Millie Buchanan

Partial Transcript: So I’m Millie Buchanan and at the time that the Champion controversy was at full boil I was working with the Clean Water Fund of North Carolina. Which was an organization that assisted communities and people who had environmental problems. It would help them try to solve them in ways that protected their communities.

Partial Transcript: Champion, in 1908, built a very large mill on a very small river. One of the things that became clear as conditions changed and the environment changed is that it would never have been built on that river 50 years later. That was partly the basis of the problem was it was a large mill using a very toxic process on a river that at low flow was totally diverted through the mill. It [the river] just wasn’t big enough to support it.
Now you can argue that no river should have to support what was being put into the river at that point. But certainly the Pigeon River was too small. And so it had been a pristine trout stream, had some of the best trout fishing in the southeast, if not in the country. Just a beautiful stream. And it flowed from North Carolina into Tennessee. So what Champion brought to North Carolina were jobs that were very good paying for the area. At one point, I don’t know at what point the union formed, but there were union jobs.
Good pay, good benefits, lots of support for issues in Haywood County, particularly in Canton. So support for local non-profit organizations and community centers. So they were a very good corporate citizen in that sense. But then the river flowed into Tennessee and as long as the pollution was in North Carolina, people could kind of see it as, they could ignore it. The smell was really awful but in Canton people would say, “it smells like money.” Where anywhere else it just stank.
In Tennessee there were none of the jobs, and some of the few jobs in that area needed clean water – rafting, farming, letting your cattle drink out of the water. The political power was in North Carolina, the money was in North Carolina, the political support was in North Carolina, and Tennessee got the worst of the pollution.
I think there was no incentive for Champion to clean up. It wasn’t that they couldn’t. The technology was there at some point. When the battle became full-blown in the 80s, 90s, but it was going to cost more money. And shareholders don’t like spending more money unless they have to.

Partial Transcript: I don’t know why Champion chose the Pigeon River other than probably land was cheap in 1908. Asheville wasn’t Asheville. Certainly Canton wasn’t, it was a little country town. There was lots of local timber. And even then, I don’t know this, but even in 1908 in general I know that protection for workers and communities was not as strong in the rural South, particularly in the mountains. You just have to look at the coal mining industry to understand that.
You could take everything you wanted from the land. It was almost like a colonization of a poor rural area that was desperate for jobs. It was also a beautiful area to live in, if you don’t have to smell Canton. So that may have had something to do with it. I really don’t know. But this area is attractive to industry for all those reasons.

Partial Transcript: Yes, and I don’t know as much about the damage to the trees as I do the damage to the water. Certainly, there was a lot of clear-cutting. They owned a lot of land over the years, they bought a lot more land. And land was cheap. And so they could, it was very cost-efficient to cut trees, kind of destroy any trees, probably a fair amount of sediment going into the water from that.
But the main pollution was a very toxic chlorinated process. To be fair, when that plant was built, nobody even had heard the word dioxin. By the time of the battle in the 80s and 90s, at least the industry knew about the dangers of dioxin even though it was a lot of denial about it. I don’t know if the industry guys in Haywood County knew, but certainly the chlorine institute knew and just hid it for years.

Partial Transcript: I know that for many years. There were issues from the time the plant was built; people downstream saw significant difference in the water, fish died, there were reports of cows dying, or livestock dying when they drank out of the water. And there were, I don’t think early on probably not as many concerns about human health, but over the years that became clear too, that human health seemed to be affected.
And so it just gradually, like most environmental issues, it gradually over the years was more and more in people’s consciousness. And the fact that parts of your family worked in the mill made it hard for people on the North Carolina side to stand up and talk about it. You know, the mill smelled really bad. But in Canton, it “smelled like money.” Because it brought jobs. Other places it just smelled awful.

Partial Transcript: So the river was a pristine trout stream going into the mill. Coming out of the mill, coming out of Canton it was dark, it was foamy, it smelled. It eventually, we learned, that it had some serious toxins, it wasn’t just a color problem, it wasn’t just an aesthetic problem, it was a health and environment problem. And, it got worse over the years as the river wasn’t getting any bigger and Champion was. The decades of pollution built up in the river so that I don’t know if anybody has tested the sediment in the bottom and compared it, because they wouldn’t have been doing that in 1908, but there’s a load of toxic material and a load of just what a friend of mine who’s a chemist calls ‘methyl ethyl bad stuff’ that just built up.
So what also built up was resistance downstream. But at the same time, what was building up was Champion’s political power and financial power and reputation in western North Carolina. So they were a big contributor to local causes, they paid well for the mountains. I have been told that they even paid to have employees’ cars repainted every few years because the toxic pollution from the air would eat the paint off.
And so from that point they were a good corporate citizen. They just were doing damage to the area outside and in other ways to the area and the community. And there was a lot of clear cutting, which of course everyone was doing. And re-planting trees that weren’t necessarily contributing to air quality, contributing to the environment. There was also nobody talked as much about air pollution.
There were times. I live in Asheville, fairly far away, and there were times when I could smell the plant here on its worst days. Can’t anymore. Or at least I haven’t recently.

Partial Transcript: There’s a lot, the problem with finding human impacts from pollution is proving causation. You can do a lot of proving of correlation, there are clusters of cancer. There’s a town in east Tennessee called ‘widowville,’ because they say so many of the men have died of cancer. Proving that that is the result of any one pollutant is virtually impossible. And when you have a system that is not designed to protect people, there’s something they call the ‘precautionary principle’ that says ‘if you think it might be damaging, don’t do it until you know.’ And there have been a lot of efforts over the years, to get that as part of the way decisions are made. Those efforts haven’t been successful because they cost money.
The folks that make the rules and benefit from them aren’t the ones that pay that price frequently.

Partial Transcript: Dioxin. We chlorinated. When chlorine meets organic chemicals it creates a number of toxic products. And one of the ones that we now know the most about is dioxin. Very toxic. There was, it took a long time for that to be recognized. It took even longer for it to be acknowledged. Even though the chlorine institute, some of the big industries had that information much sooner than they admitted it.
It had reached the point, by the time that information began coming out, the effects of dioxin, it’s a carcinogen, it has effects on hormones. It has major environmental effects, and we’re learning more and more all the time of dioxin. That’s just sort of a generic name for a lot of the specific organo-chlorinated compounds that have names ‘this long.’ And so it’s – there’s a plausibility of denial about it’s not the dioxin, it’s the sediment coming from, the folks who pipe straight into the stream from their septic tanks. It’s always somebody else, don’t look at me, don’t look at him. Look at the man behind the tree, what my dad used to say.
I think there are definitely carcinogens that went into the river. Due much less from an updated project process. But at that point, it was some pretty serious toxicity, which nobody was really testing for. The big battle became, it got framed as color. It got framed as, ‘oh so the water looks like iced tea instead of clear water. And for that you’re gonna lose 2,000 jobs.’ So the denial of the toxicity, which we now know was prevalent, and to some degree is probably still in the river, although I don’t have any current information.

Partial Transcript: Yes. One of the things that was proposed as a partial solution was that you don’t have to bleach paper. You know, Champion was making milk cartons was one of their biggest products and at the time there was beginning to be an awareness of the environment and people were talking about being green. And so one of the proposals was, ‘hey, instead of bleaching the cartons white, it doesn’t make them stronger, it doesn’t make them any better, and we know now it probably releases chlorinated compounds into the lunch milk that kids are drinking out of those cartons. So why not not bleach it?’
We had even worked with somebody that had drawn up a design and said, ‘this is what an unbleached paper carton could look like.’ It had cows and little – actually I was in the store today buying some organic half and half and was looking at the green pictures on it and was thinking about that. So, it’s the bleaching process, I know there was a, probably honestly a naïve effort, by some of us that were concerned about both the economic health of the Haywood County and the environmental health of Haywood County and Tennessee to say, ‘hey why don’t you look at changing your process? Test it out.’
We had even tried to talk to a couple of local grocery store chains and politicians and said if Champion could just test out not using chlorine, using another process, we will go on a campaign with you. We will get the Sierra Club and the Clean Water Fund and we’ll ask the local supermarkets to stock this product as something that Champion is doing as a benefit to the community.
Actually when we first started talking about that, there was some at least expressed interest from local officials of Champion but then the corporate office and the Chlorine Institute got involved and [sound]. No, Champion doesn’t make unbleached paper. That’s not what we do. End of story.
I don’t think the paper industry can ever be totally non-polluting, because you are taking color out. You are taking you’re using chemical processes. But you can certainly make it less polluting.

Partial Transcript: So one of the things that happened over the years in western North Carolina is, it’s become a place, and to a certain degree it was always a place where people always wanted to go and retire. People with money. People with the ability to move. People who lived on the coast and moved up to the mountains in the summer to get away from mosquitoes and malaria and so there was a consciousness of -- oh I come here because it’s a beautiful place and, oh what’s that? And why does the river look like that? So I think there was always resentment in Tennessee about the river, but no power to do anything about it because the decisions were made in North Carolina, the money was made in North Carolina, nobody was going to listen to those country folk in Tennessee on the North Carolina side.
When you’re going up against a corporation that could send steak dinners to Raleigh, which reportedly they did. But there were, I’m not the person who believes there’s one hero in every fight. But if I had to pick a few, in the fight to get Champion to clean up: Dick Mullinax, Dick and Lucy Mullinax, and the irony is that the public perception of the Mullinaxes that was the story that was told and amplified was, ‘here are these outsiders that wear suits coming in and they’re rich and they just want their environment cleaned up.’
Well, Duke Mullinax is an interesting guy because he, at the end he was probably wearing suits to work, but he had like a fifth grade education. Had worked in the paper and allied industry all his life. So he was not just some ‘suit’ who had never been on the line. He knew what he was talking about. And he knew that a cleaner process was possible. And so he waged almost a one-man battle for quite awhile at pretty serious risk. He was getting threats. I mean, most of us that did some work on it got crank calls, but he got serious threats.
Because he lived in Haywood County, his job didn’t depend on Champion, his wealth didn’t depend on Champion, or his retirement income didn’t depend on Champion, and for people whose incomes depended on Champion, he was the enemy. He was one of those do-gooder outsider ‘suits’ who would come in and tell us what to do. And so he went first, from what I understand. I didn’t know him at this point; he was talking to the folks at Champion and was saying, ‘hey, let’s talk about this. I know this can be done better. And they just cut him off.’
When it became a more public fight, he got support from folks in east Tennessee who were concerned. Some of ‘em, folks like Steve and Jill Hodges who would have had more in terms of economic interest and class in common with workers in Champion and some who were kids of the Chamber of Commerce and those kind of people who saw it as a development opportunity and probably would have put nice big condos beside the river.
0:21:56 So there were different – but the perception that was not only in Canton, but everywhere in western North Carolina, from all the media was it’s those outsiders that are trying to tell us good folk down here what to do. And so one of the things that Dick and Lucy did was form a group called the Pigeon River Action Council. Pigeon River Action Group, I’m sorry, PRAG.

Partial Transcript: So one of the things that Dick and Lucy Mullinax did was form the Pigeon River Action Group in an effort to bring other people together to try to get a little clout behind this effort because Dick had been sort of doing it mostly on his own. That never got a large membership in Haywood County, I actually, when we began, when I was at Clean Water North Carolina and began working with Dick some trying to help them. People would come up to me and say privately, ‘I’d join in a heartbeat, but I’m afraid to.’ ‘I can’t,’ you know, ‘we support you,’ behind their back.
There was a real fear that was partly you know, partly an economic fear. A fear of I’m going to Christmas dinner and my brother works there, or my wife works there. Partly ginned up, frankly, by the way it was presented by Champion with, I’ve got to say, the support of not only politicians but local media. That there never really any serious investigation of Champion’s claim that cleaning up the river at all would lose 2,000 jobs. We’ll have to shut down.
It’s called ‘job blackmail.’ It’s a classic industry tactic. It was very successful. The other thing that I really wasn’t aware of at the time, that I’ve learned a lot more about since, is how corporations and unions work and don’t work together. And so, Champion was unionized. And the union was in a contract battle with Champion at the same time. So there was a little. I kept thinking, well, surely they’re not believing anything Champion is saying at the bargaining table. ‘Why would I believe this?’
But there were a couple of things about this. One is, under the way corporate structure are unions don’t have any right to try to change processes or corporate decisions. They have the right to bargain around wages, hours, benefits, those kinds of things. But they’re supposed to keep out of corporate decisions about how things are done.
That meant that they really had no power over this and in most cases probably very little way to get independent knowledge of how true what Champion was saying was. Whether it was true that they’d have to shut down. Whether it was true that they’d have to cut all those jobs. And they had no independent way of evaluating that and it just wasn’t safe for them to take the chance.

Partial Transcript: And they were good jobs. They were good jobs. And the other thing that’s a more structural problem, not just with Champion or the paper industry, is that where there are, there were beginning to be at that point protections for the environment, there were standards. And one of the big issues in the fight in the 80s and 90s was that Champion was being allowed to violate particularly color standards, standards of pollution. And North Carolina had the power to give them exemptions. And they did it pretty consistently.
There were, and in most cases still are, no similar protections for workers. And so what they saw was a community saying, ‘you got to clean up the river,’ when they knew that they were getting serious exposure to the same toxins inside and nobody was fighting to clean that up. And that can’t have made things easier.

Partial Transcript: So the Pigeon River Action Group was pretty small, as I said. They did get a little more support outside of Canton, but not a lot. And one of the things that they did was decide they really wanted to challenge the permit. At that point, Tennessee was challenging the right for North Carolina to write the permit. They were trying to get the EPA to take over North Carolina’s authority saying, ‘okay EPA you have the authority to take this back if a state is violating its responsibilities. They’re doing it. We’re going to sue you.’
So the State of Tennessee was suing them and of course in North Carolina the forces were lined up in support of Champion. And they really wanted to have a North Carolina presence in that suit saying, ‘we live in North Carolina we’re dealing with this stuff. We want a right to be at the table when this goes in front of judges, lawyers, whoever.’ And so, one of the things that they did, was to get, basically any place Dick Mullinax could get an invitation to speak. Sierra Club, he spoke to Clean Water at one point. He spoke and say, ‘join us and help us at least be able to make our case in court.’
And he was successful in that. They did get standing to be part of that process. And they also, so as part of that whole process the EPA held hearings. They held one in western North Carolina. They held them in Tennessee. And PRAG had the right, not just have it say in those hearings, as anybody did who wanted to and had the nerve could get up and say anything at those hearings. But they had a right to actually enter as a ‘friend’ as part of the lawsuit. They actually had a right to get their concerns on the table in a way that was more formal and that could lay out information better than you could lay it out in your two minutes in a public hearing.
They were successful in that. There were some, there have been some changes. Talked a lot. It’s a source of debate whether Champion made the changes because it was economically an important thing for them to do because the industry was going in a better direction or whether they made it because they cared about the river and the people of Haywood County. And you would get varying, quite different opinions on that from different people.
I never talked a lot to corporate offices at Champion. But the little bit I did, it’s not that they were bad people, they were a little bit blinded by their position. But I think most of us are, in anything like this. Most of us have a point of view, and it’s hard for us to shift if it’s not in our interest, whether its economically or because of how we feel about ourselves to shift. I think if, if it had been possible for people of the union, people like them in Cook County in Tennessee to sit down and learn about each other before they got pitted against each other, I think the fight could have been very different.
But Champion they brought in a PR firm who was an attack dog. And they, in the opinion of a lot of us, deliberately stirred up things to the point where it became dangerous at least for Dick Mullinax. And much more acrimonious than it had to be.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, I mean I didn’t know the details of the Dead Pigeon River Group as much because we were working with PRAG. At one point, the local chapter of the Sierra Club, there was a gentleman there who was working with us, trying to talk about a technical process, something that would be a classic win-win. At least not everybody lose everything.
So I didn’t know as much about PRAG and those groups. I did get to meet Jill and Steve Hodges. I do know at one point, and this is something that if it had happened earlier on maybe would have mattered. There was an organization called Highland Center in east Tennessee that specializes in bringing folks together to find common ground, particularly around issues of social justice or community protection. They actually hosted a meeting where Steve and Jill and some of the others from Tennessee sat down with some of the union folks from Champion to try to build some sort of understanding of their common relationships.
Highlands has had success with that in things like people whose jobs were going to Mexico meeting the folks from the maquiladoros (sp?] So they’ve had some success in helping people understand that they are being pitted against each other, they are not natural enemies. Bigger forces that are ‘dividing and conquering.’ [David murmurs] The enemy is not the guy who is getting a lower pay in Mexico. The enemy is not this guy that can’t make a living as a river guide in Tennessee. The enemy is the system that pits you against each other and gives neither of you the power to control your environment.
One of the questions I always asked, or series of questions I always tell people to ask when they are thinking about something like this is: who benefits, who pays, who decides. And I think too frequently, in fact almost all the time, who decides tends to be people in power, and the decision benefits them. That’s the case with corporations; that’s the case with sort of anything you can name. So the folks in Tennessee there were folks like Jill and Steve who would have had a lot more in common with the folks in the Champion unions, working in the mill, if they could have met each other on mutual ground, early.
There were other folks who had more in common with the corporate managers of Champion who were more thinking about the economic progress from a standpoint of development. I think there were probably some tensions there. I don’t know the inside story of that. I do know that we had a small meeting one time and one of the folks from Tennessee came over who was pretty shocked, you know, ‘why aren’t you meeting in a Holiday Inn? you’re meeting in this little funky house that the electricity is wonky.’
Well, if we had tried to meet in a Holiday Inn they wouldn’t have let us. They wouldn’t have rented the room to us because at that point it had become very much us against them. And the few of us in North Carolina that were trying to say hey maybe we need to clean this up were pretty much persona non gratis in places like a nice Holiday Inn.

Partial Transcript: The lawsuit, when it became clear that there was not going to be any political will in North Carolina to make changes and clean up and meet environmental guidelines, the folks in Tennessee particularly decided that they would try to get EPA to take over the permit. So the way the Environmental Protection laws work is EPA grants power to the state. If the states wish to write their own permits. To enforce environmental regulations and enforce permits and control permits within their own borders.
But that is not an unlimited right; if they don’t do it right, EPA has the authority to say, ‘you’re not meeting the minimal conditions of federal law and so we will take back that power in this case.’ They were not taking back all of North Carolina’s power, but you’re not meeting your obligations in the Champion permit, and therefore, we’ll take it over. So the lawsuit was about trying to convince EPA to do that.
It was started, as I say, by folks in Tennessee. The only North Carolina organization that was at all interested in being part of that lawsuit on the side of the Tennessee folk, as opposed to on the side of Champion, was PRAG. It ended up gaining the right to be part of that lawsuit. They got standing, which involved (a) getting enough members who were directly affected because in order to have standing in a lawsuit, you have to be directly affected. Well, clearly, the folks living between Champion and the Tennessee line in North Carolina were directly affected. They got the right to be part of that lawsuit.
Eventually, after way too many months and years of hearings and acrimony and newspaper articles that said the world ?? if that happens. They did win a partial battle. So conditions that Champion was going to be required to meet were ramped up some. Now, Champion eventually switched from the pure chlorinated process they had been using to a less toxic form of chlorine dioxide. It did clean up the river some. It did make some difference. Also made some difference in the conditions of workers in the plant. Although no one was really talking about that, but it’s an important piece of what I think is the deeper story that we need to know about conditions of workers in these corporations.
Now there was a lot of discussion about, and apparently one paper where Champion actually admitted at one point that they kinda could have done this and part of it was an economic decision and so it wasn’t just about what the lawsuit made them do. I think part of it is they really wanted to keep the principle of their corporate perogatives, you shouldn’t make us do this, even if it’s something we wanted to do. Kids could be like that, yeah, okay maybe I want to go there, but you can’t make me. (laughs with David)
I’m not going to do this unless I want to do it and you can’t make me. ‘You’re not the boss of me.’ That did happen, there is, I haven’t been close to it in the last decade and so I don’t know, I can’t really weigh with any authority into the controversy of how clean the river is now. Champion is gone, it’s now, it was partially worker owned, although I always wondered, if the workers got 44% was that really enough to give them the authority to make . . . But at any rate, it cleaned up, to some degree, it’s now Evergreen. The name of the company, not the company necessarily. It’s better than it was. But there’s still contamination going into the river.
There’s still contamination going into the air. And to some degree that’s an inevitable part of the industrial processes that make what we have. I think the issue remains of there’s not enough incentive for corporations to do the best they can. The incentive for corporations and some would argue the legal incentive, if it’s a public corporation, is to make the shareholders money. It doesn’t make the shareholders money for the river to look pretty and there’d be more trout down the stream.

Partial Transcript: Wilma Dykeman is, again I’m not a fan of designating individual heroes because I think we have a tendency to do that and forget all the people in the trenches, but Wilma Dykeman certainly would be one of those heroes, or heroines. She, at a time when nobody else much was really talking about the environment, and the word ‘environment’ really wasn’t being used that much. She was seriously a champion not just for the water quality, but for the whole environment. It has been a long time since I read her book, but I do remember being struck, by how much she was ahead of her time in thinking about the whole ecosystem.
And I don’t even remember at this point if she used the word ‘ecosystem’ but she understood that everything is connected to everything else. She understood that things matter that you don’t understand matters. She was quite brave and vocal in speaking about it.
Her book, which I just re-read a couple of years ago, and what struck me was, so okay the language was pretty much you could tell it was written 30 years ago, or however many years ago, because of some of the language and convoluted sentences that we tend not to use now, but her understanding, her grip of that it matters that the whole system works together was pretty prescient, was pretty interesting.
She was, particularly for her time, or even for now, it’s not people who speak up, particularly women who speak up, tend to get tarred with this ‘loudmouth’ ‘activist’ ‘you’re not a lady.’ She was pretty fearless in a very genteel way, not being cowed by what people would say about her or, you know, ‘the girl should be quiet.’ I think her legacy is not just the book and the specific things she did, but she’s one of those people, and there are a lot of them in, I’m most familiar with the rural south and the south in general because that’s where I’ve lived most of my life and particularly Appalachia, there are some amazing strong women who at the same time they’re doing all the things that the little lady is supposed to do on the farm who are out there to protect the environment, sometimes to protect their children, but sometimes just because they care and they’re fierce.
If I were going into battle, man, it would be mostly women I’d want around me for that kind of battle.

Partial Transcript: I think that it is pretty easy to get either complacent or to think I can’t make a difference. The problems are so huge, whether you’re talking political, social justice, environmental justice, the environment – what can I do? It’s just me. I can’t do much. I should just -- and besides, I’ve got to pay the rent next week. And I think to understand the stories and to remember the stories of people that against some pretty serious odds, frankly in most cases against odds bigger than I’ve had, fought for what they believed was right. Even when it made them unpopular. Even when it put them in danger. Even when they felt like they couldn’t win.
I don’t think you have to win to a hero. I think you just have to fight for what you believe and not give in to despair and not give in to complacency. Not give in to ‘you’re in a nice house, don’t rock the boat.’ And I think we need more of those people now, rather than less. I think we are, for environmental reasons, for political reasons, we’re at some potential serious tipping points and what our future looks like as a country, as a world, as a state.
To the degree that we can get some inspiration from people that fought when it was even harder. Who fought against odds that we don’t even, can even imagine. We need to keep those stories in front of us. I think that who tells the story, I mean I’ve always sort of had these three questions: who benefits, who pays, who gets to decide, but there’s also who gets to tell the story. To the degree that the story, back to Champion, to the degree that the story got told of Champion’s a good corporate citizen, don’t let the dominoes fall, if this happens they’ll go away and that’s horrible. To the degree that that’s the story, it is hard to get a reasonable conversation about what makes a difference. I think that’s true, not just around environmental issues, but around all the serious issues we’re facing right now as a country and a world.

Partial Transcript: I think when you forget that fighting matters you lose some of your ability to feel like you mean something in the world. One of the big issues right now in terms of broader issues in the world, is whether the younger generation is going to pick up, whichever battle you’re thinking about, whether it’s gun rights, or environment or women’s rights or whatever. If the younger generation feels beaten down or feels so complacent or feels that they can’t make a difference, or buys into the idea that their vote or their actions can’t count. Then I think we lose our ability to move forward in a way that will not just protect folks that are at the bottom of the heap right now but will ultimately protect us all.
I think having those stories is really important. I met a woman. I was at a civil rights action, not an action actually, a talk, and the woman in front of me turned around and we were talking, she was African-American, and she said, “who were your heroines growing up?” And she was telling me that in her family what her mom did was deliberately read her stories almost every night that had heroines or heroes in them. Who could you look to when you were growing up? Whether you knew them, or it was just a story that you heard about, and I think she’s an activist.
And being an activist in the African-American community in the South is a big challenge. And I think hearing those stories young, of people who stood up and mattered, helps shape your ability to think of yourself as somebody that matters. Somebody that can make change. And somebody that needs to make change.

Partial Transcript: I think one of the things that was a big part of the Champion story, that is a big part of the stories of a lot of the environmental and other justices fights that I’ve seen or been tangential to over the years is the issue of power and who gets to wield power and the issue of how thoroughly a story can divide people who have a lot more in common from each other. I think the important thing about remembering a culture, or remembering of stories is to help kind of cut through that. And so that you understand that yeah, if I had just met this guy, twenty years ago and we’d been talking, I couldn’t demonize him as thoroughly now as I do. I’d understand where he’s coming from and I’d find some common ground.
There is some really interesting efforts happening now between bringing, they’re called blue green alliances, bringing labor and environmental groups together, or community groups working on the environment to understand not only each other’s problems, but how they can help find joint solutions. And I think those are encouraging in the field of environment and labor. I think there are other things happening. Bringing people that don’t see anything in common together matters.