The Path is Made By Walking: Interview with Alisa Gravitz

Antonio Machado/Poetry Foundation

All the signs have been in place for a long time to show us that predatory capitalism would just cause more problems for humanity than it would ever solve. Fifty years ago in communities of the United States, birds were dying. The rivers used to catch on fire. The air was so brown you could hardly see sometimes. Alisa Gravitz, longtime leader of Green America, reminded me that all these things were true, not so long ago. And our interview left me full of hope.

At one point in time, the scientists came in, and declared Lake Erie dead. And that was not an exaggeration. It was because the pollution had gotten so bad that there was no longer enough oxygen in the water to support plant and animal and fish life. But we had the solutions and we knew what to do. We had to get sewer systems in the communities around the lakes that had previously just put raw sewage into the lakes. And we had to have industrial regulations to make sure that pollutants weren’t going into the lake. And even though it was declared dead, and it was true from a scientific perspective, communities started to do these things anyway, and they put in those sewer systems, and they put in the regulations that didn’t allow the heavy industrial chemicals to go into the water.

And do you know about 20 years later, people started reporting seeing fish jumping out of the lake again. And the scientists came back and they said, this lake restored itself thanks to what everybody did. So even though it had been declared dead and even though it was said it was too late. And from an ecological point of view, this was a particular miracle because Lake Erie doesn’t have a lot of underground streams that come in and clean the lake as many lakes do. Lake Erie doesn’t have as many of those. So this was profound. Even though it was dire, even though it was declared dead, the solution still worked.

Do we all remember what it feels like to solve hard problems? Because this is not the only hard thing we’ve done in the past several decades as Alisa reminded me. And the solutions always come from teams of people committed to working together and persisting until they reach answers.

Alisa has been doing this for virtually her entire life. Starting off back in the 1970s in the Carter Administration, she reminds us we already knew how to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy. It was viable then, and it’s more viable than ever today thanks to those who persisted — and we’re seeing that transition everywhere, even in the most unlikely places.

Texas actually about five years ago became number one in the country in wind, and about two years ago became number one in the country in solar. And there was some recent efforts this past legislative season in Texas to require fossil fuels, not renewable energy. And it was defeated even in the Texas legislature because they understand that they actually need the renewable energy for two reasons. One, because it’s the least expensive. And number two, for a whole bunch of technical reasons, they have their own isolated grid so they need a lot of robust different kinds of energy. So even Texas did not pass the legislation that would have required natural gas instead of renewable energy, but they did pass legislation that created micro grids. So if you have a community that wants to put up a micro grid in case you need extra energy you can go ahead and use all the solar and wind you want.

My interview with Alisa reminded me of the incredible experience I had in late 2023, with over 100,000 people from around the world who had come to the climate summit known as COP 28. It reminded me that over just a few days I heard hundreds of solutions to pieces of the big problems we were all trying to tackle, and I was convinced that among all of us, all the solutions we needed existed. We just needed to recognize, elevate, invest and make them happen.

And we don’t need to have dedicated our careers to making these changes. Alisa and her team at Green America are brilliant at ensuring all our little individual decisions add up to big change. They sold me long ago on the proposition that collectively we could move markets, one individual choice at a time: whether it’s what we buy for the holidays, where we bank, or how we commute. I’ve been a longtime member of the organization. So it was great to hear from Alisa about the origins of Green America, once called Co-Op America because its model was to harness the power of cooperative economics. Importantly, it’s not hard. Every single one of us can participate, every day, in cooperative economic actions.

Green America

We’re almost at year-end holidays and it’s a good time to make choices that may themselves be gifts to others around us, and others on our shared planet. Take a look at Green America’s Green Business Pages as you think about your actions as a consumer and a citizen.

And take some time during the year-end to stop, read and reflect. Near the end of the episode, Alisa explains the quote that became the title of this episode, and we talked about another poet, too. Alisa and I ended our conversation, of course, with stories. It turns out we’re both fans of speculative fiction. And we have some book recommendations to help you unwind, relax, and release your imagination. We both like stories that help us imagine what the future could look like. Feel free to share your own reading suggestions in the comments!

What Alisa’s reading:

New York 2140 Kim Stanley Robinson

More speculative fiction recommendations:

The Future of Another Timeline Annalee Newitz

The Future Naomi Alderman

The Testaments Margaret Atwood

Listen to our interview here:

The Path is Made By Walking on Spotify

The Path is Made By Walking on Apple Podcasts