGOs and a lot of them have staff people And so there really is a number of jobs For example, some things are fairly obvious and conventional One student works as the Associate Development Director of the Nature Conservancy in Vermont We have a graduate who's working as a field organizer with the, what is it, alternatives for community and environment Which is one of the most prestigious, creative environmental justice, urban environmental justice groups in the country And so he's working on just transportation because they've done the analysis of Boston And the neighborhoods which actually have less cars and more need For people to have public transportation in order to get jobs So the poor neighborhoods, usually people of color in Boston, have less bus lines and subway lines And then they also started doing an analysis of, well, because the tea, the Metropolitan Transit Authority Is saying, well, we've got these carbon friendly, climate friendly new buses And then they looked at where those new buses, what lines they would be put on And they would be in fairly fluent areas in Boston and Cambridge and the affluent suburbs And the dirtiest, oldest, diesel, most polluting buses would be running in the poor neighborhoods So he's doing environmental justice organizing in Boston We had one student who did his practicum because there's a strong field-based component in this So each student has to do at least two 300-hour placements in an activist organization working So on his last one, he's working for the New England Coalition Against Nuclear Pollution So he's their intern and he was also during that semester taking a non-profit leadership and management class And he saw some weaknesses in their structure And so he wrote an analysis of where the organization is and where it could be organizationally And sent it to the Board of Directors They were so impressed that they made him the executive director of the organization before he graduated from the program So he did that about three years, then the Biodiversity Project picked him up I think in Michigan and asked him to become their executive director And now he's a consultant in strategic communications for a lot of environmental and wilderness preservation groups So those are just some examples of people doing really interesting work These are other staff in this program, is it just you? And what do they balance out their studies with? You're not teaching them all the science courses and all the way No, we're embedded in the Environmental Studies Program at Antioch University, New England and Keyno Hampshire And so students have to take two courses in sort of global ecological change science They have to take two courses, sort of natural history courses Of learning to read the New England landscape, what's there, what are the relationships And if you can learn to read one landscape, it makes it easier to learn others And then they have, they're required, everybody, regardless of their program Because we have a conservation biology program, resource management program, an environmental education program Teacher certification and science program So this is one of my main, but all these students have to take these required courses They're called civic ecology And I teach two courses of those general things I teach patterns of environmental activism and then the corporate power globalization and democracy Then the students who are in the advocacy program Take a course in organizing social movements and campaigns A course in diversity and coalition building because one of the things that the environmental movement Just has to learn is in the 21st century, a white middle class movement is just too narrow to get things done And too narrow to think about all the things that need to get done And so we really have to build a multi-racial movement and a multi-class movement Then a third area is nonprofit leadership and management And then we have two semesters in the second year that's called the advocacy clinic And it's built on a law clinic model where we request proposals from organizations All over the country and even internationally Who have projects that could be done offsite for them Over a three to four month period by one to five creative graduate students And this is part of their two, three hundred hour things No, this is something separate And then the other person that's sort of core to the advocacy department Is Abigail Abrash Walton who worked for ten years Is the program director at the Robert F Kennedy Center for Human Rights in DC And three years is the program director for New Hampshire Citizen Alliance Best executive decision I've ever made to hire her So she directs the advocacy clinic, you know, gets the potential clients And then the students at the beginning of each of those semesters Except which proposals they're gonna take on And so it's no longer simulations It's they're actually working for real organizations on something that's important And last spring they decided to work as a whole group instead of on individual projects And it was the Western Shoshone Defense Project And so I had them working with the UN, had them doing legal research And just doing a lot of things that the project had a little trouble With its limited staff power to do and we were able to help And then on top of that the students have the two three hundred hour placements Where they're actually working embedded in organizations Wow, that's amazing The name of the department that you had Steve is called the environmental advocacy And organizing program, I mean the program that you had Yeah, it's a program within the environmental studies department But it doesn't sound to me like it's always environmental What people do or concentrate or go on into work in Is that an ambiguous environmental application or is it meant really to be environmental? Well, I take a very big town approach to this So for me environment means the natural environment Means the social environment and it means the built environment And all can have impact on human well-being and human activities Can have can degrade or enhance all those environments And we also think that in the same way, Brookwood labor college Took a very narrow perspective of what the labor movement ought to be To create a much bigger, more progressive, more forward thinking Is that that's something that we need to help cultivate Those kinds of shifts are happening in the environmental movement And it's very exciting But we're trying to prepare people not to just go into maybe the jobs that exist But to really help that transformation along And so we think people need to know what are the linkages about social justice and environmental quality And when I was talking about the student or the graduate who works at alternatives and community environment So working on the bus situation, that's an environmental issue That's a public health issue for people because of pollution But it's also a social justice issue It's not like the pollution is spread evenly and everybody faces the same threat It's the poor and it's people of color And so if environmentalists are not trained to think about social justice issues They're not going to be working on these kinds of important issues They're not going to be building coalitions with community groups They're focused on social justice questions and see how environmental is impacting So we're definitely trying to create a big tent and to see the connections between economy and politics and the environment It's clear to me, Steve, that you're very spiritually based That you've got really strong spiritual roots Talk about how that works out when you're working in a public setting I mean, I can see you as a revivalist preacher up in front of the class Brothers and sisters, I have a dream I can see you working in that way And yet you're working with this university-type system Where everybody's neutral and we don't talk about that And besides that, you're scientifically related Anytime you're connected with the environment, you have to have this strong scientific component Does that work together well, bad? Do you feel like you have to just not say party or vocabulary when you're there? What is that? The way I do it is I'm pretty straightforward about what are the sources of my motivations for action And I talk about my faith tradition But I talk about it as a faith tradition And I ask them what inspires them to do this work And some people, it's faith based whether folks are Jews or Buddhists or Christians A number of people are atheists, but they can talk about really special experiences That gave them a sense of the potential for a human community that, in King's words, really is beloved And so I really try to create the space for people to talk about a wide variety of traditions But I do kind of push the spiritual dimensions of this Because I think the single most important or deadly occupational hazard is burnout I think if you have a faith tradition and you have some practices that keep you centered, that keep you calm Make sure you're paying attention to the quality of your relationships And you're not sacrificing your children or your loved ones for the cause That you keep that sense of balance I think that actually makes people who can make a contribution that's a better contribution And it's for the long haul So I do not impose my way, but I don't hide it I let people know that that's part of me and what motivates me Is there a red cue on your chest? I do not wear a red cue on my chest But one example of where I brought it in is some of the students come in without a lot of activist background They just have a sense that this is where they want to put their shoulder to the wheel For many more chapters of their life And it's an intuitive sense But it also means that they often don't know about the rough and tumble of nonviolent social struggle And there's some students that, frankly, I would call it a sort of this naive view And we had talked about it before About, well, there aren't really opponents, there aren't really enemies There's nobody who's really trying to oppress or marginalize people or exploit land It's just ignorance and we can just reach them one to one Education's all you need And so for an example, I go, well, in my faith tradition And then I did the quote that I did before When we stop at the show In my faith tradition, Jesus said, "Love your enemies." He never said pretend you don't have any And people laugh and we talk about, well, what might that mean to us? Well, okay, we have to think about the ethics of how we do struggle And not to over demonize people But we also have to realize that for the goals that we want Of climate protection, social justice, democratic control of corporations, peace, environmental sustainability There are entrenched interests that don't want society to go there It's not going to help them make money And students need to be realistic about that So that's an example where just in my teaching I would bring something in from my faith tradition That's broad enough that nobody's feeling that the faith tradition is being pushed down their throat But there's a truth being brought to the table that we can analyze and talk about But that's a great question I do think about that a lot Because when I first started, I didn't talk much And I just felt like it was doing a disservice to the students It wasn't giving them a model of somebody who takes the inner life seriously The deep roots and the restorative possibilities when you're tired And how to keep going and a lot of the students are going well You know, how do we know we could ever end up in a good place? And I think faith is a way of You kind of do the work without knowing for sure what it's going to be What the outcome? But another line that I sometimes use with them from my own faith tradition Is I said Jesus was once asked how to live a faithful life And what he said I think is really important to activists Because he said you need to be as gentle as doves and as clever as serpents A lot of activists are very sentimental and they're very gentle And they don't have an analysis of power They don't think about struggle They don't think how to really organize for success They want to be right and they want to express their views But they're not so concerned about being effective And then you have other activists who are serpent smart And they think very very analytically But their hearts are hard and they can do damage to themselves They can do damage to their colleagues With some sort of martyr complex Why don't you work as hard as me and you're not good enough And they also can do damage to the movement by being Absolutely I can give you an example of something A war tax resistance is something I've been involved in a lot of time And when I was in Milwaukee, we would leave it in front of the building there where the IRS was in I had a very gentle way of doing it in general I'd offer people things, you know, they're always rushing by And some people would do it or not do it But I'd open doors for people and let them in And if they took the thing, fine, if they didn't, fine And I'd have people come back on the way out I got a moment now, I can take a thank you, that kind of thing And I had people coming back to talk to me And feeling like this was an okay exchange On the other hand, there was a woman who came to participate with us Hand out leaflets And if someone didn't take her paper, she'd walk alongside them Shoving it in their face and stuff And you knew if they took it from her, they're just going to toss it And I had to kind of gently lead her to see that maybe that wasn't a very effective way of doing it And we spend a lot of time on that And part of it, I mean there's various ways to do it We have case studies, videos, we give them simulations And there's theoretical reading, they're doing volunteer work So there's a lot of way we get it, but part of it's storytelling For an example of just sort of what you were talking about One story I tell them that I think models This sort of balance of sort of emotional care and concern for others And also being wicked smart about how to do things right When we get to the organizing and social movements course When we're talking about recruiting, I tell this story And it was told by Lois Gibbs when she came and visited our campus one time And for folks who might be listening who don't know who Lois Gibbs is She was the high school educated housewife that lived and loved canal And discovered as her children were getting sick and sick and sick over and over again That their whole subdivision was built on a toxic chemical waste dump And that where the center of that waste dump was where the school was built And so she organized the community and pushed the federal government To give everybody enough money to move out of the community And it was also the birth of the Superfund law with a strong polluter plays The provision built into it Now she had never done activism before But it hit really home when her kids got sick and she became a great community organizer She could have moved into the new house and just stopped that But she didn't, she created what's now called the Center for Environment Health and Justice And they have worked doing technical assistance for over 10,000 anti-toxic groups all over the country And so she goes all over the country training people, mostly working class women I mean there's this mattering of other people But it's this huge empowering of mothers in communities of how to take charge of their communities And have the common good including the health of their children be protected And so she tells the story if she was in one town and they'd finished a four day training And so they're sitting around at a bar and they're having drinks afterwards But then she noticed she's listening to the women talk And she just hears that they don't fully get it yet And so one of the women goes, oh we just can't grow Our little organization's been around for over a year And we have talked at People Till we're blue in the face and nobody's joining us And she's hearing this and she's going okay, I think this is maybe a teachable moment And she turns to them and she said, well, okay, maybe it's hopeless But maybe it's something about the way you're recruiting Let's just think about that, I bet you $50, if you give me at least an hour and a half You could pick out anybody in this bar and I can recruit them to your organization And they're just stunned, they can't believe it, no, no, yeah, and she's taking quite a risk here And so they pick this scruffy guy down at the end of the bar So Lois Gibbs takes her drink, goes over, and is just schmoozing with him You know, hi, how are you? Small talk Then she starts asking sort of more elicitive questions So, you know, what do you do for work? Turns out the guy's an independent trucker and he owns his own rig And the issue that these women have been working on is trying to stop an incinerator on the outskirts of town And they're all concerned, their big concern is their children So she's talking with him, he doesn't have children, so there's not that immediate thing But he owns his own rig, and so that means he has to pay, she asks him So that means you have to pay your own repair bills, and he goes, yeah, whether I make good money in a given year Depends on how element truck it And so she goes, well, you know, it's probably a good thing that your town and county are so good about keeping the roads really in good shape And he laughs this bitter last, and he said, no, it's terrible, there's potholes everywhere And she said, well, do you drive a lot on Route 10? And he goes, yeah, that's one of my main routes, and she said, well, have you heard about this incinerator? The town's planning to put in on Route 10? He said, no, I think I read something about it in the paper, and it's just not on his radar And she said, well, the one thing I've heard is that there's going to be 500 trucks going in and out of there every week How's that going to be on the roads? And he goes, oh, my God, the roads are already bad, that'll just be horrible I'm not going to make any money next year at all And she said, that's a real problem, I can understand it Listen, I came with these women over here across the bar, and they're opposed to this incinerator, too But for really different reasons, they're all moms, and they're really concerned But there seems like there's a lot of reasons to oppose this incinerator And yours is just one of them, would you like to meet these women you want to come over for a drink? He said, sure, so he goes over and they talked because she listened carefully Because she made a bridge between what his concern was and what the objective of the organization was And didn't talk at him, blew in the face, she did really creative recruitment He ended up becoming a very strong participant in that group, and they succeeded two years later in stopping the incinerator And they paid her $50, right? And they paid her $50, so she put that into the fundraising for the organization But one thing that's really interesting is towards the end of this, when he would be doing public speaking against the incinerator He would talk about the public health concerns about, we have to project the kids in our town And I just think there's so much wisdom in that story about how activists need not to be self-righteous And tell people what to think, but to listen to people and care enough to find out what's bugging them What's the problem in their life and how does it link and how could we work together to solve problems? So I really like storytelling a lot and Lois told that story when she was with us about four years ago And now I tell it every year since So Steve at Antioch, do they let you be as radical as you want? There was the person at Madison who was talking about conspiracy about 911 And so they want to get him fired, do you have to face that kind of pressure? I don't actually have an article in Friends Journal coming out in August on the 9/11 controversies And there's not going to be any problem back at the university But what you're raising is a really interesting point because the University of Montana in the 90s Said let's create an undergraduate semester where students from all over the country would come And it would call an environmental advocacy semester And so all their coursework and all their field work in that semester Would all be around the theme of developing them as environmental activists It was a great program, it was well attended And a member of the board, a board of trustees, was mining company Said my company gives about $8 million a year We're turning off the spicot unless you close the environmental advocacy semester And so in the second year of the program it was killed, a vibrant successful program Now at Antioch University, I do not have that problem all This is a mission driven university that talks about in its mission statement Combining scholarship and activism for the common good ecological sustainability Every single department at Antioch University in New England has embraced the earth's charter The environmental studies department has embraced the principles of environmental justice And just about four weeks ago the board of trustees of the entire university On our campus, each time they meet on a campus, the president of a campus highlights one of the programs And brings in the faculty and some students to talk about a program And so this last time the president of our campus asked the advocacy and organizing program To do an hour presentation for the board of trustees So we have rock solid support That's great, does that mean also, Steve, that you can continue to be an organizer A fall mentor of revolution or whatever you are What kind of stuff do you do? Those who can't do teach and those who can't teach teach gym, right? No, I think it's important, I mean I do writing and scholarship I also do a lot of work with community radio and progressive news and public affairs And political education, I give talks But I'm also on the board of an organization started by two students of mine Called Advocates for Community Empowerment And they're working on a really interesting strategy that actually emerged out of western Pennsylvania Of passing local laws, for example, and this is what has happened in western Pennsylvania Townships have passed laws, local ordinances That no corporation can own and operate an industrial pig farm in the township And then these laws include things Because they know they're going to be hammered by corporate lawyers saying You don't have the right to discriminate against us, we're a person So there's over 50 townships in Pennsylvania, towns and townships Who have said corporations in the boundaries of our township have no constitutional rights, whatsoever They've built in the rights of nature So any member of the community, a citizen of the community has legal standing to go to court They defend watersheds, rivers and forests against corporate abuses And so these students are beginning to work on this model in northern New England Barnstable, New Hampshire, about a year ago Passed a law saying corporations aren't allowed to siphon off and bottle and sell water From our aquifer, because Nestle Corporation was just breathing down their stretch So I'm working, that's where I put more of my community organizing is working on a board member with my students But it's a really interesting model because the guy who sort of developed it was a public interest lawyer named Tom Lindsay Who works in Pennsylvania in the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund And so he was a regular regulatory lawyer And then he just the communities would be able through regulations to make things a little less bad But what they wanted is not to have the corporate abuses in their towns at all And so he started creating this innovative strategy saying, well in a democracy The people should rule and town should have the right to decide what kind of town they want to be What kind of risks they want to take and what kinds of businesses they have in the town What's fascinating, so this is some of the most radical, anti-corporate rule legislation being passed in the United States In rural western Pennsylvania townships where about 80% of the people vote for Bush every time And they're passing these laws because no longer is the debate about the corporate scientists And the environmental scientists about parts per million The debate is about do the people have the right to decide or do giant corporations have a right to decide And that's an area where we were talking a lot of principled conservatives I believe there should be local control and people should have that power and not corporations And so it's reframing the debate and creating teachable moments So that's the big thing I'm working on in northern New England That's awesome Thanks for being part of the conference. Thanks for your program there at Antioch University in New England And thanks for inspiring all the future change people who are going to be continuing the change that you've been working on For already a few decades in the world. Thanks so much Steve Thank you, it's been a real honor That was a visit with Steve Chase of the environmental advocacy and organizing program of Antioch University, New England The theme music for this program is turning of the world performed by Sarah Thompson This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website northernspiritradio.org Thank you for listening. I am your host Mark Helpsmeet And I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light This is spirit in action With every voice, with every song We will move this world alone With every voice, with every song We will move this world alone And our lives will feel the echo of our healing (upbeat music)