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Earth First
New York Greens perseveres in the face of co-opting politicians and photo ops
By Walt Shepperd
Syracuse New Times |
Last month FOCUS Greater Syracuse staged an innovation expo to explore a sustainable future for Central New York. Heavy hitters from government, industry and academe--Mayor Matt Driscoll, National Grid economic development director Marilyn Higgins and Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor--headlined the event. "Right now," the invitation read, "right under your nose, a better, brighter, sustainable community is being developed ensuring we'll meet today's needs without compromising the vitality of future generations."
Among those in attendance was Jason West, 29-year-old mayor of New Paltz, elected in 2003 as a member of the Green Party. West is perhaps better known for presiding over 24 gay marriages until he was stopped by a restraining order in which the Rev. Jerry Falwell charged that solemnizing same-sex relationships was contributing to anarchy, chaos and the breakdown of western civilization, setting off the entire national dialogue about the issue. That aside, West had particular interest in the local expo as one of 80 mayors worldwide invited to draft the U.N. Urban Environmental Accords in San Francisco in June 2005.
"There were mayors from Shanghai, Beijing, Rome, Moscow, London and New Paltz," he noted. "You know, the major metropolises of the world." New Paltz, a village of 6,000, lies in the Hudson River Valley halfway between Albany and New York City.
"I think I was invited because I was elected as a Green mayor," he speculated, "which had gotten international press for a year. I had been on television in Baghdad and Costa Rica, on the BBC twice. For whatever reason it became this huge phenomenon. Not that New Paltz is overwhelmingly progressive. The presence of a SUNY campus played a role, but there was a split between an entrenched mayor of 16 years and his heir apparent, and I got to know people and I ran on common-sense issues, not Green Party ideology. And specifically because the mayor of San Francisco had performed gay marriages, I think the organizers there had in their minds that I had performed gay marriages, and that may really be why I was tacked onto the list."
West had come to Syracuse with an open mind, hoping the expo would be a step toward implementing the Urban Environmental Accords, which Driscoll signed Nov. 4. "I would like to see these efforts go on in perpetuity," Driscoll said then, "and by creating an eight-year timeline with a checklist, there is accountability. I never want to see the efforts and achievements we have worked so hard to put in place over my four years as mayor halted or put on the back burner."
"The accords are 21 specific actions you can take in seven categories ranging from transportation to urban design to clean air," West explained. "For example, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide emissions in the city by 30 percent." But West had seen several similar gatherings result mostly in photo opportunities for politicians, and worried that the local event might prove one more example of what has come to be called greenwashing.
"Greenwashing is a way that corporations and governments have covered up their polluting by putting a green facade on it," explained local Green Party organizer and U.S. Senate candidate Howie Hawkins after the conference. "We've been using the term for years, but it's actually made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. The classic case was in 1990 when corporate America decided they were going to be the sponsors of Earth Day. The mainstream environmental organizations got behind that and had a milquetoast rally in Central Park, which didn't really focus on what the problems were. In response, the radical ecologists demonstrated on Wall Street and tried to close down the New York Stock Exchange.
"Driscoll adopted {the accords} four days before the election last year," Hawkins continued, "with a rally that looked like a green rally, with green banners and everything. The accords have some goals for the city, but it's hard for me to see how Syracuse can implement them, particularly when it seems like all the attention since the election has been focused on cutting a deal with {developer Robert} Congel to get the {proposed megamall} Destiny project going, which contradicts the Urban Environmental Accords in terms of energy efficiency. That project, even if the whole structure is run by renewables, will have a net increase of fossil fuel energy use because of all the consumers, workers and goods that will be transported to that centralized place of shopping and recreation, rather than bringing the goods to the people in the neighborhoods."
West was more philosophical. "Well, that's the danger anyway," he said of the anxiety over greenwashing. "That's the danger regardless. {The accords} are non-binding. That was one of the things we tried to fight {in San Francisco}, to strengthen some language. But I still do think they're useful. It's important to have a touchstone. It's a first step, not an end point. The fact that we had mayors from all over the world there talking to each other was incredible. I ended up spending a lot of my time with the mayor of Kampala, the capital of Uganda. It was amazing how similar the issues are when you're dealing with municipal infrastructure, municipal management. The issues are the same all over the world, and for the first time in history a majority of humanity lives in cities, which provoked this."
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
For West, Hawkins' skepticism about the Driscoll administration's capacity to implement the accords is a matter of scope. Elected with two other Greens to the five-member village board in 2003, West has seen small signs of success in New Paltz, in contemplating the massive challenge posed by global warming.
"Putting a 15-megawatt solar electric system on the top of village hall," he boasted, "and planting a reed bed to act as a tertiary sewage treatment process. So that rather than squeeze the water out and mix it with chemicals and haul it out to Western New York to a landfill, we're using an old greenhouse and piping the solid sewage right under this bed of reeds, which basically uses it for food and breaks it down with no odor and no tipping fees and fuel costs. We're trying to focus on projects that are common-sense solutions, things that are fiscally responsible and environmentally sound." The dollar savings from the first reed bed funded the building of a second.
But the New Paltz Greens' ability to take ecological actions and formulate environmental policies is based on their holding a majority of votes on the village board. "It really depends on the democratic process," West said, pondering the possibility of such action in Syracuse. "The reason you see solutions like this happening in small towns is that small towns and villages are the last bastion of free elections in the country. In a small election you don't need a lot of money, so it really can be a race about ideas. And even if you don't know everybody, in a village of 6,000 people with a low turnout, which all local elections are, you really can physically speak to everyone who is going to vote. People are willing to take risks on policy, but they have to be confident that the potholes are filled, water comes out of the tap and the garbage gets collected. So as long as they know the nuts and bolts are going to be there, people are more often than not excited to hear new ideas that they're unfamiliar with as long as they're presented in a way that's reasonable."
Handling daily village business combined with those small success stories has won allies in surprising places for West and his Green cohorts. For example, the commissioner of public works is working on an effort to use bio-diesel fuel for all municipal vehicles. "Bio-diesel fuel, which is renewable," West noted, "extends engine life and is biodegradable. It is essentially vegetable oil the village may be able to produce itself." West wants to apply savings from the use of biological rather than petroleum fuel to finance windmills and more reed beds. The New Paltz Greens also want to outlaw sprawl, chain restaurants in their downtown to protect local businesses, and create high-density mixed-used neighborhoods to reduce automobile use.
"There's a mistake that a lot of progressive politicians make," West reflected. "There's a desperation to what we say. But extremism is not really a political position; it's a way of communicating. You can say the most radical, unusual thing, but if you're confident and it comes off to people as common sense, they're willing to listen to you."
Although Hawkins achieved significant success in raising the issue of public power and rallying support for it during the 2005 mayoral campaign, he agrees that small towns are the most receptive to Green issues. "The college towns, first of all, are where the Greens made initial inroads," he said. "In the small towns the Greens established credibility with people who know who they are. Most people, when they go to the polls, if they don't know the candidates personally they will pull Democrat or Republican, depending generally on what they were born into. When people do know who the candidates are, then the Greens find a more even playing field. It's harder to do that in larger cities. Small towns and villages are the first focus, then small cities like Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo. New York City is tough because it's so huge and the media is so national and internationally oriented, it's hard for Greens with local issues to make any inroads down there."
Greens making electoral inroads in the state include Mike Sellers, the 24-year-old mayor of Cobleskill, one member each on the village boards of Afton and Ellenville, and one member each on the school boards of Highland and Rochester. Interestingly, all but one of those municipalities about or are within the Catskill Mountains, New Paltz included.
Ultimately, however, to get real change, Hawkins agrees with West. "You have to access the political structure," Hawkins said, "but we can get pieces of our program adopted. In Syracuse, public power is an idea whose time has come. The majority is behind it, especially now with the bills skyrocketing. {Socialist Party presidential candidates} Eugene Debs {who ran five times between 1900 and 1920, the last while incarcerated in Atlanta Penitentiary} and Norman Thomas {who ran six times between 1928 and 1948} campaigned for old-age insurance, which became Social Security even though the Socialists never took power. {Franklin} Roosevelt had to adopt it during the Depression.
"So we can get pieces implemented, but the problem is you get a piece implemented in a crisis situation, then when things get a little more stable they tend to turn the reforms into their opposites. To keep public power from becoming just so much greenwashing it will have to be democratically structured so we do have a way of influencing policies, with an independent board elected, like a school board."
Sprawl-Control
For Hawkins, the greatest obstacle to the Driscoll administration's achieving the green goals it articulates is the contradiction posed by the Destiny project. "They seem to be focused on energy efficiency by the city and the school district," he said about City Hall's efforts, "on the one hand paying a little more for so-called green power, on the other hand doing efficiency measures so they get more work out of the energy they purchase. But to really implement the Urban Accords, they will have to be promoting mass transit, and would not be focused on Destiny, but would focus on redeveloping neighborhood businesses. You can sign the accords, but then just get back to business as usual.
"For instance, instead of bringing Wal-Mart into the South Side to sell us food and clothing, why not help the people on the South Side create food and clothing businesses and have the wealth generated by those businesses stay on the South Side instead of being transferred each night down to {Wal-Mart headquarters} Bentonville in Arkansas?"
Citing a MetroEdge study that reported the city's South Side residents spend $45 million outside the neighborhood, on Feb 13 Driscoll wrote to Wal-Mart asking their requirements for establishing a superstore. At a March 15 forum at South Presbyterian Church, South Side residents split about equally on the subject, either responding positively to the prospect of low prices or worrying at the element of colonialism posed by a relationship with the mega-retailer.
Hawkins sees both the proposed Destiny and a contemplated Wal-Mart as sprawl promoters, actually contradicting the planning documents of the city and the county, especially within the context of the New Urbanism, which advocates everything you need within walking distance in your neighborhood. He is also frustrated at what he sees as local reticence about ecological issues that have been raised.
"An example is the people who've been fighting to get a bike path on Euclid Avenue," he said. "That's been before the administration for four years and the latest is the city engineers say that can't make the street wide enough. So the priority is cars over bikes. And we've been telling the county reed beds is the way to go, but they say it's too far north for that, even though there are examples of it in Canada."
Hawkins hopes to raise these issues in debates with incumbent Democrat Hillary Clinton and her GOP challenger--either former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer or Kathleen Troia "KT" McFarland, a former senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration--for this fall's race for U.S. Senate. One point he will stress is that the United States may already lag behind in the competition for U.N. Green Stars--a maximum of five will be awarded in a rating system devised by another panel of mayors to judge compliance with the Urban Environmental Accords.
"China has hired American engineers and architects to build sustainable cities," he reflected, "where the waste products of one industry are the raw materials for the next. They're building seven of these cities in China, but those guys can't get work in the United States because we're not really focused on that. In Europe they require manufacturers to recycle all their packaging and to take back products when their life is over to be recycled. We take ours to the incinerator or the dump."
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 *Website by David Doonan, Labor Donated to Hawkins for Senate Campaign* |
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