Ben Sayler

Ben Sayler grew up in Ann Arbor, MI and graduated from high school in 2006. Instead of going to college, he started out as a music journalist (Radiohead led him to No Logo by Naomi Klein). After watching An Inconvenient Truth and reading The World Without Us, he became more motivated to join the movement. He has been organizing in environmental issues since 2011, and has connected with numerous GreenCorps organizers during their year-long environmental organizing fellowship. With Food and Water Watch, he has worked on campaigns such as the Farm Bill, genetically engineered foods, fracking, antibiotics, and most recently, the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline. With Forest Heroes, he helped get Wilmar International to commit to deforestation-free and exploitation-free palm oil through Kellogg’s. He has also worked on local 350 campaigns for the city’s climate action plan. He currently writes an environmental blog at blue-swan.info, and is hoping to start his own nonprofit.

I met Ben Sayler at an Eco Book Club meeting to discuss This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. After he mentioned being a climate activist, we met up and shared ideas about the movement. Below are highlights from our interview.

Tell me about the nonprofit you’re starting.

There are already so many groups out there mobilizing, there doesn’t really need to be another one. This things take time and money and energy. And what we came to is that a lot of how climate change is being talked about and approached is not accessible to people, it’s not hopeful. If people do get involved people feel like this is a losing fight, and they’re just trying to get as many people off the titanic as possible, but this is pretty much done for. Or people feel like this is not a serious enough issue, I don’t need to be concerned about climate change. So our thing is, this is an international issue, and people are thinking hyper local. And this is a solveable problem, and people think it’s not a problem at all, and this is a problem that will affect everyone – even the super wealthy are going to be affected. There’s a certain point where no matter how much money you have you can’t insulate yourself.

In a lot of ways, every human on Earth has a vested interested in acting on climate change, they just don’t know it yet. That’s sort of the starting off point – no one wants to die, no one is looking to breathe toxic air, drink poisoned water, to go to war with another country over scant resources. People aren’t looking for diseases to spread. But they don’t know that these things are over the horizon, and they don’t know that these things are stoppable. So we decided to form a nonprofit around organizing and communicating about climate change in a new way. And that’s the idea of making people aware of their global citizenry. Because of globalization, our decisions can affect everyone around us – our negative as well as our positive decisions. When Hungary bans GMO foods and burns a field of GMO corn because it’s against the law, that’s great for all of us. That empowers people in the US. That can empower us more. And France bans fracking. That can really be an incentive for the US to do that, to really show US citizens that this is a winnable fight. So part of it is about broadening the scope and getting people to see the humanity in everyone else in the world, and to not feel like this is not just up to nation states to handle, but that this is up to people to handle.

Secondly, to really paint a picture of what this world would look like if we win. Giving people a reason to fight. I don’t think survival is enough. Survival is enough once it’s on people’s doorstep, but by then it’s too late, it’s climate change. We need to get people taking action before the crisis, which we’ve never really done as a species. We don’t tend to work that way. It’s about giving people a reason to take action now, which is all about hope. Showing people all the things they want for the world, they want for their lives, that they think are utopic or pipe dreams, and that a lot of the constraint has been this inequality, this corporate control of global systems of wealth and resource distribution. Showing that reforming all of those things is a way to address climate change and a way to better everyone’s lives. You can have things like a basic guaranteed income, you can have things like cheap, reliable energy, jobs you really like, weeks and weeks and even months of paid vacation, and time to see your kids, freedom to travel around and visit friends on rail powered by clean energy. These things are all totally possible. The only thing that would be lost is the billionaire class, and we don’t need billionaires.

The tradeoffs are obvious. This is not about us sacrificing, this is about you changing for the better.

So what is your vision of a post-capitalist world?

We need to start forming a society around the assumption that we want humans to survive on this planet indefinitely. And that means if resources are going to run out in a thousand years, that’s a problem now. These are things that can be figured out now, we can make these things sustainable now. Obviously, the further out you go, the less urgent it is. Our aspiration should be a society that can run in perpetuity on systems of the Earth, and that’s doable. There’s limited water, but it cleans itself, it recycles. There’s sun, wind, geothermal. Our society needs to become less about progress and notions of success that center around material wealth, and more about building communities and personal livelihoods that are sustainable and happy. It means a basic guaranteed income. It means no one, in this century, given the resources and technology that we have, the know-how that we have, should anyone ever worry about having housing or food. They talk about how we need GMOs to feed the world, well, we’ve got more than enough food to feed the world now, the problem is distribution, the problem is a lot of that goes to meat, cattle, livestock. The problem is that all of that goes to the rich world, and the problem is that the poor world is poor. We have the food, we have the resources, now we need to distribute it in a way that’s equitable.

Part of that is making sure everyone on Earth gets money to survive no matter what they do. Capitalism says that you have to contribute something to this larger economic system to be worth something. We need to flip that on its head and say that everyone on Earth is inherently worthwhile. You don’t need to prove your worth, you were born with your worth. And the government, which is a collective representation of people, agrees with that, and says anyone who’s contributing through their labor, is contributing to a larger pot, and that pot gets contributed somewhat to everyone. And in return it says some people can’t work, some people are physically disabled, are mentally disabled, are doing things but can’t contribute to the larger labor force but can contribute socially in other ways.

Step two, we have a transportation infrastructure that supports everyone. It doesn’t require that you need a car. We start getting rid of cars, getting rid of roads, we bring back trolley systems and trains en masse. And part of that is we shut down planes until we have technology that allows us to fly sustainable. Flying in its current form is never going to be tenable.

You can’t have planes emitting carbon at that altitude and not have it become a huge problem for climate change. Unfortunately it means fewer international trips, unless by boat. These are all good things and it will help us become acquainted with notions of community. In a lot ways technology allows us to become detached from our communities, and to think that that’s how we get happiness, that the people who are most fulfilled or most worthwhile are people who travel the most.

It doesn’t mean getting rid of globalization, we need globalization to redistribute wealth, to give back some of what we’ve taken from the poor world, to allow these systems to sustain themselves internationally. But it means restrengthening local communities. So it means supporting local businesses, it means accepting that some local industries are going to run at a loss, and it’s okay for the government to subsidize that. We’ve been doing that for fossil fuels for 200 years, we can do that for industries that actually support communities. It means taking away the stigma around people not contributing to these systems. So that means an education system that prioritizes free time, prioritizes recess, prioritizes creativity. These are longer term goals. It implies that Finland does – they do phenomenal education, so you teach phenomena and you let kids bring their own creative input to the discussion, and you let people feel whole without being graded or ranked.

And this sounds really hippy and fanciful but at the same time it is that pressure to be part of that hierarchical system that pits people against other people in this really strict set of metrics that leads to things like climate change, that leads to this hyper-competitive environment where the totality of all the things people can be in life gets reduced to this one measure, and they become blind to the consequences of that, and will become competitive and mean and that leads to things like climate change and exploitation and that needs to stop. And we need to have a system that prevents from that developing in the future. We can’t guarantee against that, but we can’t just say it’s enough that we stop climate change now. We need to stop climate change period, and that means laying the groundwork for an entire new world that doesn’t allow for things to get this bad again. That doesn’t allow for sweatshops to get developed again, doesn’t allow for deforestation and for the destruction of the natural world for the benefit of a select few in the rich world.

What did you think of the People’s Climate March?

The testament to the success of that march was the day after the march, a bunch of the organizers got together after climate beers, and one of the organizers of the march went out to a corner stop and he was picking up a bunch of newspapers because we were on the front page of the NYT. … While people were getting arrested [at Flood Wall Street], this guy walked in and there were three Wall Street bankers sitting there talking. And they looked at him, watching him just picking up piles of NYT. And one of the bankers, an older guy, nice suit, Wall Street guy, asked him what he was doing. And the guy said, I’m buying newspapers, I was actually one of the organizers of the march yesterday and we’re on the cover. And the guy goes, I really want to thank you. That was amazing that you were doing that. He goes, my son is at college at NYU and said I have to come to this. And he goes, I really wasn’t interested, I’m a republican, I don’t really care about these things, this is not a priority for me. But he was insistent and so I decided I’d walk with him. And he goes, after walking in that march, I realized how important this is, and I can no longer be a Republican, I can no longer do that anymore. He goes, I realize this is too important, I need to be involved in this fight, and I can’t let my political beliefs get in the way of that. And I want to thank you for doing that, because I wouldn’t have gotten involved otherwise.

And to me, that says everything. That a Wall Street person, someone who historically has vested political beliefs in the opposite was so moved by that, and saw just how big this was and how serious this was, and you had 400,000 people, and they weren’t environmentalists – you’re talking older people, younger people, politicians, CEOs, corporations, indigenous peoples – all these people coming together to march and say this is too important for us to be divided on it, I think that was hugely powerful. And if it can bring someone like that over, the person who’s the exact opposite, to people we never even go after because we think they’re never gonna give a shit, they’re never gonna listen. If someone like that can be so moved by it to get involved, I think it was a success, and it gave people a boost of hope and optimism that we hadn’t had in a while.