Mark Burget -- Remarks
The Nature Conservancy North America Senior Leaders Meeting Atlanta
3/11/19
Good afternoon, my Nature Conservancy family. Welcome. How good it feels to be with you -- the wonderful, smart, caring, capable people of this amazing organization. This amazing force for the future of life.
But bear with me; instead of the future, I want to talk about the past. And I want to turn from our moment of celebration to a bit of consternation.
Let’s travel back in time. Back to before I was born. This is a true story. The year is 1954.
A prescient scientist – an ecologist -- sits at a desk, worrying about the havoc that humankind is raining down on the natural world. Our ecologist knows, well ahead of so many others, that nature is the foundation on which our own lives so clearly depend. It’s 1954 – 65 years ago – yet already it is so obvious to this scientist that we are facing a crisis.
But what is to be done? Someone needs to tell the story. Someone needs to preserve a future for nature, for humanity. But it’s 1954. Who will do what needs doing?
Up in the state of New York, outside of New York City, others have launched a new organization, an organization to be called The Nature Conservancy. Volunteers so committed to the future of nature that they mortgage their homes. Let’s think about that. In the early 1950s, these people have the courage to mortgage their homes, they leverage everything they have, to complete their first project, protecting the Mianus River Gorge. Our very first TNC preserve.
Our ecologist, sitting there at her desk, is inspired by this group of volunteers in New York. She writes to this new organization, this Nature Conservancy, to petition for another chapter – a chapter in the state of Maine, a state whose amazing coastline she has observed in exquisite detail.
In fact, she has written about that Maine coastline in beautiful books, including The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. These books read like poetry. She’s a beautiful, inspiring science writer. She wants not only to observe, but also to save the world she loves.
Our ecologist helps launch the new Maine Chapter – and she serves as chair of its Board of Trustees.
Her name? Rachel Carson, one of the most extraordinary women in the history of the United States of America. Many people say she was the founder of the modern environmental movement.
I personally believe it is time to get a monument to Rachel Carson on the national mall in Washington DC. Rachel Carson really is that important to the history of the United States and the future of life. And she is that important to the history of The Nature Conservancy. Yes, it’s true. Our TNC predecessors were not all Founding Fathers.
At a recent meeting of the Board of Directors in Nashville , I happened to reference the role that Rachel Carson played in launching our organization. Not one of the board members on that committee – all women, by the way – knew of that history. They were astounded.
So my suggestion this afternoon is this: It’s about time we reclaimed the best of our history at TNC. It’s about time we remembered the courage and the sacrifice of Rachel Carson and the many others who placed their faith – and their fortunes – in our hands. After my 27 years of knowing and loving our organization, I personally believe that it’s time we turned to TNC champions like Rachel Carson to understand our calling in today’s world.
In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote the book for which she is best known, Silent Spring. In that, the last of her books, she wrote of a time to come, a time in which our world would be devoid of birdsong, devoid of birds, devoid of the wonderful and necessary diversity of life. A Silent Spring.
We are approaching that time. As the world’s largest conservation organization, holding ourselves out as providing solutions to the greatest challenges of our time, we need to be honest about this. We have the podium. It is time for us to make ourselves heard.
A few headlines that have sparked my sense of urgency:
1. On our current path, as planet Earth heats up, the world’s oceans will rise by at least five feet, making it impossible for hundreds of millions of people to live in our largely coastal global civilization.
2. By 2050, more than 40% of the world’s insect species will be extinct. We can’t even begin to know the impact of that loss. We don’t even understand yet what all of those creatures do for us. We haven’t even identified and named them all.
3. In a now normal year, catastrophic wildfires in the United States burn more than 10 times the acreage that we at The Nature Conservancy protect. A 1:10 ratio of protection to destruction.
4. And how about this: Somewhere around 2050, on our current trajectory, measured by total weight, in the world’s oceans there may be more plastic than fish.
And I wanted to be inspiring today. Really! But this IS the future we are headed to. Let’s pivot now -- to optimism! There is reason to do so. Because we know there is an alternative future for life on Earth. There is a wonderful, beautiful, sustainable future – there is a promised land here on Earth – if only we make some entirely possible changes.
Those changes are embodied in our Shared Conservation Agenda.
Our Shared Conservation Agenda is simply a response to the biggest challenges to the future of life. It is a small set of the necessary, entirely possible, best opportunities to ensure a beautiful, meaningful future for life on Earth.
Here is what I mean by that. Thanks to science conducted by TNC and others, we now know that the future of life depends on three things:
–The future of life depends on protecting land and water for nature.
– The future of life depends on transforming how we human beings meet our most basic needs: food & water, energy, and infrastructure; and
--The future of life depends on whether we the people understand our dependence on nature and care enough to act consistently with that understanding.
Yes, the future of life depends on our over-arching strategy: Protect, Transform, and Inspire.
That’s good news! Our strategy makes good sense – we know what needs to happen.
So what stands in our way? What holds us back? Of course, there are lots of obstacles to our utopia, lots of challenges, lots of hurdles.
The one that worries me the most, is this: It seems to me these days that we are too often so eager to hold our big TNC tent together that we are afraid to speak the truth. Even though we know what is happening on our planet, even though we actually know the answers to our challenges, we are just too afraid to speak up. I worry that we may have forgotten the courage of those who mortgaged their homes at the Mianus River Gorge. I worry that we may have forgotten that we were founded on the courage of Rachel Carson.
To be clear, I do see real examples of courage across our organization. Here are just a few examples:
· In Arkansas, where State Director Scott Simon just held a special meeting of the Arkansas board of Trustees, focused on climate change, even though in Arkansas in these polarizing times it is difficult to have a collaborative discussion about climate change;
· In Virginia, where Locke Ogens and her team worked with our North America Climate Strategy to approach one of their best and also most conservative donors to raise the first $1M personal gift for our 50 state climate initiative – and now have hired a senior climate expert to lead our climate efforts in Virginia.
· In Missouri, where Adam McLane and his team built on their excellent relationship with Enterprise to raise $30M for our water work not just in Missouri, but also across our North America region and indeed across the world.
· In Connecticut, where Frogard Ryan has worked so hard to make our Connecticut board far more diverse, adding three new board members – it turns out that three is critical mass if we want to really hear diverse perspectives on our boards.
· Same goes for Jim Desmond in Oregon – where we now have the first African American chair of a TNC state board.
· And, of course, in Washington State, where Mike Stevens, Mo McBroom and their team reached across community divides to lead a courageous campaign to put a fee on carbon – risking what turned out to be an inevitable loss against five oil companies that together pumped a record-breaking $30M into the “NO” campaign.
These are courageous moves – and I know there are a lot more.
Yet, on balance, I think we need to ask ourselves what more can we -- and must we -- be doing? We have built, by some measures, the most successful conservation organization in history. We raised $750M last year alone. We spent, in North America alone, almost $500M. I’m talking operations, not capital. That is $100M more than we were spending annually just a few years ago.
And it’s not just the money. It’s also who we know. Think about this – we had hundreds of meetings with Members of Congress last year during our annual Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill. That included the big four: Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. In America today, that is some serious access.
So, a question we should consider is one asked at a Board of Directors meeting many years ago. One member asked then: “We’ve spent all these years building up our reputation, our relationships, our fundraising, our knowledge. So, when are we planning to truly deploy those assets for our mission?”
We have the knowledge. We have access to the powerful. But are we using our knowledge and access to bring about the change that we know needs to happen?
There will be more plastic than fish in the sea.
We’re blowing through carbon budgets.
North America is burning.
I worry that we -- and I include me in that “we” -- lack the courage on which we were founded, the courage to stand up and say what we know to be true. Somewhere along the way, we conflated the words non-confrontational and noncontroversial. We are non-confrontational, for sure. But that doesn’t mean we are noncontroversial. Our mission itself is controversial these days. But what are we going to do; be cowed into silence?
Here we are in Atlanta. We will take time to remember Martin Luther King this week. Among Dr. King’s great revelations, born of his reluctance to speak up against the war in Vietnam, is this truth:
There comes a time when silence is betrayal.
On the topic of speaking up: Following the publication of Silent Spring, in 1963, Rachel Carson was called to testify before the U.S. Senate. In front of a Senate Committee she summarized her message:
Our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves.
That sentence is profound even today – but imagine – this was in 1963. I was two years old. Let me read it again:
Our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves.
You might find it interesting to know how some responded to Rachel Carson. The New York Times later reported that “The personal attacks against Carson were stunning. She was accused of being a communist sympathizer and dismissed as a spinster with an affinity for cats.”
An affinity for cats! Oh my. And we think the current times are bizarre.
When I recall Rachel Carson’s words, when I remember the personal attacks that she was willing to endure as a result of writing that book, I have to ask myself, what does it mean that we carry the legacy of Rachel Carson?
Given the courage of this TNC Founding Mother, what are we at TNC called to do now? How are we meant to show up at this time in history, given who we are and what we now know?
By the way, Silent Spring was published two years after the first climate change warning was delivered to a President of the United States. That was in 1961. Think about that. The first time an American President was warned about potential climate change was in 1961. Those of us born in that year were then the “future generation” that we people say we care about so much.
So, my request is this: Let’s please carry a question with us. Let’s each ask ourselves, what does it mean for me to carry the courageous legacy of Rachel Carson? What does it mean for us to meet in this city, the city of Martin Luther King?
As Rachel Carson testified before the U.S. Senate, she was in the final stages of her long battle with breast cancer. Her bones were so brittle that some worried that she might not survive the testimony. She wore a wig to conceal the fact that she had lost her hair to her cancer treatments.
Within a year, Rachel Carson died. She passed into the spirit world. At her death, our amazing, most accomplished ecologist was still serving as chair of TNC’s Maine Board of Trustees. In her last act – Rachel Carson made a wonderful enduring contribution – she entrusted us – The Nature Conservancy – with the ongoing proceeds of her most famous book, Silent Spring. Talk about a legacy.
As we begin our week together, I thank you all for carrying that legacy. And I urge us now, in these most challenging times for the future of life, I urge us to find together Rachel Carson’s courage.
Our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves.
Rachel Carson was right. And now, the future of life depends on us.
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