Ecology Center Interview

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Every day you and I get bombarded with negative news. And just like our bodies, because what we eat, our minds become the information that we consume. If you want to stay positive, it’s so important that you also listen to stories that inspire you and uplift you in this podcast. We interviewed leading experts dedicated to solving the world’s most pressing problems. And if you stick around, I promise you will not only be as informed as if you watch the news, you will feel uplifted, inspired, and have more positive energy in your life. Welcome to great.com talks with.

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Today, great.com talks with Martin Bourque, who is the executive director of EcologyCenter.org. And if you knew here into this podcast, please consider subscribing so you don’t miss out on any of our interviews. And if you haven’t told them before, Ecology Center is a nonprofit organization based in Berkeley, California, who are focusing on improving health and environmental impacts of urban residents. Martin, welcome. Thanks for having me. Thank you for taking the time to speak with great.com today. So I did a brief introduction, but how would you describe the Ecology Center for someone that might not be so familiar with the challenges you’re facing in California?

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The Ecology Center is a community based organization in Berkeley, California. We’re celebrating our fiftieth anniversary, and we were founded in the run up to the first Earth Day in 1970. And based on the values of that generation in that era, you know, at the time there were many social movements underfoot and the ecology center was created to have a place in this community. The idea was to have one in every community where people could come together, get informed on issues and get active on local projects and local efforts that make a difference in the immediate community, but also have a ripple effect or are involved are important in the broader global context.

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So it’s always been a global organization. We think globally and act locally and we do direct service. So we run direct service, like the city of Berkeley’s curbside recycling program. We run the three farmer’s markets here. We have a youth development and leadership program. We have a retail store for products, environmental products and books for our community. We have a resource center and library and, you know, a space.

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You know, the heart and soul of it is this community resource center and space where we have events and classes and get people together and get them active on how they can change their own lifestyle and behaviors and things that can ripple out and create broader social change, but also get them involved in advocacy and other efforts to kind of scale up these ideas.

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I can totally see how you’re doing a wide variety of things, but I can totally see how that community aspect becomes incredibly valuable, that people can come together and they see the behaviors of others. ‘Oh, other people are helping out. Maybe I can get involved as well.’ And so on your website that you describe yourself as action. Oriented, yes, and action oriented organization, so would you say that the main thing that is happening is that you guys are inspiring other people to take action or people coming to you that already feel like, oh, I want to do something, but then I can go to the ecology center?

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Yeah, it’s a mix of both. We are trusted as an agency, an organization that has a lot of integrity and will speak the honest truth about issues as to the best of our ability. When we were founded, there weren’t thousands and thousands of environmental organizations that were narrowly focused on every specific topic. So we remain a broad issue organization. I like to say we cover everything ants need to ozone. And in the single day we might actually

have somebody come into the resource center saying, hey, you know, I’ve got all these ants in my kitchen. I don’t want to spray pesticides, what can I do? And that the next person might walk in and say, you know, is it true what they say about global warming?

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And so our staff has to be pretty, pretty knowledgeable about a lot of different topics, but not necessarily and expert in everything. We do have some areas of expertise where we have much deeper knowledge and history, and it’s based a lot on our practical experience. So running farmers markets and working with local and regional sustainable organic farmers gives us a lot of direct knowledge from our work in the field. And so we say we’re action based. It’s very practical. It’s tangible. You in the recycling industry, we’re out with trucks and drivers every day collecting recycling from the residences here in Berkeley. And so when we speak from a policy perspective or we speak about industry trends or what’s going on with recycling, it’s not from an academic perspective or it’s not removed, you know, in a research kind of or just an advocacy kind of place. We actually have some grease under our fingernails. And we speak from our expertise. So it’s a combination of that deeper, direct knowledge as well as, you know, being able to connect people with other organizations and other individuals in our community or much more broadly who might have deeper expertise on a topic.

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So the action orientation is also that you guys have experience from actually being on the streets and doing Hands On work, so again, you’re involved in a lot of different places. But from the ecology point of view of well California, where you guys are active, are there any threats that are more important to you or maybe bigger than others or that you are particularly passionate about trying to solve or do something about?

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So, you know, climate change is obviously the existential threat of our time, but it’s not the only one. And so and it’s connected to a lot of different things and the solutions for climate change and the climate crisis that we’re in, whether you’re looking at it from a prevention perspective and trying to slow down the emission of greenhouse gases or prevent the emission of greenhouse gases, or whether you’re looking at it from a protection sort of model and resiliency model, a lot of the solutions are, in some cases, the same. So we are focused on climate change. This is obviously a central thing, but we’re also looking at the way that, for example, agriculture and our food system impacts the climate. And when you look at that system, you’re not only looking at the climate impacts, but you’re looking at social justice impacts. You’re looking at food access and health impacts. You’re looking at soil fertility and the loss of good soil. You’re looking at pesticides and toxins and fertilizer and the petrochemical industry, fossil fuels and fertilizer. You’re looking at, you know, large scale animal production and K phos and the like.

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So, you know, it starts to get into a lot of different topics just from this one thread from food and climate. And you can do the same with many other topics that we touch on. So we also think about the other major global threats right now, ecosystem collapse that is absolutely tied to global warming for sure. But it’s also tied to our natural resource extraction. It’s tied to the growth of our cities and our consumer needs. So it’s tied to our waste and disposal. It’s tied back again to toxics. So we see this, you know, it’s called the Ecology Center and ecology, the concept of ecology really is that you have to look at things from a systems perspective and that things are place-based and local, but that they are also connected to everything happening on the planet. Some of the other threats that we’re very concerned about, where this mass extinction or where does this mass extinction comes from? A lot of it is because of our human impacts on ecosystems.

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So an endangered species, when you’re trying to save that endangered species, you will fail. If you try to save the ecosystem that endangered species is in, you might have some success. So we look at things as being really intertwined, integrated and interconnected. And we look for those kinds of keys through lines in the Web that affect multiple things that might be leverage points in providing protection, creating change. I really enjoy the metaphor of the spider net and how everything is connected.

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And I like that you have that approach. And if anything good could come out of climate change, is that it maybe wakes some people’s awareness up to the fact of how much everything is connected and how there are so many reasons for this one problem that might not have gotten the same awareness otherwise. And. I’m curious. So you’ve been involved with this for a long time, or at least the organization has, how have peoples’ attitudes towards preserving the environment changed over the last 10, 20 years? Is there a noticeable difference?

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I would say, you know what I’ve observed and I’ve been in the field for a little over 30 years and at the ecology center for 20 years. What I’ve observed is that environmental issues have gone from being this thing over there. Oh, there’s those environmentalists to it being much more just a part of all of our daily lives and the conversations that we’re in.

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We had last night, vice presidential election debates here in the US and climate was just another topic. Climate change. And the climate crisis was just another topic on that list in a way that 10 years ago, five years ago, even if it might have seemed something further afield and not gotten on the normal list, you know, I look at, for example, in the press 20 years ago, if there was environmental reporting happening in the news, it was largely in a specific section. And unless it was a major catastrophe like BP or something, it was in a specific section as a short article and maybe written by a specific reporter who was the environmentalist on staff. And now everybody’s got to be an environmentalist. If you write about restaurants, you’ve got to write about food and where it comes from, and you’ve got to be able to touch on some of that.

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If you’re writing about buildings and development, you have to be able to write about energy conservation and solar and wind and insulation.

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You know, major corporations now, almost all of them have some kind of sustainability staff who are working on the environmental footprint of their own business. So it’s just become much more embedded and integrated.

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The average person has a much higher environmental literacy than they did 10 years ago or 20 years ago.

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I think, you know, there’s much wider acceptance that human activity is impacting the planet in ways that directly, negatively affects people. So we’ve moved from saving the planet from people to saving the planet for people. And there’s an understanding that if we don’t do something serious and do many things at the same kind of scale, that we’re assaulting the environment.

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If we don’t do things on that scale to preserve the environment, that it won’t be here to support us.

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And that affects the very basics like clean air and clean water and healthy food and a safe house to live in, you know, a nontoxic house to live in. So there is a much higher awareness and understanding of the issues and a much greater willingness to do small or large things about it.

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Right. That is my gut feeling. But it’s good to get the confirmation from someone that is as involved as you are. So. What would be a great outcome for the Ecology Center if we fast forward five years, maybe 10 years?

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So that’s a great question. No, we live in a very progressive city with a lot of people with high environmental ethics and values.

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We in Berkeley, we try and use that.

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Possibility as an experimental laboratory. So we are able to try things here that might not that other cities might not be willing to try yet.

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We’re a small city of one hundred and twenty thousand people. We do have a major university here. So there’s an intellectual and sort of academic opening and sort of willingness and also an interest in pressing the boundaries. I think, you know, taking some of the elements of the Green New Deal and integrating in in at a city scale elements that combine social justice and climate protection and environmental action into more sweeping public policy, you know, providing an example for other cities and other regions and reinforcing the examples that other cities have already taken. I think those will be the kinds of things that I think we could really affect here. We’ve had a lot of success in trying things out here and then becoming mainstream and broad based curbside recycling that we still run that program 40 plus years later is an example. We started the first curbside recycling program in nineteen seventy three and we still run that. But now that’s commonplace throughout California, throughout the US. We would like to see the same with regards to very significant greenhouse gas reductions, you know, moving to much less use of cars and moving to electric cars and moves away from natural gas and coal and oil, fossil fuels, much more sustainable food system, a plant based diet.

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These are things that people in cities who are now the majority and growing majority of people on the planet where this concentrated. We really need to think about the impacts not only in our immediate environment,

but the ripple effects that we have out and in the rest of the world where our food and our minerals and our lumber and our natural resources that come into the cities is coming for. If those systems break down, they’re supporting us. They’re keeping us alive. There are support systems.

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And, you know, if they break down where we’re in real trouble.

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Right, and I also see the ripple effects forward in time to our next generations. So if someone feels like, OK, I want to do something now to create better ripples for our future, what can someone do to help out? And how can someone stay updated with your organization?

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Yeah, well, we like to think that, as Adrian Marie Brown is called it, and our actions are fractal, you know, walking the talk is really important.

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So, you know, making specific changes in your life are really important and valuable. And this is not sort of like a vote with your fork approach or vote with your dollar approach. You know how you spend. But, you know, those things are important. And what you eat, how you spend your money, what your consumer choices are, those are those are important how you get to work. Do you use public transit or do you bike.

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Do you have to choose an electric vehicle instead of a gas vehicle?

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These are important even if at the individual level. And I don’t think of it so much as, oh, if we all change, then those individual changes add up. I think of it more like if we all change, then we show others what is possible and we make it normal. And once you get past this tipping point or the hundredth monkey, then you start to see, oh, this is just the everyday thing.

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For example, we work a lot on plastics and plastic reduction and plastic pollution. That’s been a central theme for us for 20 years now that it’s really been brought to the public’s attention. We’re really seeing fast action on addressing the plastic pollution crisis.

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And even something simple like bringing your own water bottle, which we’ve been promoting for 20 years over buying bottled water, you know that’s really caught on. That’s become very commonplace, particularly for the up and coming generations. That’s just normal. You only buy water when you’re really either don’t have good water to drink at home or aren’t able to filter your water, or for some reason, you know, there’s an emergency or some particular reason why you might use bottled water. But why would you pay here in the Bay Area? We have amazing water from the Sierra Nevada mountain range snowmelt.

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It’s a wonderful quarter, maybe some of the best in the world.

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Why would we pay more than gasoline for bottled water in a plastic bottle that I don’t have to dispose of? So those ideas, as we do them individually, they have change in our in our individual life, but also our friends, our families see see that maybe they become talking points, but also getting involved in public policy and making those ideas the law of the land, because the volunteerism and the early adopters are really important. But eventually we have to sort of up the bar to protect ourselves and protect the environment. And that requires everybody getting on the same page and having the same playing field, the same landscape. And that’s what regulation does. And I know that that’s become a dirty word and our neoliberal capitalist economies. But it’s really important. It’s just basically what it is, is that we all agree to a higher standard and we’re not going to allow some people to do some things while everyone else is trying to go a different direction. And and so we feel like regulation is really important, moving from voluntary approaches and commitments, whether those are at the individual level or at the corporate level. I think what’s really necessary in the radical revolution is needed to really address our climate change crisis and our ecosystems collapse crisis. And the plastic pollution crisis and the mass extinction crisis is that we were with this many people on the planet. We really have to look at what our consumer needs are and what is it that we as humans really need to be fulfilled and satisfied and comfortable and taking care of so that, you know, we’re not just chasing that next consumer purchase, that we’re really finding our fulfillment from our relationships..

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From the people that we’re engaged with, we can’t as a species, we can’t afford to have the kind of massive inequality that we have. We can’t afford to have the kind of racism and xenophobia that we have in our societies are pressing right up against each other. Climate is going to displace hundreds of millions of people.

We’re going to become much more mixed across the globe. So we can’t let these differences bring us down. We have to embrace them and look for the synergies and the positive opportunities that result from that. And that those require sort of societal cultural changes and those that are within each of us, but also within our immediate

tribes and communities, in our families and extended families in our workplaces. But they’re required at the society at large. You know, the consumer driven capitalist system that we have right now is destroying the planet. And it’s just dismembering and destroying our culture and our society. I would say it’s at the core of the major divisions we see in this country. And so we really need some cultural transformations that that’s what’s going to solve our environmental crisis.

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Well said. And I really liked your point that when.

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But this many people, we need to feel more fulfilled from things that are not purely materialistic. And I really liked what he said about our actions are fractals. I’m taking that one with me. We are coming.

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Adrian Marie Brown, check her strategic and emergent strategy.

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But that is a really great emergent strategy. That’s cool. All right. We’re coming to the end of this interview. Martin Bourque, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with a great.com today. I really appreciate it. Great to be with you. And for you listening. If you enjoy this, please consider subscribing in your podcast app. That would really help us out because then we can climb in different lists and then more people can listen to uplifting conversations like the one we just had. So thank you so much for taking the time. And we see you in the next episode.

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