Campbell Read – Texas Legacy

TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: Campbell Read (CR)
INTERVIEWERS: David Todd (DT)
DATE: October 26, 2000
LOCATION: Dallas, Texas
TRANSCRIBERS: Lacy Goldsmith and Robin Johnson
REEL: 2131

Please note that the video includes roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recording. Numbers mark the time codes for the VHS tape copy of the interview. “Misc.” refers to various off-camera conversation or background noise, unrelated to the interview.

DT: My name is David Todd and I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. And it is October 26, the year 2000. We’re in Dallas, Texas at the home of Dr. Campbell Read who has been a statistics professor at SMU [Southern Methodist University] but has also been involved in a variety of environmental issues and efforts in Texas. And some of his contributions include participation in efforts to link conservation and spirituality, conservation and politics, conservation and trade and many other aspects that we’ll probably find out about. I wanted to take this chance to thank you for participating.
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CR: You’re welcome. Glad to be here now that you’re here.
DT: Well we appreciate it. I thought we might start by asking you if you could trace your interest in conservation and environmental protection back to any early experience or a mentor.
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CR: Well it goes back, in some ways, to my childhood. My father used to take my sister and me bird watching, a sort of introduction to bird wa—watching when I was about ten years old and—along the Forth which is the estuary outside the City of Edinburgh in Scotland where I was brought up as a child and in my youth and I kept that interest for many years and sort of a general interest in wildlife grew up there. But it wasn’t really until about 1984 that I seriously got involved in environmental issues. I began to sense that something—things were not quite right. I think it was Sir Peter Scott, the son of Scott of the Antarctic who was one of the earliest people to become aware that wildlife was really in danger as early as about 1961. And he founded the Wildfowl Trust at Slimbridge and Gloucestershire in England as a captive breeding place for water fowl, ducks, geese and swans and also a place for people to view the wintering flocks of these water fowl during the winter on the estuary of the River Severn in England. And I took my niece and my nephew there in 1984 on a summer day and it was definitely a kind of con—conversion experience because Sir Peter Scott, one of his aims was to make the—make it possible for the public to come as close as possible to the birds. And so many of the species of birds were quite amenable and you’ll find that they walk in front of you along the paths, through the trust grounds. Other birds had to be kept in pens because they were more skittish about being close to humans. But it was a wonderful experience and I could see some of these birds were in danger of becoming extinct like the Hawaiian goose which really almost became extinct when thirty pairs were brought to Slimbridge. The last thirty pairs were rounded up, brought to Slimbridge. They found out very quickly how to get them to breed in captivity. And the only way the flock survives now in Hawaii is because periodically they have to replenish it from stocks in Slimbridge and other trust centers in Britain and in other places in the world including the Dallas zoo. And—and this—this example is a marvelous example of—of protecting biodiversity which is one of my main interests. But that day in Slimbridge was a—a catalyst in getting me involved in—in wildlife conservation as far as I could.
DT: Can you recall some sense of epiphany or other sort of impression that very day or was it just a more gradual thing after visiting?
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CR: That—that was the—the epiphany, if you like, that day at Slimbridge. I did all kinds of things afterwards, joined organizations and—and began by just trying to learn things, the Nature Conservancy, the Audubon Society through Dallas County Audubon Society. The International Crane Foundation became one—one of my chief interests and I went to China with them in 1987 with Jim Harris and a group to Poyang Lake to do a census of the endangered Siberian crane and White-naped cranes and other cranes there. And I’ve been on Earth Watch expeditions since then and moved into other areas but always kept wildlife conservation in the back of my mind as one of my great loves and my great concerns now.
DT: Well, has there been any way that you have been able to inject your concern about wildlife conservation in you career as a professor of statistics?
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CR: Not too much as a professor of statistics, although I’ve done things on the campus at SMU. I actually with the help of John Clair(?) organized a conference—three day conference called the “Decline of Wildlife.” And—in I think it was 19—1985—89 or thereabouts and we had Russ Mittermeier who came from World Wildlife Fund to give a presentation on primates. We had many presenters and it got the students concerned about the problem. In my own classes, about the only thing that I’d really done was to—or two things, one was to announce to my students that I would not set any numerical problems involving a storyline to do with animal experimentation because I—I don’t believe in that. And the other was to point out that the gross national product is, in fact, a very—a misleading measure or indicator of the real state of our economy because it doesn’t give any negative value, if you like, to—to the destruction of natural resources. In—in fact when the Exxon Valdez spill occurred, they actually gave a positive contribution by all the money that was spent—government money, taxpayers money on the workers of government agencies who went to—to do the cleanup. And that was considered a positive contribution to the gross national product and that was in—in—in everybody else’s eyes a disaster. The gross national product did not reflect the disaster that had occurred in any way.
DT: You talked to some of your students about how the GNP was a poor gauge of the true value of the economy but you also mentioned that you tried to teach your students about I guess some of your misgivings about animal testing. Can you explain a little bit about…
(Talking at same time)
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CR: As—as I said, the only—the only thing I did there was to announce to my students that I would not set the many problems in which the storyline involved animal experimentation. Many—many of the exercises you get—numerical exercises you get in—in introductory statistics textbooks are—involve animal experimentation of one kind or another and I just told them I would not set any problems because I don’t believe in harmful animal experimentation, that would harm animals even if it’s going to supposedly contribute to human happiness.
DT: You just feel that—you’re disagreement with that is on a sort of ethical or that they sense pain and so they should be given more consideration?
(Talking at same time)
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CR: Ethical and religious grounds. I think—one of the things I did on campus was to arrange for Thomas Berry who wrote the book “The Dream of the Earth” to be invited to campus as a speaker. We had a very good turnout. And he develops the idea of an earth community of human beings and—and all living creatures and this notion of an earth community is very important to me now so—so I read his works. And the idea of our integration as animals ourselves with ot—other creatures is very important to me from a religious perspective, although one of my concerns has been that the Christian churches in general have not cared for the earth because they do not sense this connection. Western Christianity developed what I called an anthropocentric worldview. That is a worldview which views the creation of—of the universe and of the earth and of life on earth as all having been done by the Creator for the benefit of humankind. The Bible is predominantly concerned, at least the western Christian view of the Bible, is predominately concerned with the place of the human species in the eyes of God as we see that. And my view now, along with many others, in particular, I’ve looked a bit at Native American attitudes to creation and other religions is that other species play a vital role in—in the—in the creation in all their own right, quite apart from any value they may have for human beings.
DT: Would you give credence to the Gaia hypothesis that there’s some sort of a cellular community relationship among all life?
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CR: It’s a very good device I think for—for gaining a sense of this earth community—community of the earth including the earth itself. I’m not so sure that I believe the earth is a living, vital organism in its own, but obviously there’s a—you can conceive of the earth as being one giant ecosystem with other ecosystems all interlocking and interfacing with each other. I think that’s an important thing to do and of the importance of that. And we are part of that and I—I think we have somehow failed to realize the danger that we are in from the destruction of other species—the danger to ourselves in a—in a—in an ecosystem which may collapse at some point.
DT: Do you think there are writings in the Bible or the Koran or other religious materials that give some sort of mandate towards stewardship or do you see most organized religions as being largely indifferent to those issues?
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CR: I think the idea of stewardship that I’ve—which I know is one that derives from the creation story in—in Genesis, but I—I think there’s been a misleading interpretation of—of this. Another that we invited to SMU was Dr. Megan McKenna who is a Roman Catholic sister who’s worked with Native Americans and still does, I believe, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And she talks about the—the story in which we are told to subdue the earth and dominate it. And the word subdue itself means “to administer justice to those that are under you in the way that the Creator administers justice to us.” So this—this gives us a quite different perspective on—on our place in the creation and the idea of stewardship certainly can arise out of that. But I go further. Or I would go further than talking about stewardship. I think the situation is grave enough that western Christian churches need to think about, talk about ministry to the earth. Just as we minister to—to human beings in need, the earth is in—in—in need and we need to minister to that. And a very interesting article that came out in a religious journal some years ago points out that to—to many Christians, this idea of ministry is something that—that—of which they’re a bit frightened. Stewardship is fine because in the analogy of—of an estate, a land estate, in which the estate agent is the steward for the owner of the estate and can view the work that he or she does from a professional standpoint as a steward and can be satisfied with that, doesn’t involve any attachments, spiritual or emotional, to that which is being cared for. But I—I think that in—in my perspective of—of a relationship with the land and with the creatures on it, we have to talk about the concept of ministry to the earth because the situation is now so bad, so grave. I
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sometimes wonder as the years have gone by if all we’re doing is—in the environmental movement, is to simply delay the inevitable. If our population continues to explode and if corporations continue to have the power that they have today in which everything is relegated to the—to the bottom line as the—the dominant factor, then we really are in for—for a serious situation. Dr. Peter Raven who is the director of the Missouri Botanical Gardens was in Dallas a month or so ago and he said that we are in danger of losing one third of our plant species by the year, I think he said 2050. Now the plants are at the bottom of the food chain and think what’s going to happen at the top of the food chain when that happens.
DT: [inaudible]
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CR: No I didn’t. I don’t think I used the word judged.
DT: Maybe you can continue a little bit about your interest and opinions about religion and the environment.
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CR: Yes. I conducted a survey—this is one thing I did do in—in the statistics department, of all theological seminar—seminaries in the United States to try and find out what training, if you like, what course material students in theological seminaries were—were either required to take or had an option to take around caring for the earth or around creation. And it was out of this survey—I got about sixty percent, I think, response rate from theological seminaries. And, it turns out that, in general, not many of them actually require students to take a course which reflects, in an ethical or theological manner, about the role of creation in—in the universe, about our responsibility towards conservation of wildlife. The worldview in theological seminaries seems to be, as I say, an anthropocentric one. I’ll be happy to let you have a copy of that survey. But it—it gave me a very, if you like, a discouraging view of the lack of training that, say, pastors of churches have had when they become ministers in—in a pulpit. If they’ve been trained so poorly to reflect on this, there’s—there’s not much hope for them to pass on some wisdom to their congregations when it comes to thinking about the—our relationship to other creatures, our responsibility for them as Christians or wh—in whatever religion—religion we might be. I’m tending to concentrate on Christianity because that was the focus of the survey and I have since then become a Unitarian Universalist where I find that I have more, if you like, free play for reflecting on this and—and I think that the—the members of those churches and their ministers are more open to thinking about this and reflecting on it than you find in—in—in many Christian denominations. Now don’t get me wrong, there are relatively few, I mean relatively to the large number of churches—parish churches in the country, there are many priests and professors who are concerned about this issue and have written about it much more extensively than I have and have much more influence that I have. But I think it’s still a small drop in a bucket that—where a lot of stirring has—has yet to be done. I think of here in the City of Dallas, where we started the Dallas area network on religion and conservation about 1988, and we conducted and organized in Thanksgiving Square on St. Frances Day a celebration of Thanksgiving for creation in which we—we involved
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representatives of all the religions that you find in the Dallas area, including Hindus and Buddhists, as well as Christians and Catholics—Christians and orthodox as well as western Christians and—and the Jewish representatives. And on those two occasions, we had that celebration. It was very good, but on the whole I think I—I spent a year or two answering invitations to go and give talks at Sunday schools—adult Sunday schools largely, on this subject. But I—I don’t think the message has really sunk in—in Dallas to our—the majority of churches of the—of—there’s so many human problems. I know in—in the African American churches, they have so many social justice problems to engage in and reflect on theologically that—that this is not a priority with them. But even in the Anglo churches, I—I don’t there’s enough attention—not nearly enough attention given to this. You can see in the liturgies of the orthodox churches—western orthodox churches, that in those liturgies there was an anthropocentric worldview given. When I left a Episcopal parish that I used to go to, I like Martin Luther, nailed my statement to the church door—the church bulletin board and it was a photograph of a cormorant, which is a sea bird, covered with oil from the Exxon Valdez oil spill and then the first two lines of the Gloria, “Glory to God in the highest and peace to His people on earth.” That summed up my feeling about the anthropocentric worldview and the liturgy of the Episcopal church and also others. And I crossed out “peace to His people on earth”—the phrase to his people and I replaced it “to all creatures”—”peace to all creatures on earth.” To my mind, we would be much more expansive and glorifying opening statement of the Gloria than we have. And that was my statement before I left.
DT: Well could you maybe explain a little bit more about why you think organized churches and other religious institutions maybe have neglected or slighted conservation concerns? You mentioned that perhaps the African American churches have more pressing needs to provide for people in their own communities but there are certainly congregations that have more money and more material goods to take care of perhaps that wouldn’t be an issue.
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CR: I—I think the—the reason may have something to do deep back—a long way back in history. The Bible, at least the—the bulk of it in the Old Testament is—is—is—is religious writings of the Hebrew people who lived in a harsh environment, sem—semi-arid desert in which the wilderness really was a place to be feared with hostile components to it. The settlers who came to this continent must have felt the same kind of thing about the wilderness as a place to be field—feared and they were wild harmful creatures and it was dark at night and it was a very dangerous place to go. And maybe this—this way of thinking sort of permeated and—and percolated right down to—to modern times and that—the root of the problem could lie in—in those few facts that I’ve just given. But I—I think I’d have to defer to theologians who are more trained, if you like, in the background of the Old Testament than I am to—to give a—a clearer answer on that.
DT: Maybe you could take us on toward another topic that you’ve been involved in and that’s the interplay of politics and the environment and some of your interests in trying to get the Green Party established in Texas, perhaps to establish in the secular realm where it’s been more difficult to create things than the religious world?
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CR: All right. Well, before we get to the Green Party because that really only started this year. For many years, like Ned Fritz and others to whom you talked, I engaged in the usual kind of dialog that one has. I was vice-president of Dallas County Audubon Society for many years and with that and—and convener of the Dallas area network on religion and conservation, I would send off letters to legislators to get this or that piece of legislation attended to in—in a way that we viewed was consistent with—with conservation. One example of that was a campaign that I got involved in to—to get the railroad commission in Texas to enact regulations regarding oil pits and oil tanks. Whenever they drill for oil, you get spillage and sometimes they simply create an open space on the ground, we call that an oil pit. In other cases, they’d have it drip into a kind of enormous tank. Well migratory birds, particularly water fowl, would see these flying overhead and thinking it was water, would fly right into the oil and become coated with oil and—and die. And the regulation we wanted passed, and it took a long time and a lot of pressure with the help of the U—of the federal government, was to get them to enact a regulation requiring operators and owners of these drilling operations to cover oil pits and to cover their tanks so that the birds would not see the liquid and would not fly down into them and drown. I’ve just written a letter during a comment period to the Fish and Wildlife Service requesting that critical habitat be designated for the wintering areas of—
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of a small bird called a piping plover because it’s endangered and the Fish and Wildlife Service have been required by a court decision to set up such critical habitat designations. Well they—they wanted comments from the public and if we didn’t do this, well they—they probably feel that it wasn’t necessary to set up very many areas. And so these are just two examples of the kind of work that we do all the time. Ned Fritz, of course, has been mainly concerned about forests. I’ve been largely concerned about birds but there are other issues too. We’ve been trying to pressure Governor Bush to—to authorize the setting up of a zone along the Texas Gulf Coast free of shrimp fishing at all times of the year. Because dead sea turtles have been washed up on our shores now, particularly during the nesting season and during the shrimp fishing season, because the shrimp fisherman refuse to install turtle excluder devices, something they’re supposed to do by law, in their nets to allow turtles—sea turtles to escape when they’re catching shrimp. My association with the Green Party really requires looking at another issue first and that was to do with globalization. Tom Campo who’s an activist in Dallas helped to organize a conference on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in—the end of January 1998—7 or 8, I forget which year. When the wealthy countries met through the OECD in Paris, virtually in secret, and were it not for a kind of French deep throat, you know what I mean referring to the Watergate hearings, who leaked a copy of the document to non—non governmental organizations that we were able to engage in an outcry and finally stop this from happening. But it got me interested in globalization generally and by—by globalization I mean the system of so-called free trade that we have now, really corporate managed trade. Nobody has really defined the word globalization for everybody to understand but that’s—that’s my use of it in this conversation. It means the particular international global trade system that we have under the World Trade Organization and under NAFTA. And whenever you put ‘ization’ at the end of a word it means things are
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in a state of change towards something ideal. Mobilization means making things mobile, usually an army. Globalization means making trade completely free. That means no regulations interfering whatsoever. So I prepared to go to Seattle to take part in protests against the World Trade Organization and I was educated largely through Public Citizen and Laurie Wallach. World Trade Organization – in which I found that all of the rules for the World Trade Organization had been written essentially by trans-national corporations. And the government representatives of the wealthy nations simply had the corporations write the rules for them and they took these and had them enacted. And what you have is a very powerful organization. The old organization, GATT [General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs], who is not so powerful because there, whenever you had a rule—a new rule set up or dispute ruling made, every member of GATT had to agree before it was enacted. When it was transformed into the World Trade Organization, they turned that rule on it’s head—on it’s head. And now if a dispute is set—set—settled with some ruling or some rule is passed by the majority of members, every member of—of WTO has to agree before it is overturned. Now that’s a completely different picture. It—it makes the WTO essentially supercede our laws in this country—our sovereign laws. We have to face economic sanctions otherwise and—and this is—this is how things have happened.
DT: Can you give an example of where WTO decisions have threatened to undermine American environmental law?
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CR: Yes. And—and you—you use the word threatened. It also has a chilling effect. One is the dolphin tuna controversy which really got me interested in this and that was under GATT rather than the—the WTO, where, if you recall, after an outcry when Nathan LaBudde managed to go on board a Panamania—Panamanian tuna fishing vessel and filmed how dolphins were being dragged up into the nets and slaughtered along with the tuna. Because in the eastern tropical Pacific, you get schools of dolphins that swim right above schools of tuna. There’s a kind of symbiotic relationship, we don’t know why they do that. So they would look for—the fishing vessels would look for schools of dolphins. They would encircle them with these enormous nets they have nowadays and then draw the nets in and there’d be a mass slaughter of dolphins as well as of tuna. And finally after an outcry when this film was shown before a congressional subcommittee and a federal court hearing, the government was required to—to administer the Marine Mammal Protection Act in it’s entirety to protect dolphins from this kind of thing. And so the U.S. introduced an embargo against importing shrimp from any—sorry, tuna from any country that engages in setting on dolphins. And that’s Mexico and Venezuela. So Mexico threatened to go to GATT/WTO and that was enough for the U.S.—Clinton administration to get the congress to loosen the protection of dolphins, which they did when Al Gore as presiding officer of the senate led the charge to overturn the protection completely. And fortunately Barbara Boxer, senator from California, threatened to filibuster. And so they delayed things for two years and the final legislation that came through was not quite as bad as what Gore was trying to get them to do. That turned me
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off senator—Al Gore completely—Vice-President Al Gore completely when that happened. Up to then I’d regarded him rather naively as the white knight for the environmental movement and I was completely disillusioned by that. That—a similar situation with sea turtles and shrimp fishing nets were threatened with possible economic sanctions if we continue to enact an embargo against countries like Thailand whose shrimp fishing fleets will not install turtle excluder devices. That’s a somewhat complicated story and I—I don’t think it’s quite over yet. Another is we forced the European Union [EU] to back down on a ruling that they enacted—they would not import fur from the U.S. or Canada because we use these cruel steel jaw leg traps that are really cruel to—to fur-bearing or any animal that steps on it and is caught. The animal sometimes will—will drag its leg or break its leg and bleed to death and—and p—or slowly to death in great pain. But you see, this is an illegal trade barrier in the eyes of the World Trade Organization. No discrimination can be made under WT rol—rules to import any goods from any country on any grounds other than those to do with the quality of the product. How the qual—product is produced or made or gathered is irrelevant and the fact that you’ve used these steel jaw leg hold traps is—is an illegal trade barrier under WTO rules. And so the EU had five years to ship up or face economic sanctions and they backed down.
DT: Can you speculate as to why the governmental participants in the GATT and then later in the WTO might have agreed to these new free trade regulations—would usurp much of their own power?
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CR: As far as the—the United States is concerned, I think it all goes back to the power that giant corporations have in Washington, not small businesses or medium sized businesses, which in their own way suffer as much from these kinds of rules as ev—everybody else does, I won’t go into that but that’s very largely the case. The small farmers suffer from it while giant agri-businesses profit in the same way. But I think it all boils down to that. For example, the U.S. Trade Representative, Charlene Barshefsky, she has about twenty-three advisory subcommittees on various kinds of products. She has one, for example, on forest and wood products. It has fifteen members and all of them are either vice-presidents, CEO’s or chief operating officers of lumber companies or furniture companies or something—anything companies to do with timber, giant corporations. There’s not a single environmental advocate speaking to save our forests or protect our forests on that subcommittee. So all of the recommendations regarding the—the World Trade Organization that come from the United States are written by—essentially by the transnational corporations. Now in the WTO protests in Seattle, something like fourteen hundred NGOs, non-governmental organizations worldwide came out with a joint statement, “No new millennium round in Seattle. Instead, go back to the beginning, rewrite the rules and let the NGO’s speak at the table and have an equal voice, along with governments and corporations and then let’s see if we get a fair shake so that environmental laws are not compromised, human rights laws are not compromised.” This is where these other issues come in, this is where I embraced—I decided I’m going to Seattle to champion not only environmental issues, but all of the issues including the labor union problems that we have, the child labor problems and sweat shop problems overseas and human rights issues, public health issues and consumer issues as well as environmental ones.
DT: Can you describe some of the demonstrations and other events at the WTO meetings in Seattle?
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CR: Yeah, I—I participated as a volunteer for Citizens for Fair Trade Campaign. Fair trade is a—a concept in contrast to so-called free trade or corporate managed trade that believes that workers on the front line, so to speak, those who are in the coffee plantation picking the coffee, those who are making the garments and sewing them in the factories for garments, that they get paid a decent living wage. And fair trade has that as its basic root concept, if you like. So I was a volunteer for them and Public Citizen worked out of their office in Seattle as well. I’d gone largely through reading e-mail messages and other messages from Laurie Wallach’s office and the Global Trade Watch Department of Public Citizen. And one of the main things I did was to participate in the big march that the labor unions organized in the Kingdome Stadium on November the 29th. And we marched towards downtown but then there was a lot of milling around going there and I went up to one of the marshals and said, “Where are we supposed to go now?” He pointed back towards Kingdome Stadium, he said, “Labor goes that way, up there” over his shoulder, trouble. Well I decided I wanted to go and see what was going on nearer the scene of things, so to speak, the convention center where the WTO delegates were trying to get to meetings. And I was for three hours in what I call the twilight zone.
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I really didn’t know what I was going into. This is where the direct action was taking place and I didn’t really understand what direct action means. But we could have had marches from Kingdome Stadium every day that week and if that was the only thing that was happening, the WTO delegates would have all got to their meetings and we would have had a new millennium round. What stopped them was thousands of young people, not just from the U.S. and Canada, but from all over the world who were willing to go down and sit in the—the thirteen street intersections ringing the convention center. And whenever the police used tear gas or pepper spray or arrested them, there were more people ready to go and take their place. And it took me five weeks after returning from Seattle to find out what had gone on and I did that by reading on the Internet, particularly Paul Hawken’s account, which is—is a very stirring graphic account of what happened in those direct action locations. I’m sure our part was very important as well because I did attend also some teach-ins from International Forum on Globalization, a very scholarly group which is not nearly—known nearly well enough or read enough. They should be interviewed on—on—on NPR and on the television stations but they’re not. Let me also say that the mass media did not do anything to try to educate the public as to the real reasons we were there to protest. I—I read for example, analysis in Newsweek, but I forget the analyst’s name, analyzing what had happened in Seattle the following week. He basically portrayed the protesters as either anarchists or ignorant left-wing extremists and he made no attempt to try to give any of the real reasons why we were
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there and all of those reasons related their core to the role played by the corporations, the trans-national corporations, in setting up the rules of the World Trade Organization and the wo—the word corporation nor the word corporate did not appear anywhere in that account. And that’s fairly typical of mass media did to—to find out what was going on, you had to go to the alternative media, the alternative press. The Texas Observer, for example, here in Texas had some very good reports on Seattle and also the Internet.
DT: Did your experience at the WTO meeting spur you to become more active in the Green Party campaign…
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CR: It spurred me to join the—the Green Party. One of our workers for Public Citizen in Texas is Jerry Locke who lives in Austin. And I was on his e-mail list and when he sent me a message saying that there would be a Green Party meeting place and location and so on back in, I think it was early February, I decided to go. And Nathalie Paravicini, she came—she ha—she gave her job up, by the way, after going to Seattle to work full-time for the Texas Green Party and her husband David Cobb also works for the Green Party and—and directly for the Ralph Nader campaign. And Nathalie was spending essentially several days going round various cities to try to get the Green Party going and she essentially got us going here and started us preparing for a massive petition drive. I can’t tell you how disappointed I am with the Democratic Party. I used to be a Democrat, because I saw what they and the Republicans have done to try to marginalize third parties and they make it as difficult as possible in—in many states to get on the ballot. We had to collect something like 37,380 signatures on—on petitions from registered voters who did not vote in the primaries. If they voted in the primaries, they
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were barred from signing the petition. Petitioning the (?) put our candidates on the ballot. And I spent hours of my time. In the end, we turned in, in the seventy-five days we had to do this, starting on the day after the primaries, we turned in, I think, 76,000 signatures. I personally collected one thousand of those. My niece in England sent me an e-mail, she said, “That comes under the heading of making a difference.” That is one reason I am very disappointed with the Democratic Party because, in fact, they’ve behaved on a very anti-democratic manner. I don’t know that grass roots Democrats are quite aware of what a Scott would call the high hidians(?) in the party are—are up to, namely those at the top of the hierarchy who get the legislation—legislatures to pass legislation like this, making it hard. The other reason I’m disappointed in them was over excluding any discussion of WTO issues, along with many other issues involving corporations in the presidential debates. That Ralph Nader, who’s largely began the Green Party candi—candidate as you know in the presidential election this year, was excluded from the debates and therefore denied the opportunity for many voters who don’t take an interest in the election until the debates get on television, to get to know him at all. So essentially, Ralph Nader was marginalized by the Republicans and Democrats who run the presidential debates commission and by the corporations which fund it. So what we have in the end is a rigged election. And that’s a comment I made to the Dallas Morning News that they printed as a letter on Friday, October the 13th.
DT: Can you say why it is that you feel the Democratic Party has been co-opted or it’s compromised its link to its constituency?
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CR: I think it developed over a number of years since 1980. I think it was a formation of the Democratic Leadership Council that did it. Let me give it from the perspective of a person who was—who was one time a grassroots Democrat. I used to go to my precinct convention and take two or three resolutions and they would pass the precinct. They would then go to the senatorial—state Senatorial District Convention. And if they’d been—come in from several precincts then, likely as not, they would be passed there as well. And having got them passed there then—then they had to go to the state convention and might or might not get passed there. We had one on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment and Tom Kemper actually bird dogged it all the way through to the state convention to get it passed. Well than what happens? The Democratic Leadership Council in Los Angeles, I read, actually wrote the party platform. Now what happens to all—these resolutions that I’m talking about are put together by thoughtful people. They’re discussed by thoughtful people back and forth and they’re improved, hopefully, to make a better resolution and then essentially they’re thrown out the window. So we—we’ve lost the democratic process in the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party needs to get it’s act together and correct that.
DT: Is the council self-appointed or how do they find their role?
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CR: I don’t know how the Democratic Leadership Council is—is appointed or formed. It’s supposed to work with the Democratic National Committee but it’s largely for the benefit of corporations. That’s where the corporations get their clout with the Democratic Party, there and, of course, if there’s a president in the White House through that—through that office as well.
DT: Well we’ve talked about a variety of issues from religion to politics to trade. Which do you think of these or perhaps there are others that you think are the chief challenges for environmental protection as we look into the future?
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CR: I—I think we have to engage at every level. We have to continue writing to legislators when the legislatures are in session. We have to—to continue doing that. But with the continuing explosion of human population across the globe and the increasing use of energy in this country, which contributes to the degradation of the planet, that’s our contribution. And the increase of population in third world countries is—is their contribution to continuing pressure on the environment. Dr. Peter Raven who was here, as I say, he—he’s predicted the loss of one third of our plant species in the next fifty years. We—we have to—I—we have to deal with this, we have to try to stop it. We have to try to protect our plant species and our wildlife as well as ourselves. This has got to be done. So we have to engage in—in our personal behavior through recycling and so
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on. I had a green team at our church and it’s taken forever to try to stop them even in a Unitarian church from using throwaway cups, saucers, plates, and knives, forks and spoons for meals instead of using the prominent tableware that we’ve got. So we have—we have to continue even at the—the local level. We’ve put out and—to be taken to the landfill. Texas is tremendously wasteful in spite of having recycling programs. I see my neighbors putting sacks of stuff that could be recycled out—two or three bags twice a week in the alley. I put out a sack about once every two months for pick up and the rest I’ve got contacts for recycling, even cardboard as well as plastic numbers one, two, three and I think they are number six. We have got to engage in politics. I joined the Green Party for the reasons I’ve given you. People who want to stay with the Democratic Party, that’s their prerogative, I just hope they will get to grips with the problems I’ve outlined. We have got to have a campaign finance reform. We’ve got to loosen the grip of these giant corporations on the democratic—on our democracy and construct what Ralph Nader calls a deep democracy that is for all people and puts the people first before profits. That’s a very simplistic summary of it but that’s essentially what Ralph Nader says we have—we need to do and I admire him greatly. I think he’s—it—it would have been wonderful if he could have been elected president as a real citizen president who has worked for us for forty years, is incorruptible as far as taking campaign contributions from corporations is concerned and would really stand up for—for the people of this country.
(misc.)
0:49:08 – 2131
CR: Yeah, le—let me give an example of the—the interface between environment and human rights issues and that would be the survival of the indigenous people of the world, various tribes of the rainforest that are in danger of extinction and they have all kinds of ecological wisdom, both about medicinal herbs as well as about sustainably living in their environment. Environmental justice issues here in Dallas—I’ve been concerned with opposing the—the wishes of the downtown establishment and a group called “Save the Trinity” to stop the building of more levies along the Trinity River, to stop the building of a toll road that they want to put between levies in the flood plain. And along there is a community called Cadillac Heights of low income people that live, many of them, in the flood plain. They’re continually being flooded and our—our position is that nature should be allowed to take it’s course, as it—as—as—as became clear from a Galloway Report following the Mississippi floods, even in an urban area. And we should offer people living in areas like Cadillac Heights where the soil, by the way, is also contaminated with chromium and—and other poisonous heavy metals, a voluntary buyout and voluntary relocation to higher ground out of harms way. So there’s an example of—of an environmental justice issue and I think it’s a way in which we can perhaps engage African Americans. It’s a way that I’m engaging our—our Green Party members, most of whom at the moment in Dallas are more concerned with living wage campaign and with human rights issues, the death penalty and not so much with environmental issues. And they’ve asked me to help to educate them in the kinds of issues that they could get involved in and the issue of the Trinity River is one that I’m going to do after the election is over to get the Green Party involved because then the Green Party—by the way we are active all the year around, not just every two years when it comes up to precinct convention time and election campaigns. The Green Party is involved in social justice and environmental justice issues all year around.
DT: I had a conclusion question that I’d hope that you might be able to add whatever you would like, but we often ask people if there is a spot in nature, a physical place, that they enjoy visiting that gives them solace, peace, respite, and some connection with their fellow creatures. And I was wondering if there’s a location that you could mention.
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CR: I’d like to mention two. One is a place in Northern New Mexico near Santa Fe where I go every year for a week to Santa Fe and I always hike the Chamisa Trail. And so up there in the forests of Northern New Mexico it’s about mid-mountain level with lots of ponderosa pines and scrub oak and Douglas firs up there and aspen. I can think of a place where the—where the trail goes up onto a—a ridge and then goes down the other side to the Tesuque River. That is a very sacred place to me. Another would be an island in the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland that I visit many times when I go back to Scotland. I was there about—just over six weeks ago. The Island of Iona, about three miles long by one and a half across, very close to nature on the Hebrides. On the islands you—you live on an island, you’re always conscious of the sea all around you. But this particular island, when St. Colomba came over in 563 A.D. to use it as a base to evangelize the mainland of Scotland and spread the word of Christianity and Celtic Christianity to me is very much alive. When I go back to Scotland, I become like the
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Queen of England, a Presbyterian again, but in particular to do with a group called the Iona community which is part of the established church of Scotland and is very much involved in social justice and environmental justice issues all over the world and is based on the Abbey of Iona. And so I go for a week to the Abbey where they usually have a ret—conference or retreat about some topic or other. And it’s a—it’s—it’s been a sacred place since before Colombo came when the Druids were there. But you see in Celtic Christianity, one’s spiritual life is very much connected to nature and the—and the place of the birds, of the sea and the whales and the other creatures of the deep, and the wind and the waves is very much a part of their life. And so the Trinity, (?), although I’m a Unitarian, the Trinity comes alive to people living on an island like Iona and in the Celtic tradition the way that it doesn’t here. The—the Father and the Son and your neighbor and the Holy Spirit and all of life and the prayers of the Celtic peoples are very much addressed to the three persons of the Trinity. It’s very much alive to them and their place in nature and the dark side of nature with death and destruction that can be brought along with the—with the bright light side of nature is a part of that life as well. So that’s a sacred place to me and I like to go back there and reflect.
DT: Well thank you. Is there anything that you’d like to add before we conclude?
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CR: I don’t think so. I’m sure I’ve left something out and after meetings like this I always think of something after everybody has departed but.
DW: One of the things we always ask is let’s say this was going on as an educational interactive CD ROM to advanced high school students or junior college. What type of encouragement would you give to young people especially since a lot of them today—we’ve heard this from a number of people—feel the problem is too big and overwhelming, therefore there’s no point in even beginning because the global warming is going to wash everything out with raising seawaters and so why bother? We find there’s a lot of that kind of cynicism out there so words to address as to—as an educational purpose to young people, how would you?
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CR: I would answer like the way that somebody asked St. Frances of Assisi, “Supposing somebody told you that you were going to die now, would you feel any—anything was undone, yet to be finished?” And he said, “Just so long as I can finish planting this row of vegetables.” There’s only a limited amount that any one person can do. And I think we need to recognize those limitations and young people sometimes want to tackle these giant problems. They might find it easier if they just come down to that level of, “What can I do as a person?” And they can get ideas for that and encouragement by joining like-minded groups, whether they be religious groups, environmental groups like the Sierra Club or the Audubon Society or here, Texas Committee on Natural Resources that Ned Fritz and I both worked for, or the Nature Conservancy which buys up critical habitat with private monies and more and more of that can be done, the better. Or they might want to join a political party like the Green Party and get involved with like-minded people and projects and see things happening one step at a time. That would be my encouragement to them, not to—to try and tackle an impossible problem but just to work one step at a time, one task at a time, work with others and then the group of you can work on bigger projects and—and accomplish more.
DT: Thank you very much.
End of reel 2131
End interview with Campbell Read