re:human: Recent Episodes

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The good news is that however daunting the climb towards a thriving society, we have tools at hand that we may have underestimated. Communicating through stories is one. Organizing is another. Together, they provide a human element to counter the political industrial complex. As we pick up our conversation with Marshall Ganz, you may recall that when Obama dusted off those tools in his historic 2008 campaign, Ganz’s grassroots organizing model helped propel him to the presidency. Today, Ganz talks about the potential for a wider embrace of this approach. You can catch up on Part I here.

CHRISTIAN: The word that’s coming to mind in our conversation is political capital. Democrats have a certain amount of political capital at any point, in the form of votes or donors, or having a majority, or press attention. And it seems like we’re deploying our resources and leverage to address individual issues, but we’re almost playing Whac-a-Mole. It feels like maybe we need to set aside the urgent to focus on the important, which would be putting that political capital into building power?

MARSHALL: That’s exactly the question, and see for some reason the other side seems to get it. Now, it’s easy to attribute monolithic character to the other side. But if you look at the role of ALEC [American Legislative Exchange Council] in the assault on public sector unions, that was so strategic–because that’s how you cut off resources at the state level. You weaken the union, but you’re also cutting off the money that it takes to finance democratic politics. So that was a power strategy. Right now they’re in a power strategy about voting. And for some reason, we don’t seem to… I don’t know, why don’t we do that?

CHRISTIAN: Yeah… the conservative strategy seems to be going unapologetically after power. And with the recognition that values are the keys to power.

MARSHALL: It’s also a movement-based strategy.

When I was in high school, back in the day, my senior year I was being recruited by the John Birch Society in Bakersfield, CA. Because I was a promise, right? They already had their local Christian anti-communism crusade bookstore. They had this movie called Operation Abolition that showed how communists had taken over the universities and were going to, you know, destroy democracy. And now they were doing outreach. In other words, there was a movement coming out of the fifties, with roots coming out of the racial fear coupled with this other–boy, how to put it? There was a racial dimension to it, a religious dimension to it, and a kind of anti-state, anti-democracy dimension to it. But you know, it flourished. I mean Barry Goldwater was nominated as a presidential candidate in ‘64 by Republicans. Then it was reversed. But there’s been a core movement that’s gone through different forms, and it’s been at the heart of this thing.

From my perspective, the sin of the corporate side was to make a deal with them in the seventies. And with Nixon, it was a deal. It was like, ok southern strategy, we love your racist stuff, because it’s common ground with our we don’t want regulation, we don’t want taxes, etc.. hey, we’ve got a convergence here. So it was kind of a deal with the devil. And the Democrats had made their own deal with the devil before the sixties, in terms of the resistance to anything that dealt with race. But that deal that was made in the seventies–that’s been a real problem. The thing is that what they thought was the tail has become the dog. It’s like oh no, well, we’ve got the wealth... yeah, we’ll use that. Well guess what, guess who’s being used? The point I want to make is that there’s been a core set of values and highly committed people who have been working at it. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s not like a plot–it’s quite out in the open.

There was a great movie about Phyllis Schlafly on TV called Mrs. America. Phyllis Schlafly was a brilliant organizer who coupled the anti-choice movement with the conservative movement in the seventies, and really played a critical role in building the women’s base for that. So they’ve had good organizers too.

CHRISTIAN: That’s so interesting.

I’d like to go back to the word depth and in particular how it factors into campaigns. There’s all this money being raised by progressives to challenge conservative incumbents, but then you have someone like Jaime Harrison raising $100 million and still losing.

MARSHALL: That goes back to this problem of the political industrial complex. I mean it goes back to turning politics into a business–a business of communications and marketing, but not of bringing people together. And yeah, when I get fund appeals for campaigns, I think okay, what’s this going to be used for? It’s going to make some consultant rich, basically.

CHRISTIAN: If you had $100 million to run a Senate campaign, what would you spend it on?

MARSHALL: People.

CHRISTIAN: What does that look like?

MARSHALL: Well, it looks like a lot of what we were doing in the Obama campaign; we were actually building an organized grassroots base. Now the problem is that the organization didn’t belong to the people; it belonged to Obama, and he didn’t want to use it once he got elected. He sort of went through a big strategy shift from mobilizing support to minimizing opposition. From my perspective, that’s one of the great missed moments in our history. But you build it, you bring people together, you organize them.

Look, after Trump, there was Indivisible [whistles], there were all these things. For the most part though, they weren’t being brought together. There wasn’t an effort to structure it, there wasn’t training… oh maybe in some places. But talk about a massive mobilization. And it was an opportunity to create even the sort of structure we had in the Obama campaign.

So it’s developing enough skilled leadership, but also ways of telling the story, of interpreting and understanding what’s going on so as to be able to make the shift, because our politics just…. look, Bernie sparked a big deal, right? The first time Bernie ran, woah, look at all that! And then he formed something called Our Revolution… disaster. Couldn’t govern itself, internal fights, just you know, had no staying power. DSA is trying to build organization, but it’s very, very small. It can’t reach out and build a really broad base, the kind it would take. Biden is so interesting because he speaks human. In other words, he doesn’t speak ideology, he speaks values actually. And in a way, that’s exactly what we need, but we need it in a much deeper, more powerful way.

Progressives often get caught up on the ideological nuances of this, that or the other, which make no difference in people’s daily lives. When you have an activist core that has no constituency–in other words, there’s a big difference in a meeting between someone who has a base they have to answer to because they got elected and someone who has emails they can mobilize that they’re not accountable to in any way.

So when I talk about depth, I’m talking in terms of people and their daily lives–getting at the core of things, not just the superficial things. Because the core of things… people want their kids to have a future. In doing this narrative work in different parts of the world, boy, it just hits you again and again how fundamental the choices are that we face growing up, and the sources of hurt and pain and where we get hope. The deeper you go, the greater commonality you find. Commonality of experience. And the more up here you go, the more difference you find. In other words, abstraction is not how you create unity, it’s depth that’s how you create unity.

CHRISTIAN: So you’re talking about macro-level depth. And then there’s also the difference on a personal level of being involved in say a demonstration, where you’re interacting with people and potentially putting yourself at risk, versus writing a check to a campaign, or sharing a statement on social media.

MARSHALL: Absolutely, because we learn emotionally, alright, we learn cognitively… we also learn experientially. When we were organizing farmworkers, I saw how when someone would be lukewarm on the union, once they were on a picket line for an hour, their whole perspective shifted. And it wasn’t the argument, it wasn’t the story–it was their direct experience of being cut out and finding solidarity with others. Those kinds of experiences, they’re transformative.

In the Obama campaign, the experience people had in those local teams was real; they could actually make decisions and work as a team. I was talking to the former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, which started doing some organizing after the lunch had been eaten by the other side. They had put out a call and well, five of the groups that appeared were groups that went back to Obama. Because that was where they first experienced politics that were real to them.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. And what we haven’t seen is organizations that reach that scale, that find a way to generate resources to maintain their independence, that stay in place beyond elections, and that are permanent bases instead of something temporary that gets spun up as quickly as possible.

MARSHALL: You know, and for that to shift, one of two things has to happen. One is there’s a candidate who actually believes they need organization to govern. Or there’s an organization that is able to sustain itself independently of the candidate but chooses the candidate or supports the candidate. Actually, we have someone running for governor here in Massachusetts who I think has much more that vision of organizing not just to win the campaign but to govern. And I think it will be a very interesting experiment here to see if we can do that.

CHRISTIAN: Could we talk about leadership actually for a moment? I’m thinking of transactional and transformational leadership, and what they mean for the inflection point we’re at right now.

MARSHALL: Leadership’s one of those words like justice–like what do you mean? It’s used to describe so many things. When I’m talking about leadership... well, the foundation is in these three questions posed by Rabbi Hillel when he was asked, how do I decide what to do with my life? He said well, first ask yourself if I’m not for myself, who will be for me? Not selfishly, but self-regarding… like who are you, what do you bring to this? Then second, what am I if I am for myself alone? Meaning to be who, a human being and not a what, is to recognize the inherent relationality of being a human being. And then finally it’s if not now, when? Not about jumping into moving traffic, but sort of a recognition that you can’t learn to do well what you want to do until you actually do it. In other words, there are always elements of risk in action, and so for me, the interaction of the self with the us with the now is at the heart of what leadership is all about. It’s not just me. It’s not just you. It’s how that works together, and then it’s all about dealing with the uncertain. Because when everything’s working, you don’t need leadership–the system works.

So leadership has a particularly adaptive role. It has a creative role. It has a role of agency in circumstances. And to do that, you have to treat it as a question of skills, a question of strategy, and a question of courage; it’s a multi-dimensional thing. So the definition I use for leadership is that it’s about accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty. It’s not a diva model of leader, not like a great charismatic persona. It’s a form of interacting with other people around the creation of collective capacity. That’s how I think of leadership. It’s interdependence; it’s not command and control, but much more eliciting capacity.

And you know, with transactional leadership, James Macgregor Burns made that original distinction and it was all about exchanges. You do this. Or, I tell you. And what he called transformational leadership is really what I’m talking about. It’s about bringing people into relationship with one another so that they see possibilities they didn’t see, strength they didn’t see in themselves and others, so that they find a common purpose. That work is what I mean by leadership. If you look at it that way, then leaders are developing more leaders all the time. It’s kind of like learners become teachers. If you look at how movements spread, like evangelical movements, it’s people who you know, get the spirit, and they go out and they make more and they make more. So there’s a human kind of infrastructure that gets you to scale. I mean it has historically, there’s a little thing called Christianity that started as a movement. All the movements before depended on leaflets, on horses, but they were spread people to people.

Once you take people out of the equation, it becomes much more problematic. Because you know what happens when we’re on email and social media; each person becomes a symbol. They’re not a person, they’re a symbol, they’re this set of words. So the constraints–the empathetic constraints and enablements that go with interpersonal communication–they’re not there. So we can do whatever we want, and it just becomes savage. It actually undermines the capacity of people to relate to one another.

Now, it doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve been teaching online for a long time, but then you see people, it’s intentional. And leadership, when we teach it, is broken down into five core practices: building relationships, telling stories (which is about motivation), strategizing, action and structure. You can do that in a neighborhood, and you can do that in a country. It’s sort of like getting that Beethoven’s symphonies depended on each note being right, but they were constructed by putting the notes together. And that’s kind of what it takes, putting the pieces together but with a vision of something whole.

CHRISTIAN: I am curious whether you see strong leaders emerging…?

MARSHALL: I hope so. Because they don’t just appear. How can I say it? The people we look at as great charismatic leaders–first of all, they had teams; they weren’t just by themselves. And they often came out of a tradition. The tradition of preaching in the black church… there were a lot of really good preachers. So Dr. King didn’t just come from nowhere; he came out of a tradition of moral communication, and he was a master of it.

Where are people learning how to do this? In other words, okay in churches people learned. Now in politics today, Obama was a practitioner of that, and he understood about narrative, he really did. And it was a source of real power. Now since then, who was cultivated, who was grown from that? What intentionality was there by saying hey, this is an important part of leadership now, you don’t have to be Obama, all of us can do this, we all have the potential. We were trying to do that with Camp Obama, exactly that. Because people would come and say well, I’ve got to tell Obama’s story. We’d say no, learn to tell your story, because your story is what is going to persuade your neighbor about why you support this guy. And so oh, I have that potential?! Yes, you do, we all have it within us and it takes conditions, circumstances, learning. Lawyers used to be like that–Clarence Darrow. Now Gandhi didn’t make much in the way of speeches, right? Gandhi spoke the rhetoric of action. His rhetoric was all in what he did and very little in the words. So there are different ways to communicate this kind of vision, but there have to be places where it matters.

Now in a typical political campaign, does it matter, really? I mean Hillary could never give a speech worth a damn. It mattered, but they couldn’t help her. I show my class six minutes of Hillary and six of Michelle Obama at the DNC in 2016, where they’re both sort of talking about themselves. You know, Michelle speaks entirely in narrative moments. The basic unit of narrative is the moment; there’s a challenge, there’s a response. Now, she’s talking about the day when the big black cars and the guys with the guns came to take the kids to school when they were in the White House. And their faces are pressed up against the windows of these cars, and she turns to Barack and says, what have we done? And see, you become present to that moment, because she’s present to that moment, and you get the emotional meaning of the moment. Or waking up in a house built by slaves and seeing her beautiful black daughters playing on the lawn. These are all moments. Hillary, there isn’t a single moment in her whole talk. It’s references too. And what that means is she’s never emotionally present in a way that people can even begin to get her. You watch that contrast… man, it is so striking. Because Hillary’s just over here and it’s kind of like by walling yourself in, you wall the world out. I’m sure she had very good reasons for the way she developed that kind of protectiveness, being married to Bill for all those years. But it doesn’t serve you… it doesn’t serve you well.

But Obama knew how to do it. Michelle knows how to do it. It isn’t just otherworldly, I guess is the point.

CHRISTIAN: …it’s a skill.

MARSHALL: It’s a skill! It’s a craft. If we were saying you’ve got to be a master of calculus or nuclear physics to be president… no, you’ve got to be able to tell good stories. We’re all equipped for that; we tell our kids stories all the time, we know what stories are. But it’s implicit, it’s not explicit. And so that’s what we’ve been trying to do–come up with a way that can be made explicit so you can treat it as a craft, and so that you can learn to to communicate meaningfully about core values to people. I just think the potential is all over the place out there, but venues are needed. Legislatures are no longer people giving great historic speeches, that’s not what happens. And the Democratic Convention is a production, it’s not a real thing, it’s a ritual. But it’s not even that good a ritual! This year was better… the online one I thought was better, because you actually got to see more real people.

CHRISTIAN: Can I ask what gives you hope?

MARSHALL: I guess the thing that gives me the most hope is that I get to go to class and have a conversation with the future. In other words, I get to work with people who are all wrapped up in the future, and who want to deal with it. It’s kind of like what Walter Brueggemann, who wrote this book called The Prophetic Imagination, says–that transformational vision comes at the intersection of two things. One is criticality, a clear view of the world’s hurt, of its need, of its pain. And then hope, the sense of its possibilities, its promise. One without the other goes to despair, or it goes to irrelevance, but together they can be a powerful transformational energy.

Young people come of age with a critical eye on the world they find and, almost of necessity, with hopeful hearts. Generational change is a really important thing and it’s all around us. One of my students just started the institute at Harvard Law School on ending mass incarceration. This guy I had as an undergrad. See, teaching gives you a way to sort of be long-term and short-term at the same time, because you’re investing in people in such a way that then they can go and grow and build. That’s why investing in people is so damned important. Not using them, but investing in them. That’s what organizing does; it’s an investment in people and their capacity to work together. But we don’t think that way–we think oh, spend, spend, spend. So the first source of hope I have is what I get to do. My online class, we have 160 students from 31 countries. We have to do it in a global context. Now, these are people who are shaping the future. They are maybe in their thirties or so. I’m not expecting oh, some best thing. I’m creating possibility, I’m creating potential, I’m creating capacity. And you don’t know what’s going to come of that. So I get hope from that on a regular basis.

I get hope from Sunrise, I get hope from the reaction to George Floyd, these things that are happening. You have to recognize them for what they are even as you try to grapple with how to make them more. But you can’t dismiss it. So look for where the energy is. That’s what I try to do, work towards where the energy is. And there’s a lot out there. There’s a group called GirlTrek. You know about it? It was started by two black women who were concerned about health, and so they put together this movement really, about walking and health among black women. They have over a million people now, and they want to become organizers. To me, woah, that’s hopeful. See they built something that brought people together around improving themselves and each other, and then said ok, that brought us so far, now we’ve got to get some control over the politics. So I’m not optimistic, but I’m hopeful.

CHRISTIAN: You’re not the first guest to phrase it that way (laughs).

MARSHALL: You lose hope, you got nothing. There is a real logic to hope. Look at all the crazy things that happen–good things, bad things happen. We tend to remember the bad things more, because they challenge us, but often out of that comes the capacity to create good things. Not necessarily. But we are all authors of our time and the future; we have that capability.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah.

MARSHALL: But you’ve got to be willing to take the risks. You’ve got to have enough faith to actually take the risks. Because if you don’t take the risks, nothing’s going to happen, you know? Not really.

There’s so much in our traditions about sources for that. This is maybe an aside, but I’ve been studying the Koran for the last year and a half every Wednesday night for an hour. And I’ve been reading the Hebrew Bible with a friend; we finally got through Job and Ecclesiastes. So now we’re working on the New Testament. And reading the Gospel of Matthew is amazing. If you read it as an adult and you try to think of the context in which people were doing what they were doing, it’s really rich. There are these ancient sources of human beings struggling with what it is to be human, and where to find hope and all the rest of it. You can get hung up on the particular circumstances of living in tents or whatever, or you can actually read for what’s being shared about human beings and the challenges we face. It’s there.. it’s deep there. It’s sort of like recovering from the past what we need to be able to shape the future that we want. It isn’t imitating the past, but boy there’s a lot to learn, a lot of shoulders on which to stand.

Catch up on Part I here. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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For almost sixty years, Marshall Ganz has played an instrumental role in progressive movements and major democratic campaigns. He began to develop his approach to organizing while working alongside Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers, and would go on to design the grassroots organizing model that helped propel Obama to his historic victory in 2008. He’s now a senior lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Harvard Kennedy School. Today we’re sharing Part I of our conversation.

CHRISTIAN: Marshall, it’s such a pleasure to have you join us.

MARSHALL: Thanks Christian, happy to be here.

CHRISTIAN: In the past few years, there have been a number of watershed moments, including Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March and climate strikes. While all this energy has been exciting, it’s not clear that these movements have been able to fully translate that into power. You’ve made the distinction between mobilizing and organizing–shall we start there?

MARSHALL: That’s a good place to start, because there has been a lot more mobilizing than organizing. The distinction, I think, is this: you can mobilize individuals’ resources, people who already agree with you, to show up somewhere or maybe to send an email. In other words, mobilizing is taking a capital you already have and spending it, but it doesn’t generate anything new. And that’s because it’s not rooted in the capacity to absorb anything new. What I mean is that organizing is about bringing people together and making commitments to one another to develop a collective capacity–an organization or a movement–in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. To do that, you have to bring people into relationship with each other, you have to develop leadership, and you have to commit to people engaging as strategists as well as actors. Then if you have a mobilization, it’s a strategic choice, not just a reaction to the moment, and you’re equipped to use that mobilization to build power.

What we’ve seen so much of in recent years is digital media being taken advantage of to share information with large numbers of people in reaction to some motivating event, asking them to show up somewhere or something similar. But there’s no new capacity-build, no real power built that sustains. So you wind up having lots of these one-shot deals, and then they don’t translate into power, because they weren’t conceived that way. Zeynep Tufekci has a terrific book Teargas and Twitter where she does a study of these mobilizations, and that’s the contrast she makes. One of her arguments is that when you’re trying to mobilize in order to influence decision makers, how they see the mobilization–the rally, march, etc–depends a whole lot on what they think went into it. The March on Washington in ‘63, for example, was evidence of organized power. Some of the rallies we’ve seen more of these days are not evidence of that; they’re evidence of a momentary energized public that then may just disappear.

So mobilizing without organizing doesn’t get you very far. Organizing and mobilizing can get you a lot of places.

CHRISTIAN: In a recent article, you mentioned the work of feminine sociologist Jo Freeman and her phrase “the tyranny of structurelessness.” Can you talk about that for a moment?

MARSHALL: It’s interesting, because culturally when you say structure, I think people want to run the other way. It’s like oh, that’s going to be a constraint on my autonomy, and the highest good I have is my autonomy.

The sort of radical individualism that’s a result of political marketing and economic marketing… well, let me put it this way: structure, at its most basic, is simply a commitment we make to each other that we’re going to coordinate our work in some way. We’re going to meet once a week, or we’re going to use these criteria, or we’re going to end at this time. It’s just agreements we share so as to create continuity in our work or our relationship. That’s all structure is.

So the first problem is that it has a bad rap to begin with. It’s in this culture that feels like, I don’t want that. In part, that’s a reaction to experiences of oppressive structure; if maybe you’ve been in a situation that was a top-down deal, where you were structurally constrained, then you say, I want out of that. And so you go to the opposite extreme: uh-uh, nothing. There’s both a combination of that reaction to an oppressive structure and the lifting up of this kind of extreme individualism around us that makes structure sound like a problem, not a way of solving anything. And then you get what Jo Freeman in the early seventies called the tyranny of structurelessness.

This isn’t the first time this happened; in my generation, we went through the anti-structure phase too. But her argument was look, human beings are going to create structure anytime they get together. They’re going to make agreements. And it can either be on the books, transparent and accountable, or it’s going to happen off the books, opaque and not accountable. In a group where oh no, we don’t want any structure, we don’t have any leaders here... ok great, then what happens? Well, somebody’s still making decisions. Who’s that? Or wait, who decided that? And usually they disintegrate into various forms of factions and antagonisms, and fall apart. Not always–but a whole lot of the time.

Now sometimes the substitute for structure is intense personal relationships. You’ll have a movement or organization start with a core group of people who really trust each other, so they don’t need to build structure. Well, as they grow, guess what? The only decision-making authority in the whole organization is that little core. And so it winds up being the opposite of what it sets out to be; it winds up being very centralized, very personalistic and very top-down. There are organizations around us right now really struggling with this. They have local groups, which sort of want to do their own thing, and a national group of founders, and there’s no locus of legitimate decision-making. So structure is also an antidote to nepotism, to personalism, to all that stuff. It’s a way to be transparent about how we’re going to work together. But the aversion to it is a problem, it’s a big problem. A lot of organizations really struggle with it because see, it was sort of the norm.

Ok, here you’ve got to distinguish between firms–whether nonprofit or for-profit firms–and constituency-based representative organizations, in terms of where the authority comes from. In a firm, the authority comes ultimately from a board, which is fundamentally a function of ownership. And in nonprofits, it’s not so different–it’s still the board. Whereas in a union, for example, the authority comes from the members and is then delegated upwards. And in the federal structure, a citizen delegates to the city, to the state, to the federal–so the authority source goes from the bottom up. That’s the difference between a nondemocratic and a democratic organization.

For many years, up until the sixties or so, the typical form of association in the US was the representative form. It became dominant on a large scale in the late 19th century when a lot of civic capital was created. A typical model was a local chapter, state, and a national, and with elected leaders, and all that. Well, that kind of came apart in the sixties and seventies and it’s never really been successfully replaced. Unions still operate that way, some much better than others; some are much more engaged and capable of renewal. But people’s daily experience isn’t of that much–less and less. So like my students don’t know how to have a meeting. Now what does that mean? They didn’t make Toastmasters? No, it means that it takes a certain orientation to create a collective.

De Tocqueville, when he’s writing in the late 1830s, says the genius of America is associationism. By association, he means people connecting with other people, learning how their individual interests differ from common interests, developing affective bonds and learning to govern themselves. The whole capacity for collective, in this sense, has been eroding seriously. It goes beyond social capital, it’s like self-governance. How many good meetings have you been to? I’m not romanticizing the past, but there was a Civil War general who was active in the YMCA after the war, when all these associations were growing and people were asking, how do we govern ourselves? He came up with a pocket version of a set of rules; that’s where Robert’s Rules of Order came from. The innovation was that you could fit it in your pocket, because there were a lot of competing forms around. Well, that became kind of a standard thing. So it wasn’t this big puzzle, how do we decide? Nowadays, we’re like wait, how do we decide, who’s going to make the decisions? Is it going to be by consensus? Are we going to vote? What’s our commitment to honor decisions we don’t agree with? Oh wait, you made the decision? Then I’m walking. Well, then you don’t have a collective anymore–you just exit.

I guess what I’m saying in different ways is that this capacity for collective effort, where you’re ready to invest elements of your own agency in creating a collective agency, is really very, very much under assault. And so people substitute aggregation for it like, let’s get a bunch of opinions. What’s missing is people coming together and figuring out how to act on what they have in common. Instead it’s just aggregate…which is how a lot of market stuff works, and how politics has come to work.

CHRISTIAN: You talk about these micropractices and how they can turn into macropower. In many ways, this is leading into your thoughts on the breakdown of civil society.

MARSHALL: Yeah, well exactly, you have sort of two assaults. One comes from the economic direction. Markets are fine for certain things; they’re fine for figuring out efficiencies based on who’s got the resources to command them. But they don’t build anything collective, that’s not what they’re about. So a market process can be a pretty efficient way to operate an economic domain, but it’s all based on exit–you vote by your feet or by your dollars. Now politics is essentially, or has been traditionally, a collective effort. It’s about trying to bring people together to find common ground or to articulate their differences in such a way that they can be tested, argued about. That has been disappearing from our politics since the seventies, when the Supreme Court ruled that speech is money. What that meant was that we were the only liberal democracy that has no constraints on campaign spending–not on where it comes from, but the spending. What that did is create an industry that doesn’t exist elsewhere, political marketing–and it’s an, I don’t know, $15 billion industry now, that feeds off itself. The more money that’s spent, the more money they make. So it puts us in this transformation from what, historically, has been a collective process, into yet another form of marketing. It’s through soundbites or videos or social media, but it’s not bringing people together; it’s all about finding the niche that they’ll respond to. It’s kind of like oh, this person can be reduced to this issue, so now I’m going to hit on that issue. People aren’t issues though–they’re whole human beings. And so it fragments so much more than anything else. And at the same time, it turns politics into being dominated by wealth, for the most part.

Now what’s happened is that the wealth that’s generated on the economic side has generated a whole lot of inequality on the civil society side, so over the last thirty years, civil society organizations and movements have come to depend on philanthropy. And it’s crazy, but when we were building movements, it wasn’t like that. There’s been this shift where now I’ve got to figure out how to take care of my donors, I’ve got to come up with data that can convince my donors that this thing matters–as opposed to building a constituency based on people power that can contest the power of wealth. So it’s a big problem. I talk to my organizing friends, and it’s like we’ve got to get a grant, we’ve got to get a donor. Well, that wasn’t the deal, you know.

Now something like the Sunrise Movement is interesting because it didn’t start that way. It started more out of a real movement being generated by young people, just like March for Our Lives. But March for Our Lives pretty soon got taken over. And Sunrise, so far, has resisted that. By taken over, I mean hey, we want to help you, we want to support you–but now you need a board, you need this and this, and oh by the way, yeah we’ll give you a couple seats on the board. Well, it was just coopted; it just got appropriated. And so that’s a problem. In our country more so than in Western Europe where the same thing hasn’t happened to their politics, not like here, and the inequality isn’t as great.

So then the question is: where are the spaces in which you can create power that’s based on people rather than wealth? Movements are often what can fill those spaces. To me, that makes something like Sunrise very important. But also very challenging, in that they need the structure. Because there’s a lot of energy for change out there, but there’s also this problem of… well, here’s another just interesting person, Elizabeth Anderson. Do you know her work?

CHRISTIAN: I don’t believe so.

MARSHALL: She’s a philosopher at the University of Michigan. Her work is on freedom and equality, and her argument is that they are interdependent, not contradictory. Because the argument we get is that if you’re going to have equality, then you have to give up liberty. And she’s sort of saying well, maybe that’s the case if you look at it in an individual, but in a society, you can have the liberty of one person dominate everything based on wealth, and you don’t have much freedom. So if you look at it in terms of who has the capacity to make choices and act on them, then a concentration of wealth, inequality, is the opposite of freedom, not just the opposite of equality. Because if it’s equality in freedom, that’s very different than equality in nominal equality. So she wrote this book called Private Government, and it’s about the fact that most people spend most of their time in what she humorously calls communist dictatorship–in bureaucracies in which they have no say, in which they own no property. And increasingly, the firm or the bureaucracy moves out of just work life into private life. So it’s kind of like, where do people experience democracy on a day-to-day basis? I go from my job, well, there’s my house. But then where do I experience self-governance that actually matters?

All of this comes back to micropractices, because how do you have democracy unless people can learn how to do it? How do you begin to balance concentrations of power with people power, unless you can build collective capacity? The energy’s out there, the need is out there–the George Floyd response showed that woah, there’s a lot out there. But it’s either going to take shape in a form that can really assert power, or it’s going to dissipate. To me, that’s what this moment is about, because clearly there’s an awakening. The question is ok, what do we do with that? We’ll see.

CHRISTIAN: There’s an author you’ve referenced, political scientist Sidney Verba, who says essentially that liberal democracy is a gamble that the equality of voice can balance the inequality of resources. You just mentioned the 1976 Supreme Court ruling in Buckley v. Valeo that money is speech, and it feels like we continue to head down that path. As I look at how we spend our political capital, it feels like money in politics is one of the most pressing issues. Can we go further into how we address the current role of money in politics?

MARSHALL: Now, I think it’s important to go to the starting point. Compared to other liberal democracies, we have far less of a functional democracy. It has to do with the origins, the constitution; it has to do with the institutions and how they were negotiated in order to accommodate slave states, basically. We have this thing called the Senate. Now representatives? Ehh, no way. The Senate gives such power to nonrepresentative minorities, it’s unbelievable. Rhode Island, you get two votes. California, you get two votes. What’s democratic about that? Anything? I mean, nothing. How do you justify that? At the time, they were trying to make an alliance of small states and big states. Well jeez, look at now. Now you have these underpopulated red states exercising more power than super-populated blue states. That’s just wrong. And then the rules of the Senate itself make it so that unless you have sixty, you don’t really have any power to do anything; it’s like a stranglehold. Then there are first-past-the-post districts, where you elect one person per district, so 51% gets you 100% of the representation, but 49% gets zero representation. Then there are the districts designed by incumbents. What I’m saying is that there were deep institutional problems to start with that make it even harder to be a genuinely representative democracy. Now you add into that the money thing, and it’s pretty understandable why the US has kind of been at such variance with the rest of the world, especially in the last 40 years. You know, the whole neoliberal thing–it comes from here.

So we have a lot to overcome if we are going to get a functional representative democracy. Maybe it will take constitutional amendments. Maybe it will take social movements that are able to exercise civil disobedience at such a scale that they can’t be ignored. Maybe it will take electing progressive people wherever they can and beginning to try to build enough of a base for that. But that’s why movement energy is so valuable and so important and so precious. And that’s why to see it dissipate into Occupy Wall Street is so frustrating, because it’s a protest. Great. Protests are not movements. Protests are not organizing. Protests are protests. So it all comes back together. I’m not trying to be gloom and doom, I just think we have to accurately see what the deal is, so that we can figure out how to deal with this thing and use our energy strategically to do it.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. And to comment on your point about undemocratic institutions in our government, I think about the words progressive and conservative, because you look at the amount of power you need to have progress, versus a system that has been set up by the people who want to conserve an unequal and harmful set of norms.

MARSHALL: Exactly. The founders were trying to assure the dominance of local elites, which is what they were. And they weren’t so hot on democracy–they were a republic. They emulated the Romans, not the Greeks. It’s interesting… you see it in the architecture. The design of the 1770s through the 1790s is very Roman-influenced. You don’t get the Greek stuff until about the 1820s or 1830s, when it becomes much more of a democratic ethos, and you actually see architectural styles change and become more like the Greek model.

CHRISTIAN: I didn’t know that, that’s a great observation. So there’s this essentially neoliberal attempt to gut power from the government and present the market model as the only model, as opposed to it being just one of the tools we have to create the world we want. How do you overcome deeply entrenched cultural beliefs like this, beliefs that are human constructs, reinforced through the education system and the media? Maybe this is a chance to dive into one of the major successes of your work, the public narrative.

MARSHALL: You know, the question you’re asking is how do you explain radical shifts of any kind? And boy, we should be so conscious of the contingency there is in life. I mean, nobody thought Trump was going to be president. Nobody thought Tahrir Square was going to happen. Very few people thought a black man would be elected president. In other words, we’re living in a time in which the power of contingency plays out again and again. Now that can be scary, but it can also be hopeful. Because it means that as fixed as things seem to be, they aren’t that fixed.

Covid is a great example–the radical shift in lifestyle that we went through in the way we worked, everything, that’s what change feels like; it’s disconcerting, it can be uncomfortable, but boy, it can be creative, it can be resilient, it can be adaptive. In a certain sense, if we really want to deal with climate change, it’s more like Covid than it is like getting your local city councilperson elected. So we are capable of dealing with change as a species, but it’s also a lot harder for us to initiate it. It’s almost like sometimes it takes an external shock and then things open up and people say woah, wait a second.

The market crisis in 2008 had the potential for that, because it shook up the whole economic system. That was a crucial moment, when Obama went one direction and I think a different direction was possible–was absolutely possible then, and supportable, to manage capital in a different way. Well, that was missed. Trump is another kind of shock and throws a lot of things into play along with Covid. That’s why right now it feels like there’s a lot more fluidity. You have a progressive perspective in the Democrats that just hadn’t been there for a long time. You actually have a critique of capital, which is like, woah. There’s a generational shift that’s going on. The flaws of the system became so clear during covid.

One of my colleagues is running for governor here in Massachusetts, Danielle Allen, and part of her whole deal is, look what happened during Covid with housing. You know the story of the miner’s canary?

CHRISTIAN: Canary in the coal mine?

MARSHALL: Yeah, exactly. So if you look at Covid and where the hurt is, it’s in the most vulnerable people–vulnerable in terms of health, economy, housing, you name it. It’s just all in great relief there. On the other hand, the wealthy have done pretty well. So are the tools there? Is the time right? Because you’ve got to be doing something about organizing people, about changing the narrative. You’ve got to figure out different strategies and how to create enough of a structure.

So I just see lots of possibility, and lots of agency possible right now. Since you can’t predict everything, what you can do is lay as much of the groundwork as you can–to be prepared, so to speak. Does that make sense? Because it’s not just like cost-benefit analysis that we’re talking about, it’s a fundamental value shift. And value shifts don’t happen just because somebody makes an argument, they have to do with thinking about oneself differently, one’s community differently, and about the world that we confront differently.

Now that’s where narrative is. Narrative is a way of understanding and articulating what we care for, what our sources of hope are, what our sources of hurt are–as individuals and also as communities and also as nations. Because what stories teach is what is of value. They teach what is of value in the moments where there is a disruptive challenge or threat. That’s what a plot is, a plot is just that. It’s someone going along and something crazy happens, and they’ve got to deal with it, and then there’s an outcome. Now that basic plot structure–we’re not interested until that happens. It provokes our interest because we’re infinitely curious to learn how to deal with the unexpected, that for which we’re unprepared in our daily lives, like a marriage breaks up or we lose a loved one. So the subject of narrative is how to deal with disruption and how to find the moral or emotional resources to do so. And because we can identify with the protagonist in the story, we feel it. We don’t just understand it with the head, we feel it with the heart. Narrative is fundamentally a form of emotional language, and emotional communication and values are fundamentally about emotion.

So when movements come along, they do that work. I got introduced to organizing in Mississippi with the Freedom Summer Project and I’m so grateful for it, because people were refashioning understandings of themselves as, I am somebody. Yes, I can find the courage. Yes, I merit this. Then that was playing out on a communal level; I’m talking about the black community. That began to create the power to transform the institutional. And that’s the story formulation–of a new story for me, the new story for us, and now this moment is a storymaking moment, because we’ve got a chance to act and really change things and it’s urgent that we do so.

So narrative plays a crucial role, but it’s also not the only role–you’ve also got to build power. And you’ve also got to have some structure. When we came out of the Farmworkers, it was like you always have to have a story, strategy and structure. Why are you doing what you’re doing, how are you doing it, and how are you organizing yourself to do it? It’s interesting to reflect on the progression in Black Lives Matter, which has been a restorying; it’s been a restorying of American history. There was a big shock to the system, a double-whammy. So it provoked sort of a revaluing. And the revaluing is what can help move things in a different direction.

I think that’s potentially a lot of what’s going on right now. The way young people feel about climate–I mean, it’s like a religious thing. A lot of people of my generation don’t get it, you know? Hey, it’s their future. It’s like the givens are not givens. So there’s a tremendous potential for real change there, I think.

CHRISTIAN: We have so many serious issues to address as a society, but the question for climate I think is how do you organize around something when the worst is yet to come, as opposed to organizing around something that’s clearly visible? With Black Lives Matter, the visceral footage of people being killed by police has been a catalyst for civil rights progress.

MARSHALL: Along with hope. Hope not as in flowers in May, but hope as Maimonides’ hope–belief in the plausibility of the possible, as opposed to the necessity of the probable. Hope as more a sense of possibility.

CHRISTIAN: Along with hope. How do you tap into what triggers the shift in the story?

MARSHALL: I think it’s a combination, because you don’t get mobilization without urgency. Urgency is crucial. Now you can respond to urgency in a short-term way like oh, we’ve got to do this. Or you can see the urgency as creating the opportunity for real depth and tackling some of the structural problems. I use the example of the Montgomery bus boycott. The bus issue was a big issue, segregation is really painful, but the initial idea was a lawsuit, because that was Brown v. Board of Education. Now a lawsuit might have won. The movement came because of the boycott. They stumbled into that and then oh wait, this is a whole different deal. And then oh, ordinary people can create power and oh, it doesn’t just depend on the lawyers. So out of that came a whole stream of activity that really nobody predicted. And it was because it was a process of discovery and emergence.

On climate though: the challenge has been to make the important urgent, right? That’s always a challenge, making the important urgent. In a movement, how do you create urgency if the urgency isn’t evident? Well actually, the civil rights movement did quite a bit of that by creating moral crises, like Selma march. In other words, they were using mobilization to create urgency. If you listen to the March on Washington speech, Dr. King’s speech, you’ll see that’s what it’s all about, it’s all about freedom now. Because the experience of Black Americans is very different from the experience of most White Americans. Media played an important role, showing the police dogs etc., and all that was very important. I think one thing that’s changed with climate is that young people are hope, the future. Mothers Out Front, an organization here in Massachusetts of mothers and grandmothers–they’re all about climate. Why? Well, because of their kids. It’s a moms’ movement, it’s not just a kids’ movement, you know? You want a future for your children, well, better look at this. And environmental justice–it’s not abstract, it’s right there, right now. So there are the elements to create the kind of urgency. Is it going to be enough? Who knows. Maybe the next hurricane, or the next earthquake.

CHRISTIAN: That explanation of important and urgent feels vital. In many ways, I see the progressive movement getting lost in things that are urgent, but not necessarily as important.

MARSHALL: Amen. We organized an event here at the Kennedy School a few weeks ago, getting together 70 practitioners and academics to try to do something to get at that, looking at whether you have democracy if certain essentials are missing. Do you have a democracy if there’s not vote equality? Probably not. Then ok, let’s take a look at what we’re dealing with now. And most everybody is caught up in the urgent things. So now is there a way we can respond to urgency deeply so as to recognize the importance of what we’re doing now for the future? It’s a strategic challenge, because you need a venue in which there is that perspective. You’re trying to put the pieces together.

The bus boycott, in doing a boycott rather than a lawsuit, created power, developed leadership and used the urgency to build a base for the future. Did they consciously do that? That may not have been the intent, but that’s what happened. And so the question we have is how do we use these urgent challenges to create greater depth, so that we can actually get to where we need to get to? That’s strategic stuff.

CHRISTIAN: The Democratic Party has tried to build a larger and larger umbrella, which is important because it’s representing a diverse group of individuals, but the challenge then is that we’re each coming to it with the issues we care most deeply about. And it’s sometimes hard to let go to say, you know what, if we collectively focus on building power, then we have power that we can use to address all of the urgent priorities. Getting to that mindset shift is challenging.

MARSHALL: It is indeed, because you need venues in which to do that work, to provoke fresh thinking. In this year’s organizing class, as like a laboratory experiment, we formed teams by issues. What you wind up with is a collection of people who are defining themselves by one sliver of themselves. It’s not too surprising that they may be fragile. It’s not surprising that they’re going to remain small. It’s not too surprising they’re going to lose their creativity. Because what they’ve done is take this one variable and make that the definition of their identity.

Now you can go at it a different way, which is to do the work with other people to discern common values. Values are much broader. In other words, if you organize around a purpose as opposed to a strategic objective, it goes broader, it goes deeper. Let’s say we share this value of a sustainable world. Why do we care about that? Well, we’ve had different experiences that have led us to care about that. So how do we act on that? Well, there are going to be thirty strategies. Now the question is, do we have enough coherence and enough structure to be able to look at those strategies and say hmm, we can build our power best by focusing over here on this? And so then we have the unity we need in order to do that, and they become strategic choices rather than identity choices.

See, defining by issue turns everything into an identity group. Issues fragment like crazy. So an effective political party would do this work. I got to spend enough time in Canada to see an alternative parliamentary system, with a labor party, but enough the same that the differences are interesting. I was really interested in the New Democratic Party, because the unions and the liberals were all thrown together and had to come up with a common leader. They had to come up with a common policy, because it’s parliamentary and so there’s much more pressure to internally negotiate and find common ground. Not compromise, not lowest common denominator but common ground, so as to be able to be more strategic. We don’t have anything that does that.

Part II of this conversation with Marshall Ganz to follow. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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Earlier this spring, a piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review caught our attention. The author, Auden Schendler, wrote that “the focus on sustainable practices instead of power-wielding has unwittingly empowered the fossil fuel industry’s capture of government policy and action, providing cover to allow ExxonMobil and others to maximize profit and global emissions of greenhouse gases, unmolested.” Several decades into the era of CSR, there’s a growing recognition that opt-in and incremental change just aren’t enough. We recently sat down with Auden, the VP of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company, to talk about where we go from here.

CHRISTIAN: Auden, thanks for joining me today.

AUDEN: Hey, my pleasure.

CHRISTIAN: Over the past 25 years, there’s been a shift in your understanding of corporate social responsibility. In the early days of CSR, it was seen as a solution to climate change, but now you believe that in some ways it has actually exacerbated the problem. In a recent article, you said:

Systemic change is the only path to climate stability. But what the corporate sustainability movement has truly succeeded at is ensuring that everyone works within a narrowly defined playing field that leaves the one thing we need to upend—the fossil fuel-based economy—intact and unthreatened.

Can you walk us through the evolution in your approach to CSR?

AUDEN: So I came out of the nonprofit sector, and the thesis was that business was the only entity that was big enough, nimble enough and motivated enough–by profit–to meaningfully move the needle on the climate problem (or you can call climate sustainability, since you have to solve climate to be sustainable). And I took that ball and ran with it into the corporate sector where I am now at Aspen Skiing Company.

The first thing I attempted was changing lightbulbs. It should have been straightforward, because lighting retrofits typically pay back anywhere from 50-100%. In some cases, the second you screw the bulb in, you’ve got your payback–the new LEDs are that efficient. We eventually got it done, but it was much, much, much more difficult than I had been taught. I’d been taught that smart business people would not turn down a sizable return on investment opportunity. And the reality of the world, as you know, is that there are other factors at play. You might make a lot of money changing a lightbulb, but even more by selling a bottle of wine. You may choose to spend your money on improving hotel rooms instead of garage lighting if you have a limited bucket of money. So what that led me to think was, I don’t think we’re going to get there! I don’t think business is going to be a key part of the climate solution, because it’s just not enough.

Over time as I did this work, I said you know what, it’s not that it’s not enough. It’s that it’s actually distracting us from what really matters, which is wielding power and using business as a policy tool to drive large-scale change. And then I thought–and this is all 20 years of evolution condensed into a few minutes–well actually, it’s not just a distraction.... it’s a dodge. What I mean by that is that corporations don’t want, typically, to stick their necks out on policy and on controversial issues. They get attacked, and it distracts from their core mission, which is making stuff or selling a service or product. So they’re actually using things like carbon footprint reduction, lighting retrofits, green buildings, as a way to avoid the hard work.

I thought well, that’s no good! And then I had the final shoe dropped in this intellectual conversation I was having with myself, and this actually happened while riding my bike. I was thinking about the proponents of this movement, which is: sustainable business is good for the environment, it’s good for all of us, let’s do it. I thought, what would the fossil fuel industry–the architects of the carbon economy, that are responsible for climate change and for the fact that we have a completely fossil fuel-powered economy, and for the fact that we have a fossil fuel-owned government–what would they want us to do? And the answer I came up with that almost made me fall off my bike was exactly what we’ve been doing. In other words, our work is complicit with the fossil fuel industry’s interests, because what they want us to do is take blame for the problem ourselves, to address it in small ball ways that don’t affect them. What they don’t want us to do is use our power and influence as a business with a huge and influential customer base. They don’t want us to start a social movement, to protest their activities, to engage their boards, or to engage politicians to change policy around the use of fossil fuels.

So in some ways, I’ve argued, we’re complicit.

CHRISTIAN: Within the CSR community, it feels like you’re ahead of the curve in reexamining the role of business. How would you say the response has been to what you just told me?

AUDEN: This is tough, because the reality is that 99% of corporate sustainability people are doing operational change. That’s what they trained for. That’s what they understand. There’s a very small group of people who understand and agree with what I’m talking about. The rest basically say yeah, we are getting serious–we’re using science-based carbon targets. Which is a term that basically means, we’re going to apply science to our business’s carbon footprint so that we make reductions that meet the scale of the global problem. It looks very serious; it’s defended by major NGOs and leaders in the field. And it’s… it’s b**t. Basically it’s like asking if you’re in a shipwreck and you’re drowning, what portion of the ocean should you drink to save your friends around you. In other words, if what society has to do is cut emissions of carbon dioxide 100% by 2060, then you having a target of 30% or 40% or 70% doesn’t matter–what matters is whether you can get the rest of the world to change. That’s how you are part of the solution; it’s not just accepting blame and reducing X percent.

CHRISTIAN: If the subset of business people who are concerned about climate change aren’t addressing it systemically, how does that pivot happen?

AUDEN: I think we’re actually in the middle of that transition. And yesterday’s news [ed. note: we recorded this in May] is a good example. Exxon Mobil basically suffered a coup d'état on the board; a tiny hedge fund in California named Engine No. 1, which owned something like .6% of their shares, fronted two or three climate-friendly candidates for the board and won at least two of those seats. Now who came in and backed this? BlackRock, the world’s largest investment equity firm. BlackRock is run by Larry Fink, who has made profoundly ambitious and aggressive statements on the need for climate action, but never really done anything material to achieve that. Now he has. And simultaneously this coup at the board should tell Exxon hey, it’s not enough to run greenwashing ads on MSNBC about biofuels. It’s not enough to say you’re cutting your carbon footprint. It’s not enough to invest less than 1% of your total forward investment into renewable energy–while expanding fossil fuel development. Your organization is going to be changed for you.

So the definition of corporate sustainability has got to change. It’s happening by force, and it’s very gratifying to see this. The same day, in the Netherlands, Shell lost a lawsuit and is being forced to do more to cut its carbon footprint. This is what I’m talking about: if you’re a business, you should be seeing things like this and saying, even if we don’t want to become more active and change, we’re going to be forced to.

CHRISTIAN: That’s encouraging to hear.

You mentioned Exxon’s ads on MSNBC, which opens up another theme you’ve written about recently, the disconnect between words and actions? Companies that give public lip service to a social cause, but in back rooms they’re funding conservative candidates or lobbying to maintain the status quo.

AUDEN: One of the stark challenges–and this has been brought up repeatedly by Sheldon Whitehouse, the senator from Rhode Island–is that you have leading corporations making a ton of noise on climate and taking pretty significant action around buying renewable power. You say ok, that’s great... is that going to solve climate? It’s just not enough. It’s important–but what would really matter Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, is if instead of spending money on renewable energy investments, you used your K Street lobbyists to prioritize climate action. And then if you were public about it in the news. If you dig in, Tim Cook has talked about climate. But it’s always in the context of what Apple has done in the context of its own operations. Now remember, that’s complicity with the fossil fuel industry. And what Whitehouse has pointed out, and now a new group called Climate Voice that’s run by Bill Weihl, who was the sustainability guy at both Google and Facebook, they’re saying: show us how much money you’re spending on climate lobbying. And the number’s about 4% of that.

The way businesses operate is they’ll do an annual trip to DC where they publicly lobby on climate, but they’re typically lobbying for a bill–and if you’re doing that, the senator can say I don’t like that bill, but thanks for talking to me. But if you say, we’re not going to vote for you, and we’re going to make a public stink if you don’t get more progressive on climate… that’s a different argument. So these organizations have to actually use their lobbying power to push on this. And the reason they don’t is pretty simple. They need other stuff from Republicans. And if you ask for, say, trade policy support, you don’t want to then alienate them by opposing them on climate.

There’s a great example of this playing out in real time in Colorado. We have a trade group called Colorado Ski Country USA. They’re our trade group; we pay them a lot of money. And we and the board have said climate should be a priority. Well, the governor of Colorado was very helpful during Covid. Now there’s a climate bill that’s profound, that’s supported by the environmental community, and he’s going to veto it. We’ve said to Colorado Ski Country trade group, you need to take a position on this. And they said, we’re not doing that, because he was so good to us on Covid.

CHRISTIAN: How do you break through those gridlocks? If everyone wants access so they’re afraid to stick their necks out? Do you think that corporations are even willing, or structured in a way that allows them to start prioritizing climate at the cost to risk of other pieces of their business?

AUDEN: Yeah, I think this is playing out now as well. I used to argue that there was risk in taking a position on climate. And now, I think there’s risk in not having a position. A surrogate for this conversation is what happened in Georgia around the voter restriction law. Coke and Delta knew it was happening. They didn’t oppose it. And then–after it was passed!–they opposed it. That’s duplicity, right? They got what they wanted, which is more Republican governance, and then they came out opposed. Well, that’s a joke… people aren’t falling for that. So basically they’re learning that not having a progressive position is going to hurt them. And it’s going to hurt them way more than their senators or congresspeople can impact them–it’s their social license. It’s brand. So I think we’re getting past this.

By the way, this isn’t that complicated, right? Our trade group could say, Governor Polis, you were awesome on Covid. Of course, a lot of what you did was just to keep the economy going, and we really appreciate it. Climate is going to put us out of business worse than Covid did, so we really have to support this bill. We know you don’t support it, but we’re going to take this, sorry.

Right? This is just emotional intelligence.

CHRISTIAN: So we’re entering a moment where support for progressive causes is a factor in a business’s social license. At the same time, you’re still seeing Tim Cook’s statements buried underneath other priorities. You’ve mentioned in the past how Salesforce has an arm that addresses progressive issues, but that it isn’t emphasized in their publicity. Is it because they’re still afraid to stick their necks out? Can you speak a little more to when that becomes front and center?

AUDEN: Part of my thesis I guess, is that it doesn’t, because of the nature of these corporations. If you look at who’s leading and who has led, they’re only private corporations or corporations with visionary leadership that are unicorns. Salesforce is an example of that. They recognize the value of lobbying, and they’re changing as we speak in terms of prioritizing that over operational greening (though if you look at their sustainability report, it looks just like everyone else’s in terms of operational greening). You’ve got Patagonia, you’ve got Unilever… Patagonia is of course privately held, and there’s no one like Yvon Chouinard in the world. Paul Polman at Unilever got it, but he was like the only guy who got it. Corporations are very slow to change, so when you have this conversation, it almost becomes hey look, we’re going to take the willing–the businesses that are willing–but we need to call out those that are not. What I’ve said over the last decade is, if you’re calling yourself a green company and your CEO hasn’t made a very visible public statement on the need for strong government policy on climate, you’re just not a green corporation.

CHRISTIAN: I’m curious how optimistic you are that policy would meaningfully shift the way that corporations are held accountable on climate. It feels like there’s still a belief that there’s going to be an opt-in movement where companies are going to voluntarily police their externalities, which we’ve seen time and time again doesn’t work. How do we get enough traction with policy?

AUDEN: Well... that’sa question about whether the American experiment succeeds. We’re in a democracy crisis right now, and it’s going to play out. If we continue to have a significant number of our elected representatives denying facts and basically retaining power by limiting voting, then we’re not going to succeed.

Biden is showing what’s possible through the regulatory process, and some of the things he’s doing are significant and profound, like a pause on public lands drilling, which is 25% of US greenhouse gas emissions. Like ratcheting down methane restrictions. Like infrastructure support expanding renewable energy. Getting into office may require taking money out of politics, which is another conversation. But if you can get that little bit of edge, there’s all kinds of policy that even the business community would support that would accelerate this change.

But this is about whether Americans can govern as a republic. When you dig in on climate, and you ask how we’re going to solve this, you realize... this is a democracy issue. And it’s a money in politics issue. Some philanthropists and leading thinkers on this, like George Soros, have said, I’m not going to work on climate anymore–I’m working on democracy. If you can move to a direct election for the presidency, if you deal with the Senate having disproportionate power and not representing people but representing states. If you deal with gerrymandering, if you halt voter suppression, if you take money out of politics, all–and this sounds pollyannaish–but our problems would be solved. Americans agree on climate overwhelmingly, they agree overwhelmingly on abortion actually. They agree on education and social justice. You’d solve these issues if you could govern. And a lot of this is just the structural problems in American democracy. QAnon apparently has more followers than some major religions, I saw in the news last night. So we’re in crazytown.

CHRISTIAN: Then for those of us who care about climate, if democracy is fundamental to this, is now the time that we drop everything else to focus on politics? Obviously, you have a career and an expertise that runs parallel to democracy. But what are your thoughts for someone looking to get into a career around impact?

AUDEN: Yeah, I mean as an individual I think you ask, where’s my power? You have to think beyond your individual actions or your business’s impact… it’s more how do I wield disproportionate power? Greta Thunberg is just a seventeen year old girl, but she’s wielding enormous power. Everyone is different. For me, it’s ok, how do we use this wealthy, press-worthy resort as a battleaxe on policy. How do we influence people who visit? How do we influence policymakers?

It’s almost trite or cliche to cite Ben Franklin’s comment outside the constitutional convention, when a woman said, “What have you given us Mr. Franklin?” And he said, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” We’re failing widely to keep our republic. People hardly vote in the US, let alone participate in democracy. Every town has a town council. And it’s always like the worst of the worst who run for town council, the dregs who have too much time on their hands. I can say that–I was a town councilperson. But you can be on the planning and zoning commission and instead of voting down everything in your backyard that you don’t like, you can support initiatives like affordable housing. You can be part of a social movement by giving money and participating with groups like Protect Our Winters or 350.org.

We got America delivered to us after WWII, this place with clean air and water and good laws and we’re like, this is how it must be. No, you have to work at it, people. You’ve got to work at democracy, you’ve got to pay taxes and show up, and it’s hard work, but it’s what you should be doing as American citizens.

CHRISTIAN: Can we talk about some of the tactical work you’ve been involved in? Your organization has filed briefs in support of Supreme Court cases, and I want to go back to Massachusetts vs. EPA. If you could talk through why it was valuable to file that brief, what that Supreme Court case meant and then where you see similar opportunities?

AUDEN: Yeah. So to understand our approach to sustainability: we’re Aspen, so we’re a focal point of conspicuous consumption and power and wealth. One response to that would be, shut up you hypocrites, but we do two things to leverage that wealth in the climate fight. We use our wealth to model specific projects since we get so much press attention. So whether it’s a coal mine methane capture project or fully electric buildings and hotels, we’ll do these things and then we’ll push the word out on them. Today in the Washington Post, there’s a feature on the project we did capturing methane from a coal mine. That’s important because it’s not us doing it that matters, it’s whether other people replicate it. So that’s one approach. The other is to wield power. And the amicus brief we filed on behalf of MA vs EPA is an example of an attempt to wield power.

Now, we’re also very realistic about what our impact is. I don’t think that the amicus brief mattered that much. While we were the only outdoor industry representative to file, I doubt it influenced the case. But the vision is right; that’s how we want to play ball. And the reason we intervened–this was in 2007–was because we were asked to by our friends at the Natural Resources Defense Council. MA vs EPA was the most important law in the history of climate. It basically says that carbon dioxide is a pollutant just like sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxide, traditional pollutants, and that it has to be regulated by the EPA. It’s binding, it holds true today. All American climate policy is going to be based on MA vs EPA.

I think of it more as like this is how we ought to think, now can we apply this in different ways to other projects.

CHRISTIAN: Interesting. You continued this process of supporting policy and decisions that are impactful; I want to jump over to Excel Energy submitting a proposal to close coal-burning power plants and replace them with wind, solar and natural gas. How were you involved in that process, and what’s been the outcome, has it met expectations?

AUDEN: Yeah. So I’ll give you some examples of how we try to wield power and how we try to act at scale. (And yes, that did happen, Excel now has a clean power plan; they’re closing coal plants, they’re doing renewables. We won that one.)

When we were looking at the fact that we use a lot of energy, what we saw businesses doing was buying renewable energy certificates, which are credits for energy generation elsewhere. And we did that, we bought some. Then I looked into it and I said, this is a joke, it’s like a scam… it’s not actually changing emissions in the world. Well ok, if we really cared about climate, what would we do? And the answer we came up with was that since our utility is a conservative rural electric co-op, we’d change the board. So we dug in. And we spent 15 years community organizing, finding candidates and helping them run campaigns, ending up with staff changes and, thanks to a coalition that was involved, we now have Holy Cross Energy. The CEO is a climate scientist. They’ve divested from a coal plant. They have a target of 100% renewable energy. We don’t get to claim we’re 100% until 2030 when they get there, but when they do, it won’t be just us but the whole community–including our arch-rival, Vail–will be 100%. And there will be a model for how to do this transition.

Another example, this is a long story, but the short version is that we boycotted Kleenex because of how Kimberly-Clark was practicing forestry. Because of who we are, that led to a conversation between our CEO and their CEO. Kimberly-Clark is bigger than many countries in the world and we’re just a rinky-dink ski resort, but we’re having conversations saying we’re not using Kleenex at Aspen. And Kimberly-Clark is saying, we want you to use Kleenex because of who visits. Alongside 700 other companies, that led to a change in how they practice forestry, which is a major climate issue obviously.

So that’s power-wielding. Asymmetric warfare, that’s what the military would call it. At the moment, there’s a climate law in Colorado we’re supporting, and we’re in direct conversation with the governor and the governor’s office. Mike, our CEO, knows the governor. I know the staff. And we’re civil, but we’re like hey, this is leadership, we’ve got to do it. And then as another example, Biden’s interior department has put a pause on public lands drilling, because that whole process is screwed up, you know; fossil fuel companies will lease the land for pennies on the dollar. They make a ton of money on it and they contribute to climate change and don’t pay for that externality. So revisit that. At the worst, you should charge a ton more for the lease, and at best, you shouldn’t lease it at all because the scientists tell us we can’t extract more carbon and still meet Paris climate targets. So Biden files this pause. He gets opposed by the State of Wyoming and by energy trade groups. And we come in, working with Earth Justice and Public Justice, in support of Biden. So now he’s got a ski industry, which is relevant in Wyoming, right, they have Jackson, they have a big ski industry, saying you can’t do this, we support Biden. So we hope–and yeah we’re Aspen, so in Wyoming we may not have a lot of traction–but we hope that we’re a credible witness saying we support this, we’re business people, we’re using more and more clean energy, and we shouldn’t extract these fossil fuels.

CHRISTIAN: Not to get sidetracked by operational greening, but can you talk about where you’ve run into roadblocks with on the ground implementation of sustainable practices, since you have so much experience in doing that alongside power wielding?

AUDEN: Well, the challenge in doing anything different is that the status quo is this freight train that’s very hard to stop or turn. It’s hard to deviate from the status quo in say buildings or hotels because yeah, it might use more energy, but it’s going to work. When you do things like I’ve done and you put an early generation waterless urinal in a luxury hotel and it smells, that’s bad! So the people who oppose change are just trying to do their jobs. That’s the primary problem.

But we encounter this all the time. We’re trying to build a hotel in Mammoth, California and we’re trying to make it all electric. Electrification is a key climate solution, because if we heated that hotel with natural gas, it’s going to emit carbon dioxide for its whole lifetime. But if you heat it with electricity, it’s going to become greener every year until the grid is 100%; the grid in California is already 60% clean. When we pitched this, the engineers basically said you can’t do it, the technology doesn’t exist. It does exist–we just built a similar building here in Colorado. But the engineers’ job is to build the building in a way that they won’t get in trouble if it doesn’t work, so there’s no incentive.

In the end, what works is changing building codes, you’ve got to change policy. We’ve built green buildings, but over time as communities changed their building codes it was actually hard to build even to code–because the code was that energy efficient. Snowmass Village is an example, we built a hotel there and we were barely able to make it as efficient as the code required. At the Limelight Snowmass, we ended up exceeding the code, but it’s a great code. So that’s the way things work.

Without policy, in terms of implementation within a business, the key is that you’re not at war with your staff, you know? Initially, I might’ve gone in and said hey, we’re doing this, we’re being more efficient. The real way to approach these problems is to go to the facilities guy. In our case this was a Marine who on Parris Island during training was the best shot of 350 marines… so this is the real deal (laughs). I go in and talk to him. I say Peter, what have you always wanted to do that would help this company save money and energy. And he’d say oh, I’ve always wanted to retrofit the boiler in this hotel, but we’ve never had enough money. Okay, let me help you with that. So it requires a humility and a lack of kind of righteousness. And a respect for people’s places in the world, in the sense that Peter may have college expenses for his kids. Yeah he has ideological differences, he’s got health care challenges, he hasn’t paid off his house. You have to assume people are good people, which they mostly are (though some people in Exxon Mobil are not, for example). You have to come to them as a human being and say, I want to work together. And that doesn’t always happen; it’s often command and control, or the environmental community has a level of righteousness that turns people off.

CHRISTIAN: You’re trying to balance the visionary leadership that is needed to move us forward, and doing it in a way that’s not arrogant and brings people along, is what you’re saying.

AUDEN: Getting back to Ben Franklin–he had this list of virtues, thirteen of them. He tried to meet one virtue every week, and then he’d switch to the next. And he was like, the hardest one I can’t get is humility. You know, it’s very difficult, I have not been a model of humility in my life. But you have to aspire to it. An example of what we’ve learned here is if we achieve something great like we just did with an all-electric building, you dish off the credit as much as you can. Literally instead of me talking about it, we’ll have this person, or the CFO will do the interview, and you just dish it, dish it, dish it. And it only elevates you right?

CHRISTIAN: Within an organization, in many ways you’re in a unique position in terms of the type of company you work for, the flexibility and support that you’re getting. You’ve written about how people who get brought into sustainability positions are often sidelined.

AUDEN: I think that’s the status quo right now. If you’re a sustainability person, you’re not involved in company policymaking, you don’t talk to the CEO. And that has to change. Again, the companies that are leading are the ones where the CEO is the sustainability officer basically... Marc Benioff, or Larry Fink. We have this unique situation where I’ve been privileged to be at the table; I’m part of a 12-person senior management team. My perspective gets weighed even if we can’t follow it. In some cases, I am able to draw the line; I’ll say we just can’t do this. I think even within our progressive company, there are forces of conventionality that are actually pushing us back towards a kind of operational greening approach that is copacetic and that everyone can love–because the reality is that the work that I do is highly controversial, you make mistakes, and it sometimes puts the company in an awkward position. In the end, that’s very hard within a business community.

In 2007, I think, I was the subject of a Businessweek cover story that was kind of blowing the whistle on the corporate sustainability movement. I got in severe trouble for that. I was talking to a friend of mine who used to be the sustainability director at Patagonia, and he said yeah Auden, corporations want things to be happy, smiley face all the time, and you didn’t do that.

I think there is a cracking in the system where a company like Patagonia deserves a lot of credit for saying we don’t give care, we’re going to do this. So they have tags on their clothing that say Vote the A**s Out. And what’s interesting is that that was done by staff; it wasn’t approved by the CEO. They have a culture that allows that to happen. Well, they’re doing great, and they’re highly respected.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah! Ok this is jumping around, but I want to circle back to something we were talking about earlier, economic arguments for climate solutions. With some of the low-hanging fruit –lightbulbs, low-flow taps–there’s a return on investment that can be compelling. In corporations and even at a policy level, you hear about how great the ROI is on certain solutions, as a strategy to get people on board (because, like you said earlier, even those solutions can be difficult to implement). The risk is that we set the precedent of making economic arguments. Many other needed solutions, unless you’re operating on a long-term time horizon with a very robust definition for economic health, are at odds with profit. This seems to be something that gets swept under the rug in the impact investing world and the CSR world. How do you think about that challenge?

AUDEN: You know, it’s a huge problem. If you look at the Obama administration’s first four years talking about climate, they focused on national security and energy independence–and it got no traction at all. Then they started framing climate as a moral issue. So the short answer to your question is that the way to get things done in society is by using morality. You can look at the abortion issue and see the power of anti-abortion messaging, the kind of intensity that brings to the conversation.

I think the economic argument is dangerous because it only gets you so far, like your retrofits will only get you 30% of your carbon reduction. At the same time, we have an economic system that simply doesn’t function as it ought to, in the sense that some things are free and some things are not free and there’s no logic behind it. So it’s free to pollute carbon dioxide, but you have to pay to throw your garbage out. A philosopher at the University of Tennessee, I think, did a study saying your average American’s emissions are going to be responsible for 1.5 deaths or something like that over your lifetime. Well, we should be ruthless and monetize that right? If there’s a cost to carbon dioxide emissions, let’s put that in the system to help it fix itself. It’s not the only answer, there has to be a moral piece, but fixing the economics is a piece of it.

I think Trump is an example of the power of a moral argument, right? People felt he was making a religious and moral case. And that’s the role of a president, is kind of to bring values into the policy conversation. You can criticize Biden for his past legislation and for not doing enough, but he’s been really good about addressing the human component of why we’re making certain policies. Remember, this is the guy who blurted out that gay marriage was fine before Obama did, and he got in trouble.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. On the topic of capitalism, something that has come under fire by the progressive left… I’ve heard you talk about moving away from a fossil fuel-based economy, but not necessarily capitalism. Do you see mechanisms for the type of functional capitalism that you mentioned? It just feels like we’re so far away from a true free market system, and we’re so far away from being able to capture the externalities that are necessary to actually have a functional capitalism.

AUDEN: I mean, I guess my take is I agree with those people right? Generally speaking–Naomi Klein and others who are arguing that capitalism is fundamentally broken… I agree. I’m not sure we can get rid of capitalism; I think we’re stuck with that model. But the role of government and regulation was to fix market failures in capitalism. So there’s a role for regulation, and there’s a role for economic signals like a carbon tax. If we had a $200/ton carbon tax, suddenly we’d be closer to reducing emissions. I think you have to achieve a level of capitalism that looks more like what real capitalism would be and that may look more socialistic. Norway’s a capitalist society. The US is capitalist, but we have smart, socialistic programs like Medicare, Social Security. So I think you have to work within the system. And I’m actually a guy who consistently argues don’t work within the system! Like I want us to drop out of our trade group that’s not doing anything on climate, but I’m losing that fight. But I think it’s hard to drop out of capitalism... realistically, I don’t see how we do that in the next 50 years.

Imagine two semi-plausible things and one implausible. What if we eliminated subsidies for fossil fuels? It’s in the hundreds of billions of dollars–

CHRISTIAN: –wait was that the plausible or implausible? (Laughs)

AUDEN: That seems plausible... the right gets that, they don’t like subsidies. And then a carbon tax, semi-plausible. Think about if you had an escalating carbon tax that didn’t eliminate regulation, those two things would contribute to a different society. Then what if you had publicly funded elections? Now that’s implausible, I think. But what if you did? You’re still in a capitalist system, but we’d actually be functional.

CHRISTIAN: Yep. As we look at these solutions, what’s the role of academia in this process? You’ve talked about it as the closest thing to an unbiased source in our society. How do you think about engaging with academia as a driver of new ideas?

AUDEN: What’s been fun about my career is that I’ve had a foot in academia. Many of my colleagues I will co-author academic papers with are professors at business schools, and I’m regularly at business schools talking with students. All of these sustainable business people–the ones in the back rooms doing carbon accounting and not driving change–they came from somewhere. And they were taught at business schools. So there’s an opportunity to change what they’re taught. Now here’s a really gratifying story... I got a text the other day from a student at a business school, a screengrab of what the professors had up. It was the SSIR article I wrote about how your role is not to reduce an organization’s impact, but to use the organization as a tool for movement building and power-wielding. And the professor had included a caption below the article: “Should we change how we’re teaching sustainable business?” If business schools start changing how they teach–because right now they’re teaching to the conventional logic–suddenly we have weaponized graduates who aren’t going to accept the carbon accounting jobs. Maybe they’ll be unemployed, but then they’ll be part of the movement.

CHRISTIAN: I had a conversation with Rick Ridgeway over at Patagonia on this topic of where the power of youth is. And he similarly felt like talent is not necessarily being fully weaponized, as you would say, or being primed to drive the change that it could. That there’s power in a generation of desirable future employees drawing the line by saying I’m not going to work for you, here’s what you need to do before I would consider working for you.

AUDEN: Yeah, a lot of what I see is this inclination to worry about process–getting your annual review done, and your reporting–over mission. You’re always being pulled back into management, strategic planning and whatever. And talent does, I think, get stifled. So it’s the organizations that allow, and Patagonia’s a great example, they allow people to flourish. I think we do as well, but then the bigger you get and the more publicly owned you get, the harder it is.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. Well... any last thoughts?

AUDEN: Hmm, no. I would say that this conversation ought to be what’s going on in the heads of sustainable business practitioners on a daily basis, and if you disagree, then ask, if I really cared about climate change and my role in this organization, what would I be doing?

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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Today we probe our apparel supply chains and emerge with two viable reasons for optimism. The first is a resurgence of the values that shaped the initial organic movement. The second is a model for an alternative ownership structure that places domestic production on firmer footing. Bená covers a lot of ground in this conversation, filling us in on recent turbulence in the global cotton supply and troubling indicators of a changing climate.

CHRISTIAN: Bená, you were a pioneer in what we now call sustainable fashion, and with your brand Maggie’s Organics you’ve established a precedent for worker ownership and partnering directly with small-scale farmers. But if we go back to the late ‘70s, you were marketing organic food. How did you make the transition to apparel?

BENÁ: The unlikely story, yes (laughs). So the company I was working with at the time was one of the first to market blue corn tortilla chips, and we had a farmer in Texas growing our blue corn. When the first part of the harvest came out, we had these rich, deep blue chips, but as we were pulling from later parts of the harvest, the chips were lighter–almost gray. I asked if he could do anything to fix this, and he decided to try adding cotton into his crop rotation; part of sustainable agriculture involves rotating crops, and he had some theory about fixing certain nutrients in the field if he grew cotton the season before the corn. So he planted 200 acres of cotton that year.

I was used to him being this renegade farmer who would try different things. The industry was very small back then, and the relationship you had with your farmers meant you usually sold what they grew, or at least you tried to. He called me in the spring and said my cotton’s growing, and I said great. Then he called me a couple months later and said, you know I’m going to yield a crop from this cotton. I said okay, good for you, and he said well, you need to sell it for me. I was like Jim, I sell food, it’s not food, I don’t know what you’re talking about… who cares about organic cotton? And he was like but Bena, it’s organic! So I started researching cotton with a business partner, and we found out how absolutely devastating it is for the environment–five of the top nine pesticides classified as the dirtiest pesticides by the EPA are used on cotton. They’re sprayed from crop dusters and drift and go into farmworkers, etc.

I was from the generation of blue jeans, so we just wore jeans and t-shirts all the time; our entire wardrobe was cotton. Mind you, once I found out how complicated the supply chain in clothing production is–which you know so well–I was overwhelmed and completely underwater. We invested a quarter of a million dollars in this crop and had no clue what we were going to make out of it, nor how to convert it from this beautiful stuff in the field to a finished product.

CHRISTIAN: I want to stop you there for a second and go back to crop rotation, which I thought was interesting. What other methods have you seen organic farmers use?

BENÁ: Well back in the day, we bought all our cotton from US farmers. We tried to convince every farmer we knew to put cotton into their crop rotation after our experience in Texas, and they generally rotated with a legume. Then they either grew straw or clover or let the fields fallow, so it was typically a three-year rotation here in the US. I’ve worked on four different continents now with agricultural commodity growers and cotton farmers, and most of them use a very similar rotation. As the industry has grown, rotation has become, certainly in the food industry, almost an antiquated philosophy of how to grow organically, and I think that’s what’s causing this rebirth of small-scale and regenerative agriculture.

Small-scale farmers outside of North America have much smaller farms than we’re used to and you always notice the shade trees they keep in their fields so farmworkers can get out of the boiling sun. Intercropping is also happening all over the place in Africa now. We’re working in Tanzania and they’re using it there, but the first time I came across it being used with cotton, I was working with farmers in Burkina Faso. Weevils–they’re this mealy, wormy-looking thing–are very prevalent in cotton fields, but they love okra. Okra produces a pod earlier than the cotton, so the weevils would go into the okra plants and just eat until their hearts’ content. They left the cotton plants alone until they got to the bolling stage–and by that point the cotton plants were less vulnerable.

CHRISTIAN: You mentioned regenerative agriculture, which I’m hearing more and more about. Can you talk about where that’s coming from?

BENÁ: So as the organic food movement kept growing, farm sizes invariably got larger, and this is what has kept small-scale farmers so down in many parts of the world. When you think of commodity farming in the US, you think of the Plains and fields and fields of monoculture, right? Many times that’s one farmer buying more land and learning how to efficiently grow on mega-acreage. In other countries, often farmers become part of groups and these groups negotiate brokered prices for commodities, so the farmers are still kind of forced into the situation where they’re growing the same crop in a field over and over and over. With organic standards, in my opinion, getting more lax and allowing more approved substances in the form of fertilizers and pesticides, organic has become more about acreage and less about individual farmers and crop rotation. I didn’t even know this happened, it kind of snuck up on me, because our farmers have always rotated. But I was at organic events five or six years ago and people were talking about rotating, and I was like, well our rotation is this and that–and other commodity brokers were saying, oh your farmers still rotate their crops? Like it was old-fashioned, like it wasn’t part of systemic organic agriculture.

As the whole movement got so large, and as national organic rules became prevalent in so many countries, in response there has been interest in getting back to what organics really was at the beginning–to really treating our soil with respect and working with nature. Carbon sequestration is of course part of that, and I think that’s where the whole regenerative movement is coming from.

CHRISTIAN: The organic food movement started as an attempt to rethink our agricultural system but has to an extent morphed into simply checking the boxes for certifications.

BENÁ: Right. And akin to the fair trade movement, it hasn’t been as much about small-scale producers. When larger corporations purchase products made with commodities, then of course there’s pressure to grow more, faster, faster, more. It’s just like what has happened in the fashion industry at the production level. So as a direct response to that, organic wasn’t organic anymore, and regenerative farming is, in a sense, a return to true organic farming.

CHRISTIAN: If you compare sustainable fashion to organic food and look at H&M slapping a Conscious Collection label on a mass-produced product, it’s clear that as you start to reach those volumes, the definition of sustainability gets watered down.

BENÁ: I think it’s interesting… I mean I’ve been referred to as a purist through my career on organic and fair trade (laughs) and I think that when you look back maybe 15 years ago to when Nike started first getting into organic cotton, they were into this blending program where first 1% and then 1.5% and then 2% of their cotton was going to be organic. We all kind of pooh-poohed that, and in fact when we were first writing the legislation that became the National Organic Rule–and it’s still in the GOTS standard–it said you can’t have an organic and commercial component in the same finished product. If you can source it organically, then you must source every part of a product organically. That was designed to sort of decry these larger companies blending X% of cotton into their products. These days people do what you’re just talking about; they develop these larger collections that are all organic and suddenly there’s this super big price pressure to get volume up to the levels they need in order to supply them. That’s when we question well, what does that do at the farm gate to pressure farmers into growing more and more and more? What does that lead to? And that’s when you think about the watering down of standards.

CHRISTIAN: I’d love to talk about a recent event in India that is tied to news coming out of China about organic cotton production.

BENÁ: I don’t know how many people understand the process of getting garments certified to organic, but there are independent certifying groups–some for-profit, some nonprofit–that are sanctioned by governments. The USDA has a list of probably 50 to 75 certifying agents that you can use to get your garment or your raw material certified under the USDA umbrella under the National Organic Program.

So India. I just started working there five years ago, and one of the reasons I didn’t work there sooner was because it always seemed too easy to get organic product out of India. They’re the largest or second-largest producer of organic textiles, and there were so many organic dye houses, finishing houses, cut and sew houses, brokers who had organic product… It was kind of suspect. For the first few years I worked there, I couldn’t get to the farmers I was buying from, which for us was a brand new thing–we always started from the ground up. I would say to whoever I was working with there, a dye house or knitter or whatever, well I need to know who the farmers are. And they would send to me an address and say these are the farmers, but it would be a buying office in the middle of Calcutta or another city. When I finally broke into the system and got directly to the farmers, I would hear these anecdotal stories about potential fraud.

Well, there’s this lot-tracking system where you have to have a transaction certificate for every lot of cotton. It has to go all the way back to the farm and through to the finished product so that you can, in theory, trace your product. As more large players got involved, I heard more anecdotal stories about certifiers being bought off or transaction certificates not matching the amount of cotton grown. And what happened in December was that 50% of the organic cotton coming out of India was decertified. It’s just one of those situations where you hear rumors, rumors, rumors and then poof! Half of the organic cotton in India is no longer organic.

As you mentioned, this happened at the same time that the Uighur detention camps in China started getting all the publicity. The forced labor there has been going on for a while and ironically, most of the organic cotton grown in China was coming from this region. The EU and the US decided to forbid people from bringing in commodities made in that state in China at the same time as all this cotton got decertified in India. So it’s been a total upheaval.

CHRISTIAN: That’s huge.

BENÁ: It’s huge. Huge.

CHRISTIAN: What are some of the implications in terms of pricing and supply?

BENÁ: We buy directly from farmer groups and we pre-pay for our crop–very few people do that. We had just paid our farmers in India right before all this happened, so our source of supply was secure. But as soon as everything got decertified, all these larger companies started coming to our source of supply and the price is being driven up. Even though we have a contract for a certain amount of money, we’re going to be paying more when the harvest comes in, because we know the farmers could get more if they didn’t sell to us.

So in reality, this is only helping the remaining farmers who are truly organic. Their prices depend on supply and demand, and demand is only going up. Overall, I think it’s really good for the industry, because you try to put together the most ethical supply chain you can and when there’s an area of the world where there are these rumblings of fraud, you’re just kind of waiting for a shoe to drop.

CHRISTIAN: If we look at how price is a concern for brands when they’re building organic supply chains, it’ll be interesting to see how that shakes out. You want farmers to be able to get better prices for their crops, but as supply gets squeezed, how many brands that were interested in or committed to organic cotton stay are going to stay that way?

BENÁ: It will be interesting. Coming out of the pandemic there’s so much talk about what will happen with this sustainable movement. So far, our sales are only going up, and larger players are talking with us about programs and wanting to get involved in sustainability. That’s talk in the industry–is it really going to happen when these supply demands keep getting higher and the end result is a product that costs more? I don’t know.

CHRISTIAN: If you look at how fractured supply chains were at the start of the pandemic, and at the relationships between brands and factories that were already fraught but with the cancellation and delay of orders are even more filled with tension, I thought there might be a moment for more transparency. But instead I’ve heard accounts of brands going back to factories that they already were taking advantage of or putting harsh terms on and saying we know how desperate you are and we’re going to ask you do this this cheaper, we’re going to give you net 120 terms instead of net 90.

You’ve always had a strong relationship with your supply chain, and one of the reasons is that you’ve supported alternative ownership structures. Could you tell us about that?

BENÁ: Like most things in my career, I think I first got exposed to worker ownership by accident. I was so focused on agricultural commodities when I started Maggie’s Organics that I truly was ignorant about workers in the mid-chain supply chain. I had started selling a lot of t-shirts–America’s great disposable commodity–because every two t-shirts I sold meant another pound of cotton that converted from chemical agriculture to organic. Well, we were producing our own yarn and fabric and dyes, because there were no organic standards and we wanted things to be done as cleanly as possible. Then I would take our fabric to these t-shirt houses in the South that were built for 1,200-2,000 people, but were working at 30-40% capacity because so much of the apparel industry was already moving offshore. So I’d come to this factory and say here, I’ve got all your raw materials, this is the simplest garment to sew, your factory was designed to sew these at scale, how soon can I get this order? I would get a quote of say three weeks and four weeks or six weeks later, I still wouldn’t have the order. And then the craftsmanship was just terrible. I’d get these calls from the end user saying I’ve got shoulder seams that aren’t sewn right or whatever. I couldn’t figure out how this was possible–I was working with contractors that had too much capacity, and I was making a very basic garment, yet I couldn’t get an order on time.

So I just started spending more time in the facilities. This was all in the US, and that’s when I really learned firsthand who produces clothing. 90% of the people in the facilities were women and they were undereducated or completely uneducated. Often they were single heads of households. And they got paid by the piece. If they were a hemmer, they only paid attention to their hems, because if they did a hundred hems a day, they would get minimum wage. And for every hem beyond the hundred, they would get an extra two cents or five cents or 15 cents. So they weren’t invested in the whole product they were making. That’s when I started saying to myself, wait a minute, I’m trying to convert acres and sustain life, and I can’t sustain the lives of these women. I mean, they’re breaking their backs to make barely minimum wage, and they can’t feed their children. So that’s when I said, we’ve got to change the model–the model’s broken.

At this point we ran into an NGO in Nicaragua that was dealing with victims of Hurricane Mitch. They were trying to find employment for people rather than charity. We asked do any of these women know how to sew? They said sure, there’s a sweatshop industry in Nicaragua, why? And we said well, we need to build a facility where every worker has a vested interest in our success, how can we do that? And they said to me, what about a worker-owned cooperative?

The only co-ops I knew were food co-ops, but I said, oh yeah, let’s try that model, that sounds really like it could work.

CHRISTIAN: Did it work?

BENÁ: So that co-op worked for a while like a dream. The women built it from the ground up, literally built the building themselves. We put in a t-shirt line, a basics line, and then we put in a line to do camisoles and just a little more upscale knit garment so that we could use the t-shirt line as a training line, and then when people wanted to make more money and were feeling more secure in their ability to sew, we’d transfer them. It worked for probably three or four years and then it completely crashed and burned. I’ve asked myself so many times you know, what really happened, what was the real root of that? And my only answer is that we were working in Managua, in Nueva Vida specifically. Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the hemisphere next to Haiti. Nueva Vida means “new life” in Spanish and is basically a relocation village for victims of the natural disasters that happen in Nicaragua all the time. The women were truly worker-owners. They truly had a democratic system; every worker had a vote on every decision they made. But I think in their hearts they just thought they were going to fail. I used to tell them, for every step forward you take two steps back. Every time I tell you this is a great order, the next order comes in and it’s terrible. It was almost a psychological thing where I truly believe they sabotaged themselves. I still believe in the model. Man they were capable of sewing things they had no business sewing and doing a damn good job at it. And it was because, I feel, they were vested in their own business, and they knew that this was a way to feed their families.

We started our next co-op in North Carolina. We were involved with an NGO that was really hands-on, kind of running the place. And that project, Opportunity Threads, worked very, very well.

Our dream in Nicaragua had been to build a vertical supply chain that was all worker-owned, and I still believe that that is possible, I guess I just didn’t have the wherewithal to do it myself. Talking about slow money and slow investing, I sacrificed a lot of growth in the company to stay loyal to my mission there, which was: I won’t develop any products if you can’t sew them… I’m only going to develop what you can sew.

CHRISTIAN: It was the first worker-owned company that ended up in an area designated as a free trade zone, right?

BENÁ: As far as I know they’re still the only worker-owned free trade zone (well, they’re not in business right now) in the world in any industry. And it was wonderful, the women became so capable. They had had to import all their own thread, because they couldn’t buy from the free trade zone thread offices, and then they couldn’t buy boxes or labels at the places that all the free trade zones could. The women went to the free trade zone office and said we want to become a free trade zone. They kind of got laughed out of the office.

But then they went to the Nicaraguan government and said how do we do this? The Sandinistas were still in power, I think, or had just gotten back into power, and the Sandinistas are more in line with cooperatives.

They had to set up an organization above their cooperative in order to get the status they needed to become the free trade zone, and it took a few years. We helped raise a couple hundred thousand dollars for them, but they did it. And once they were a free trade zone, life was so much easier. That’s when I thought they were really going to take off, but by that time there were all these internal issues happening within the company, sabotage and jealousy.

CHRISTIAN: Free trade zones don’t necessarily have a great name, so it’s interesting to hear them applied in a way that isn’t detrimental to a local economy.

BENÁ: Right!

CHRISTIAN: What other policies have you seen facilitate more sustainable business practices?

BENÁ: Well, I wouldn’t say policies as much as things like the Global Organic Textile Standard. When we first wrote that, we were a splinter group of the Organic Trade Association. People were beginning to market organic clothing who didn’t have a clue what was really involved; they thought if they just bought organic cotton, they wouldn’t have to control the whole production cycle. We started saying well, that’s not really enough, if you’re going to call something organic then you need to make sure the dyestuffs don’t cause cancer, the effluent water is maintained, etc. So we started writing the standard with the help of the Organic Trade Association, and we used the fledgling organic food standards at the time as our model. We actually came up with categories of finished product based on the percentage of organic materials in each product that mimicked food and then those became part of the Organic Trade Association’s doctrine.

As you recall, the first National Organic Rule came out and allowed sewage sludge and irradiated food and a whole bunch of other things. It actually got more comments than any other law at its time in history, so the federal government pulled that law and started over. The second time the National Organic Rule was going to become law, we thought our efforts to set standards for every stage of production of organic textiles would become part of that law. But then in their inimitable way, the USDA decided to only mention clothing in the preamble of the rule and only suggested that people should follow this voluntary set of standards.

So to me that’s an example of rules and regulations not working to our favor, though I will say that even that sanction by the government gave us the ability to say to new supply chain partners, here’s the blueprint you need to follow. Certainly legislative efforts could help so much, not only in organic, but in treating people with respect and dignity and ensuring that supply chains are truly sustainable. But I don’t have a lot of success stories relative to that.

CHRISTIAN: I am hoping that Senate Bill 62 which we touched on in a previous interview with Ayesha Barenblat becomes a success story and establishes a minimum wage for garment workers in LA.

BENÁ: Even just to get standards for hourly wages versus piecework or a minimum monthly would be a start. If we could just get everyone that’s producing apparel in this country to live by trade laws it would be a huge start.

CHRISTIAN: I know you continue to do some manufacturing in the US, but it certainly isn’t the core of your production at this point, right?

BENA: It actually still is more than 50% of our production–but it is only socks. Well, that’s just because of volume. More than 50% of our dollar production happens in the US, made from imported materials because of our relationships with farmers. We could still switch our socks to being offshore and probably save 25-30% of the cost of production, but it’s part of our ethos now. We’ve been through seeing so many mill close, and it’s been the survival of the fittest. We’re working with sock manufacturers who are third and fourth generation.; they’ve hung on, and they’re now very secure and our contracts with them are very secure. We won’t ever, I think, move offshore with our socks. Unfortunately with apparel it’s not so much about cutting and sewing, because even when we started the co-op in North Carolina we could get our products sewn in the US–but to get our entire supply chain in the US, even yarn forward, would just be a very big challenge.

CHRISTIAN: You’ve seen the whole industry decimated. Spinning, dye houses... there are just missing chunks. Is that what it is?

BENÁ: I think a lot of it is that. I think we’re losing expertise, especially at those mid-supply chain levels. Though we do work with two dyers, both in North Carolina–one is an immigrant company and the other is an old school dye house that’s been around, Meridian–it’s kind of come out of the ashes and held on. Using Meridian as an example, they dye I think all of our wool now and maybe not our cotton? And tubing is a very important part of dyeing. It’s a skillset that very few people still have. We had socks this past fall that we were having all sorts of quality control issues with, we were getting orders late etc, and finally we got to the root of the problem at Meridian. They said oh, the tubers are getting national unemployment checks, so we lost all our tubers. And I’m like you guys, this is an international pandemic and you let your tubers leave? I mean, go find them! It’s a dying art form.

I think yes, you’re hitting the nail on the head that there’s a lack of skill because the industry has been gone for so long, and I think maybe companies aren’t willing to do what it takes to bring the skillsets back?

CHRISTIAN: You and I have talked about this because you’re a former board member at ISAIC, and we’re tackling one small piece of it there. If you look at every operating level, spinning, knitting, linking–maybe basic cutting and sewing you can pick up relatively quickly, but production quality at an efficient pace across the whole supply chain is not easy.

I think it’s interesting that you’re doing socks here, because socks is a much more automated category relative to some of the other pieces that you make. With the investment firm I’m working on, socks is towards the top of our list because of that. There are numerous facilities doing $15-20 million a year in production and a bunch of smaller ones, which is not necessarily the case in many other categories in the industry.

BENÁ: But you’ve also been involved recently in potential joint ventures where maybe the technology from another country is going to come here, yes?

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. I think even if you look at how Shinola was set up in Detroit, they were bringing in masters and foreign partners who had those skillsets. As we look at these categories, that’s the path forward, because to try to build from scratch–we tried that at Lazlo and when you have as little experience as I did and try to start in a category, it’s very difficult.

BENÁ: Yeah. So maybe the pandemic is a great equalizer for that too–certainly people are more creative and entrepreneurial right now.

CHRISTIAN: I really do think domestic manufacturing has a role to play in the overall supply chain. It feels like there are products in a bunch of different categories that from a speed perspective and from a cost of raw material perspective are reasonable to do here.

BENÁ: I agree.

CHRISTIAN: Changing gears, can you talk about how your supply chain has been impacted by climate change?

BENÁ: Sure. We began by contracting with all US farmers–our intent was never to go offshore with our contracts for cotton. We thought, why not stay in North America? Then biofuels took off and our farmers were simply not planting cotton anymore, because they could make more money growing corn. A couple of them reneged on contracts we had, which was challenging since we were a small company without a backup source of supply. Meanwhile, the NGO we were working with in Nicaragua on the co-op also exported food commodities, so I asked whether any of the farmers there were interested in growing cotton.

Well, cotton had been Nicaragua’s largest export commodity before the Sandinista revolution, but they had been sold a bill of goods by hybridized cotton and had ruined so much of their soil by spraying it to heck with all these pesticides that they couldn’t even grow cotton anymore. So we worked with an agricultural university in Managua to develop a strain of cotton that was specific to the Nicaraguan climate. We got a few farmers here and there to say ok, we’ll do cotton this year. And then we got enough of them that we actually harvested a crop.

I couldn’t get the cotton spun in North or Central America without having it fumigated upon leaving the country and being imported into the other countries–this is a fight we’ve had with the FDA for a long time. I’d pledged to these farmers if you grow good organic cotton, I’ll buy it from you, and here it’s sitting in their barns getting ruined. They’re like, you said you were going to use this stuff. So we went through years of that! Finally a spinning company in El Salvador was able to import it, and they started spinning it for us.

About the time we started getting really good yields and figuring this is going to be the thing we can hang our hat on, we can build a company around this cotton all from Nicaragua, climate change showed up.

Very few farmers outside of the US irrigate their crops, they’re too poor. There are two seasons, the rainy season and the dry season, and you plant and harvest around the rains. Well, the rains stopped coming. They’re supposed to come in April, they’re supposed to come in May, they started coming in June–and by then it was too late to plant. By the time they planted, the plants were stunted and their yields would be very low. I think we had a three-year contract, and the first year they lost 20% of the crop, the second year they lost 40%, and the third year the crop was virtually decimated. So once again, here we are with all these orders for finished goods and we can’t even get our cotton off the ground.

Then I went to Peru. This is back in 2005–we were already working there a little bit. I said to the Peruvian farmers ok, climate change is happening, how are you going to mitigate this? And they said oh, we get water from the Andes. There are farming communities around the river beds. They’re like, we’re not going to ever have a problem, don’t worry. The next year, they had a huge problem. I mean I have pictures of the same field from year to year and the first year the plants are like four feet tall, and the next year they’re like four inches tall.

We started a campaign to educate our customers and said we’re going to donate X cents from every garment you buy to get these farmers potable water. By the time we raised the funds to dig wells, they were literally underwater; they had had floods from the Andes. And we lost that crop.

So here I have this relatively small company, and I’m feeling like I have to contract from at least two different continents just to get a crop I can work with. Still to this day, small-scale farmers feed the world. I think the last statistic I read is something like 60% of what we eat is grown by small-scale farmers. Those guys are on the frontlines of climate change. If you don’t have money for a sophisticated irrigation system, you live by nature. If nature brings you water, then you eat. And if nature doesn’t bring you water, you don’t eat. It’s what inspires me to keep going, because if we continue the way we’re doing farming in this world, we’re all going to perish–the handwriting’s on the wall. Finally, climate change is starting to hit developed countries so maybe now something will change.

CHRISTIAN: What do you think that change might look like?

BENÁ: That’s a really interesting question. I think communities work best if they’re limited in scope. The whole idea of self-sufficiency, I think that that would be an answer to the climate crisis. If we could develop communities near us and try to be self-sufficient. In Michigan, farmers are using hoop houses with the goal of being able to feed everyone in the state year-round. Now that it’s 8 degrees below zero today, that’s a tall order, but I’ve seen farmers pull off miracles. We have the ability to do this, we just have to really look at things differently I guess.

CHRISTIAN: It just feels like there are very few things that scale without losing their soul–which maybe sounds super woo-woo. But if you look at say political change, you can have leaders who inspire people but to really drive change you need engagement in local communities. You don’t start at the presidency to drive real change. And it feels like with climate change, we can talk about international policies, those are important, but we also need to understand how our communities can independently take action.

BENÁ: You know, our company’s in a growth mode right now, and we’re hearing from large corporate players who want us to scale. As we get into the greater fashion world, people are saying your product’s too affordable, you price your products too low. I’m always getting pressure from our sales people to raise our prices. I ask them, what is it really going to do for us? Our MO is to make clothing affordable, we want people who choose to maybe not make millions in their career–choose!–to still be able to afford a good pair of socks or leggings or whatever. If I just keep raising prices so that I can afford to implement these programs from all these corporate players, then my neighbor can’t afford my clothes, and really what have we accomplished? It puts me under more pressure, it puts us under financial stress to raise more. I guess I’ve chosen to not grow our company as much as people expected.

CHRISTIAN: As you know, I ended up on the opposite end of the price spectrum, and I was thinking the other day about the metric for return on impact. Your return could be in social impact, it could be environmental, quality of life–but it felt like higher-priced goods support better jobs and more families with a smaller environmental impact if done right. At the same time we’re in a situation where, due to the inequality we have in this country and the stagnation of wages for large swaths of the population, affordability is a real question around clothing. I think I’ve struggled to balance higher prices that support everyone in the supply chain, and the desire for everyone to have the choice of organic. You just touched on that, and in terms of the levers you can pull around people being able to afford organic, it’s the price of the end good, but it’s also the wages that people are making.

BENÁ: And then it’s also how you bring the product to market. I think that’s what I was trying to eliminate post-Covid. We’re trying to find efficiencies in our supply chain so we can bring product to market more affordably. Because of our price philosophy and retail price, we do put price pressure on our supply chain, but I like to think we do it in a more responsible way than some of the corporate players. I find that the closer we get to our supply chain partners, they understand oh, I see, you’re not just taking this as profit for yourselves, you’re passing it on to the market–and therefore the volume will naturally go up. Which I know is a very different philosophy than the luxury market. But it’s a constant challenge, it’s a constant challenge.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah, the answer is probably a mix of all of the above. If we don’t find a way to bring the price down for a large percentage of the goods that are produced sustainably, it’s going to be very difficult for them to be widely adopted.

BENÁ: And we need to bring the value of goods up as well. Now that the discount-driven market is so prevalent, with designers designing for these discount retailers… you just think of the landfills. It’s this cycle of downwards pressure that’s just not making any sense. We need to work with partners and supply chains to try to find efficiencies, and then we also need to put pressure on consumer culture–like you did at Lazlo I think–to shape the perceived value of the product.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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When Trump pulled out of the Paris accord, hundreds of mayors on the frontlines of climate change continued to quietly and nimbly prepare for a new reality. Ahead of the curve was Grand Rapids, Michigan, already in 2008 named by Fast Company the greenest city in America. We hopped on a call with George Heartwell, who served as mayor from 2004-2016. During his time in office, his leadership was recognized with the Climate Protection Award for Large Cities, and he was asked to join Obama’s climate task force. He spoke with us about building momentum and what he learned while navigating the changing political landscape of West Michigan.

CHRISTIAN: George, thanks for joining us.

You know, I still remember hearing you speak for the first time; it was in 2004 at the Healing our Waters Conference. You talked about the power of cities, how they’re large enough to matter yet small enough that a group of concerned citizens can move the needle. Are you as optimistic now about cities as you were then?

GEORGE: You’re being very kind. As I recall, that speech started by saying mayors will save the world (laughs). And you know, to tell you the truth, I still believe that’s the case. What can be accomplished at the local level, especially without the clutter of partisan politics, is important and significant, especially with respect to climate change.

I was privileged to be one of 38 mayors credentialed by the UN to represent U.S. mayors at the Paris climate accords. In the very first week of the conference, Mayor Ann Hidalgo of Paris and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg gathered 600 of us at City Hall, and we had a day together that I think was perhaps one of the most impactful of my twelve years as mayor. We were working across international boundaries to develop our own strategy, for influencing and affecting the final outcomes of the Paris Agreement, but also to look ahead to how we were going to be implementing those accords in our own communities. I can say this with certainty: 600 mayors went away from City Hall absolutely convinced that we were the frontline guards. International agreements are important–don’t get me wrong. National commitments are important. But the hard work, the work that makes a difference, is done at the city level.

When I came back to Michigan, my term was over at the end of that month. I watched as a climate denier was elected President and I watched him take us out of the Agreement. It was discouraging. But the work has continued… mayor after mayor in this country, hundreds of them, perhaps now over a thousand, have signed onto a subsequent agreement during the Trump era that says in effect, Mr. President, you may not care, but we do.

My successor in Grand Rapids has done some incredible work and has taken the city from the roughly 20-25% renewable energy it had when I left office to now something closer to 40% of the city’s electrical power coming from renewables. It’s happening, and it’s happening at the local level.

There was a book I had bought for the title, so that I could put it on my shelf and people could see the spine, but then I read it and it was absolutely right on. The book was If Mayors Ruled the World and what it said was that at the level of national or state or provincial governments, politics play such an immobilizing role that things either don’t get done or get watered down to such an effect that they are often inconsequential. But at the city level, hurricanes blow in and rivers flood and the heat island effect begins to take people’s lives, so mayors are compelled–compelled!–to do that work.

CHRISTIAN: Clearly you haven’t slowed down one bit.

GEORGE: (laughs) Oh I’ve slowed down, but my passions are still there.

CHRISTIAN: I really appreciated that conference. My sister and I were there because Patty Birkholz had very kindly invited us; I was 13 at the time and Kathryn was 15 and here we were around these visionaries for the Great Lakes, Patty and Peter Wege and David Ullrich and yourself… just a really wonderful group of leaders. I feel like the impact of that leadership remains, but I’m aware that both Peter and Patty have passed away, and you’ve retired.

For the generation that will be stepping into your shoes, I’d love for you to speak about being a socially and environmentally conscious leader focused on supporting marginalized communities. We’re in a part of the state that has wealth that in theory could help with that, but also an outsized conservative reputation. We’ve got the DeVos family here, Betsy DeVos, her brother Erik Prince with Blackwater. Militia activity has been making headlines in Michigan–

GEORGE: (laughs)

CHRISTIAN: –although there are probably more militias now than when you were in office. But how did you navigate this community?

GEORGE: It’s funny to think about it. My father chaired the Kent County Democratic Party in the ‘50s when, as he used to say, there were three of us. For him to see Kent County today, especially the city of Grand Rapids, Gerry Ford’s hometown–he wouldn’t recognize it.

The city has become decidedly democratic, with demographic changes resulting in political changes. I believe it has voted in the last nine or ten presidential elections for the democratic candidate. In Kent County, interestingly, which is still Republican territory, Joe Biden won the county, Barack Obama won the county. So I think the outstate perception is that Kent County is a decidedly conservative bastion, and that isn’t as true today as it once was. The fact that a liberal such as I could be elected three times as mayor in Grand Rapids certainly speaks to the changes that have taken place.

Because I worked in a nonpartisan office, I felt it gave me at least some opportunity to work with Republicans as well as Democrats. I didn’t go to Lansing and Washington with a big capital D on my forehead, I was simply the nonpartisan mayor of Grand Rapids trying to do good things for my community. When it came to working with some of our philanthropists–who deserve enormous credit for the renaissance of the city–even though most of them lived outside the city, they saw the importance of investing in the core city, and they found that they could work with a mayor even though they didn’t always agree with his political ideology. I think Grand Rapids and Kent County are worth studying in terms of their models of working across business and government and philanthropy, that triangle. By trusting one another and working together and building up and respecting each of those sectors, I think we got things done where communities that fight between sectors struggle–you know, the mayor versus the Chamber of Commerce, or the philanthropists versus the business people.

CHRISTIAN: One of the things I find interesting is that if you look at the congressional opposition to Trump, two of the ten who voted for his impeachment–Peter Meijer and Fred Upton–are from West Michigan. And Justin Amash as well. Here are some of the most outspoken Republican critics of the ideology of Trump coming out of a very traditionally conservative–or thought of as conservative–area.

GEORGE: I give them each, Upton and Meijer, a lot of credit for being bold enough to take the stands that they did, and Amash too. But in part, it’s a very strategic recognition that the districts they serve are marginal Republican districts. There’s a moderate Republican voice here, in addition to the strident right wing voice, that they need to speak to. And they can speak to moderate Democrats as well.

CHRISTIAN: You had a personal experience recently that reflects the hyperpartisan divide we’re seeing across the country. Can you speak to that?

GEORGE: Well, as a way to transition from a full and active professional life to the life of a retiree, I serve on a number of boards. The International Joint Commission’s water quality board, the Michigan board of the Environmental Law & Policy Center. Governor Whitmer has twice appointed me to serve on boards, and a little over a year ago I was appointed to chair the Michigan Natural Resources Commission. As soon as the word got out, the NRA weighed in with all of their members in Michigan, with an action alert saying this would be the worst appointment in the history of appointments (laughs). Heartwell is anti-gun, he’s anti-hunting, what was the Governor thinking. My appointment was defeated on a party-line vote in the Senate with only a single Republican, my own senator here in Newaygo County, voting with me.

CHRISTIAN: It’s not necessarily common that someone in that position would not be approved.

GEORGE: Absolutely, you’re right about that. It was very unusual. What made it more difficult for me is that the Governor had two appointments. She had appointed a very bright and capable young biologist with a background in deer herd management, an ideal candidate for that position. She was appointed just before I was, and they used her appointment to try to knock me out. So they went to the Governor the day before, on the 59th day, and said if you withdraw Heartwell, we’ll let her through. The Governor said the hell I will. The very next day they took her to a vote on the Senate floor and voted her down as well. So I felt responsible for that.

CHRISTIAN: In your earlier role as mayor were you seeing this increasing tension across the aisle?

GEORGE: I think I certainly saw that. In race relations, an area of passion for me. Even in 2014, 2015, I was watching things deteriorate in the city. The issue around guns was that I objected to guns in public meetings. I argued that it was a suppression of the First Amendment rights of others when someone exercised their Second Amendment rights and carried a firearm into a public meeting. It was on those grounds that the NRA began challenging me when I was still in office. I would have gun rights folks lined up at the lectern at every meeting to tell me how foolhardy I was–that’s a kind word (laughs). So you could sort of feel that tension.

I was fortunate to serve in a nonpartisan office, but when you look at the policies I implemented over the years and the speeches I made, I think it’s clear that I’m quite liberal, and I think it could be–correctly–assumed that I was a Democrat. And so the right wing pushed back. We saw that regularly throughout my term in office, but I think in increasing measure the closer I got to the end.

CHRISTIAN: Well it’s very interesting that you had spoken out against guns in public meetings given how much more significant that has become over the last few years.

GEORGE: Isn’t it? Guns in the capitol.

CHRISTIAN: Was it a theoretical issue for you at that point?

GEORGE: Well there was a trigger for it, pardon that pun. The city, early in my tenure, had passed an ordinance prohibiting guns in public buildings. Other cities in Michigan did the same thing. The state legislature ran to the rescue to protect gun rights, and they preempted any local ordinance that was more restrictive than the state statute with respect to firearms. Other cities rescinded their ordinances. Grand Rapids didn’t–we said no, it’s important. We know we can’t enforce it, but it’s going to stay in the books, because the day is going to come when reason will triumph. So I became sort of the cause célèbre for the gun toters, and for the last several years I was in office, a meeting didn’t pass that there wasn’t at least one person sitting in the front row at the chambers, armed, who would get up to speak during the public comment section.

CHRISTIAN: It seems like gun rights is one of a handful of issues–I would say abortion is another–that have become so deeply personal to many voters that it’s hard to work on anything else if you don’t agree on that position.

GEORGE: Yeah that’s interesting, isn’t it? It does seem like there are these defining kind of issues, like abortion and gun rights, that become a litmus test. Either you’re for it or against it, but you can’t talk to each other, you can’t look for the middle ground.

I remember when I was chair of the Planned Parenthood board, we tried to open a conversation with the local Right to Life in Grand Rapids, just to see if we could find some common ground, you know, like that unwanted pregnancy is a bad thing–we should be able to both agree on that. And yet we could never even start the conversation, because the other side was so dug in and so unwilling to even look for common ground.

CHRISTIAN: Where do you see the opportunity to move the needle on issues that have become so much more about identity than any evidence or facts that you could present?

GEORGE: Well, climate change is another one of those issues that seems to have taken on the cloak of partisan politics. I think I’ve gone through some evolution on this question of climate change. In the beginning, I wanted to convert every climate denier. Then I had a stage where I said it’s not worth the effort… I believe I’m right, I don’t believe I’m going to change their mind, so I’m simply going to go ahead and do the things I think are necessary. That didn’t feel quite right either. So I’ve come back, maybe in the maturity of age, to believing that the way we use language, the vocabulary we choose around some of these questions, the way we approach people either civilly or not, makes a difference–and we should always continue to try to find that common ground between us. I think both my politics and my faith argue for that.

CHRISTIAN: It feels like you have to run parallel paths. You have to be open to extending yourself, thinking about how you’re reaching out to people–but you also can’t wait for them. Social change doesn’t happen with permission from everyone, it happens because you build power. As you think about these sides that are so entrenched, and as you look at the current political landscape, what do you think needs to happen to build enough power to implement more ambitious goals around immigration, climate change, race relations?

GEORGE: I’d use the example of a dear friend who was affluent and used his wealth beneficially in the community around race relations. Bob Woodrich and I used to sit and talk about how we get from this place–an unhealthy place–to a place of health and equality in our community. Bob would argue that it’s about changing hearts and minds, and you change one heart and one mind at a time. I didn’t disagree, but I would argue that it’s about public policy. You change policy to do the right thing, and then as people are doing the right thing and learning that it’s better, it’s healthier as a community to live in equity–then hearts and minds change. I’m not prepared to wait for all the hearts and minds to change, I’m too old for that now. I want to see good, sound enforceable public policy that will move us in the right direction towards racial equity. I can fully believe that as that happens–as people begin to live and work together and share equally because that’s what the law says they have to do–then eventually they will see that the other isn’t so scary, isn’t trying to take away my job, isn’t trying to take away my stature, but is my neighbor and becomes my friend.

CHRISTIAN: In the push to implement some of these policies, you have to reach a certain threshold of political power. You look at things like gerrymandering, which currently in Michigan puts the state legislature more in Republican control relative to how the state votes, and you see voter suppression. How do you build enough momentum to get to the place where you can reform some of these things? And in that push, where do you spend your political capital?

GEORGE: Great set of questions. My reading of late has included Isabel Wilkerson’s important book Caste, Eddie Glaude, Jr.’s Begin Again on James Baldwin and his relevance to our times, and Ibram X Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. I think it’s fair to say that those authors and Baldwin would say you need to invest in policy. But you’ve got to come to it, Kendi says, not simply as a white guy with good racial sensitivities. You’ve got to set aside all the myths and stereotypes that have become so much a part of our systemic understanding of society that we don’t even recognize them. You’ve got to hold them up and recognize them–then you can begin to change. And then it’s about developing public policy.

I can’t think of anything other than perhaps climate change that is more important today for the future of our nation than working on becoming an antiracist society and breaking down the castes that are so deeply embedded in the way we live. It’s about, I think, the whole redemption process, where you say you know, I’ve held this understanding and it’s wrong, it’s not helpful. It’s not moving us in the right direction, and so I as a white man need to be the one to change. And when I change, I start to see my relationships with others in a different way, and that’s how fundamental change takes place.

CHRISTIAN: And I might tack on sexism and inequality.

GEORGE: Throw immigration in there too, because it fits into that same bucket of inequalities. In each case, it starts with at its very root, fear. I fear as a white man that a woman is going to take my job away. I fear that an immigrant from Mexico is going to be better educated than I am and elected to office and setting the laws. I fear that my black neighbor is going to harm me. You have to address that fundamental issue of human nature and the fear of the other.

CHRISTIAN: Let’s talk about public solutions versus private solutions. I think I’m becoming more conscious of how highly celebrated philanthropists get more and more credit. They are looked to as the individuals with the power to change and address significant issues in our society. I have admiration and understanding and I also feel like from a democratic standpoint, from a governing standpoint, having those resources controlled by individuals doesn’t necessarily sit right with me. I find myself questioning whether the role of philanthropy and the role of government is balanced right now.

GEORGE: I can still feel the blood rushing to my face when I think about Governor Engler’s efforts to cut back on general assistance funds for single individuals in poverty, based on the assumption that the private sector could take care of those folks and that it was not government’s responsibility.

I think government has a key role to play in the vis-à-vis for-profit business, to provide the first dollars in for what may be seen by business as risky ventures. Say I think it’s got a future, I can’t afford to invest in it, but government comes along and says alright, we’ll seed the field here. We’ll make the initial investment, whether that’s in tax incentives or investment in real estate or research and development. Government has this role at the beginning to drive economic development, then, and also a role to see to the welfare of all of its people. And it ought to come to that role with a recognition that not everyone is equally able to compete in the private marketplace for adequate sustenance to support themselves and their families. Partly because of past injustices, partly because of present circumstances, it has a role to support people who are struggling. You can’t leave that purely to the philanthropic sector.

So, delighted as I am to see philanthropy step up, dependent as I’ve been myself over the years on philanthropists who have been willing to support things that I believe in, I still feel there’s always going to be a key role for government.

CHRISTIAN: Is there a way to reduce the impact of wealth on our current government?

GEORGE: The wealth in politics is obscene. I’m delighted that Warnock and Ossoff were elected to the Senate in Georgia, but the money that it took, that came from certainly a variety of sources, some that may have strings attached–we’ve never seen that kind of money before.

I was talking to a friend in Grand Rapids who’s contemplating a run for a city commission seat in 2022. I asked him what he thought that would cost, and he said probably $50,000, $75,000. When I ran for city commission in the ‘90s, I was breaking new ground with $30,000. It just seems to be ratcheted up at every level.

The parties that come to the table with money have certain expectations of the folks they support–not always, but oftentimes. There’s a way around that. It’s not one that anybody seems inclined to take seriously right now, and I don’t know what it would take to get legislators who are dependent on those funds to take it seriously, but it’s publicly funding elections. There’s a limit and it’s funded by the government. Not by the pharmaceutical industry, not by the police and firefighters’ unions, it’s funded by folks like you and me. I think ultimately that’s the only solution that allows us to have legislators who are bound only by their commitment to their constituents and their own consciences.

CHRISTIAN: It seems like that alongside of ranked-choice voting could make a very big difference in who is able to be elected and the ties that the people who are elected have to their constituents. And if we consider political capital, to me the question is if we’re going to hang our hat on a couple issues, which ones unlock the most change? Potentially it is campaign finance reform, because without that it’s so difficult to address any of the other issues.

GEORGE: You’re right, I think it’s that and it’s gerrymandering. Michigan took an important step in the right direction in creating a commission to set the boundaries for our electoral districts. Those will be two key reforms that I think could help move us in the right direction.

CHRISTIAN: What gives you hope right now?

GEORGE: Every day when I get up, I have to renew that hope. I love the quote–and I’ll try to get it at least close to accurate–from Vaclav Havel, who was a dissident elected president of the Czech Republic. He said hope, in a very deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good. It’s not the conviction that things will turn out well, it’s the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.

I see a vision for a world where climate is stabilized, a world in which we share the resources of a good world equally. Those are things for me that are hopeful. It’s not optimism–honestly, I’m not particularly optimistic right now, Christian (laughs)! But it’s beyond optimism. It goes to a belief that what I’m doing today is right, it’s essential–no matter, as Havel said, how it turns out.

CHRISTIAN: That’s beautiful. And if I look at my own career choices, I want to go through life in the most meaningful way that I can. I want to do work that’s important. I don’t want to say it’s a selfish thing, but I think hope is the sustaining thing.

GEORGE: Yes, absolutely. It’s an iterative thing, but it can have moments when it breaks out and accomplishes grand things. I’d like to see a few more of those grand things before I go! But they’re coming, they’re absolutely coming.

CHRISTIAN: In your opinion, where are the opportunities to build hope versus fear? I don’t necessarily think it’s a dichotomy, but in many ways it seems like there’s leadership driven by fear and leadership driven by spreading hope. How do you swing the pendulum toward hope?

GEORGE: Well, that’s the huge question of our time, and it doesn’t have simple or easy answers. It starts with each one of us believing that we can do more. We can make the space around us better for the people who enter that space. We can exude the kind of energy and enthusiasm and love that are captivating and are transforming for other people. So maybe it ultimately is iterative, and it’s one by one by one. But there are grand moments, like for me in Paris when 600 mayors stood up and said by God, we’re going to do something about this. This issue of climate change doesn’t have to be the reality of the future. We know we’re part of a larger movement that can sustain us and that motivates us and moves us towards a better place.

CHRISTIAN: I’ve spent so much time in the venture capital and private equity world lately, where everything is about scale and about can you get to a massive scale quickly. It feels like the depth of change that really drives hope is not something that scales across large tech platforms or huge movements quickly, but as you’re saying, is built on that one-to-one connection. How do you balance the personal nature of the relationships that drive hope and the visionary leadership that can spur a much larger movement?

GEORGE: Momentum is the word that comes to mind. I think the sum total of all of those acts of hope have a multiplying impact, and they make for the potential for one of those moments where hope just breaks out and transforms everything around it. So part of it is staying hopeful yourself and doing the work of love–I think those two words are inseparable–but believing that in that there is momentum, and so that as I interact with people, each of them is going to be interacting with other people and momentum grows out of that.

CHRISTIAN: If you look at Me Too, or you look at Black Lives Matter, I think those are moments where you see that washing over of hope. The question for me is, can you capture that and turn it into the policy that solidifies that hope into something that’s much more stable?

GEORGE: Well, absolutely. And Black Lives Matter is a great illustration. Glaude, in the book I mentioned previously, goes back to the Post-Civil War era and the Reconstruction era that brought in powerful civil rights for freed slaves, which was met with pushback in what was called the Redemption period, but then again in my lifetime the civil rights movement emerged. Who would have thought that we could make the policy progress we made under a president from a southern state, from Texas? And yet it happened. There has been more pushback, but that pushback is now met with a new movement, the Black Lives Matter movement. And the Black Lives Matter movement comes at this important point in time, with a new president and a new Congress, when maybe the sheer momentum of hope takes over and good public policy is implemented.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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Some context for today’s conversation, since this is a space where both the technology and terminology are evolving:

Direct air capture [DAC] is an emerging technology that we want to differentiate from the more controversial point source carbon capture, which targets CO2 from power plants and other sources of concentrated emissions but can justify the prolonged use of fossil fuels, among other concerns. Ryan clarifies: “There are some new projects looking to use DAC CO2 for industrial processes in the oil and gas sector which have received criticism for the same reason, but generally speaking DAC avoids many of the pitfalls associated with point source capture. Preventing further emissions is very important if we are to limit global warming, but it is equally important that we are able to capture and sequester historical carbon emissions that are already in the atmosphere. There are plenty of natural climate solutions that do this, but DAC is sure to play a major role in the future of environmental decarbonization.” Aether’s DAC partner is Climeworks, which has machines that run off renewables and energy-from-waste, and emissions that are a fraction of captured CO2.

We asked him about the high cost of DAC and how the economics change when the captured CO2 has value as an input for luxury goods. He responds: “Direct air capture plants are expensive to operate. Costs will come down over time but for now this is still a pretty big problem. Some DAC companies generate revenue by burying captured CO2 underground and selling carbon offsets. The problem is, due to their high operating costs, the price for these offsets is way higher than existing alternatives. Offsets from verified natural climate solutions (e.g. afforestation or reforestation initiatives, mangrove development, regenerative farming) can be had for $5-15 per tonne. DAC costs $1,000 per tonne. As many see it, a tonne of CO2 is a tonne of CO2. While customers may be willing to spend a slight premium for one project over another, offsets that cost two orders of magnitude more are prohibitive. Companies like Aether, which are much less sensitive to the upfront cost of the CO2, allow these companies to monetize in a different way. Finding customers that are less cost-sensitive should help bring in new revenue streams that are needed now while operations are still high up on the cost curve. It's similar to where solar power was a couple of decades back. It used to be prohibitively expensive for all but a few and today it's extremely approachable for most.”

Lastly, there are no waste products that need to be stored with Aether’s production process; everything is utilized. We won’t go into detail, but this is significant within the larger context of the storage and use of captured CO2.

CHRISTIAN: I’m here with Ryan Shearman, the founder of Aether. Ryan, can you start us off by briefly telling us what Aether does?

RYAN: The elevator pitch is simple: we are making diamonds out of thin air. And what I mean by that is essentially we are pulling harmful atmospheric carbon down and transforming it into crystalline carbon, otherwise known as diamond.

CHRISTIAN: Terrific. One of the things I appreciate about you is that despite not having a background in sustainability, you’re doing some of the most innovative work with decarbonization in the consumer product space. What was your tipping point on climate change?

RYAN: The first time I can recall talking about climate change–and really it was global warming then–was at a carnival as a little kid asking my dad about it. I remember him kind of shrugging it off and telling me that it wasn’t something I would have to worry about in my lifetime. It really didn’t start to become part of my life until the hurricane season of 2017. My father is a sailor; he keeps a boat in the British Virgin Islands, and he saw places that he has known and loved for decades essentially wiped off the map. That was something that got us talking, he and I. At the same time, the house of a friend of mine in Puerto Rico was leveled. The parents of another good friend had a house in Florida that was severely damaged. Another friend had parked his relatively new Harley in a garage in Texas that was underwater. So all these things were happening, and they struck close to home. They caused me to pay more attention to something that I had not been paying attention to. My focus had been on my career–largely in consumer product development. At the time, I was running my previous startup, but I knew I couldn’t just sit idle anymore; I wanted to apply my skills to this problem set in a way that could really effect change. In its first iteration, this took the form of organizing something we called the Last-Minute Run For Charity–an appropriate name because we put it together at the 11th hour. It was a virtual charity ride with motorcyclists who were using the product we had built with my last company. We organized these disparate rides happening concurrently, with the largest concentration here in the greater NYC area, that culminated with a weekend camping. We raised a bunch of money for disaster relief, and I was hooked.

CHRISTIAN: Ok, so that still doesn’t get me near carbon capture.

RYAN: Sure. I had stumbled upon this Japanese notion of Ikigai–your calling, really. Think of a four-way Venn Diagram of what you’re good at, what you enjoy doing, what you can get paid to do and what the world needs more of. After my previous company was acquired, I was wrestling with what was next and as an engineer, Ikigai appealed to my base instincts. I could think of things that fit into three of those categories, but not all four. My wife (then girlfriend, maybe fiance) had given me a book called Drawdown on decarbonization projects. I started paying more attention to tech-enabled climate solutions, since tech is where I gravitate naturally. At the time, the world’s first direct air capture plants were coming online; this was nascent technology that people were excited about. I understood kind of innately the need for decarbonization–not just offsetting future emissions but pulling down legacy carbon. It was an assumption then, and it’s now something that we know for a fact, that you need tech-enabled climate solutions to augment natural climate solutions in order to limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius.

That’s where we had this aha moment, my now-cofounder Dan and I. All of a sudden I had something that fit into all four categories, taking my engineering and materials background–with a lot of what I’d focused on having been consumer-driven–and applying it to this problem in a way that allowed us to leverage that professional background I had built up over a decade. I had time spent in the jewelry industry, in materials, in building a direct-to-consumer brand. When you think about it, diamonds are one of the most enduring and valuable forms of carbon on the planet. We started to develop this thesis that there must be a chemistry we could take advantage of to transform CO2 into just crystalline C. And because diamonds are so valuable, that might open an opportunity for us to use it as a funnel and bring cash into decarbonization and a sexy story–people love diamonds–to hook consumers. What’s often overlooked in the climate conversations I’m a part of is consumer participation, for a few reasons: we know that the vast majority of emissions are not on the shoulders of consumers, it’s the large oil and gas companies, the transportation sector… we know where carbon is coming from. I’m a firm believer that we can drive demand bottom-up for change. That has to sit alongside regulation; we need the government to play a role in decarbonization, but if we can get consumers involved in a really, really profound way, they can drive change. So ultimately that’s where we landed.

CHRISTIAN: Yes, I’m a believer in change that’s driven by movement towards rather than guilt or movement away. We need regulation. We need accountability. We also need consumers to understand how they can engage with change. Can you talk about how much carbon actually goes into a diamond?

RYAN: At a very base level, a diamond is only carbon. So if we’re talking about one carat of diamond, that’s one carat of carbon. That’s a fifth of a gram. If we talk about what goes into that gemstone in particular, roughly 75% of the diamond’s mass is lost in the cutting and polishing process. If we start with a five gram piece of rough, we’ll end up with something maybe a little larger than one carat. That’s the direct linear path for those carbon atoms, but that’s not the scope of our impact. There’s the amount of carbon that’s turned into rough diamond. Then we also have the fact that we’re offsetting the need for a different dirtier diamond that would otherwise enter the market. That’s a really interesting element about this market in particular; the demand-supply relationship is so tight in diamonds that we have a high degree of confidence that for every stone we put into the market, that’s one less diamond the big mining companies–the ALROSAs and De Beers of the world–are going to be able to sell. Then there’s this natural offsetting that we have to talk about. Beyond that, the products we’re selling are high-value, high-margin goods. I think one of the big things we get to contribute to the climate fight is dollars. That’s where I get excited; we have this notion of a fair carbon price, probably at least $25 per ton although I can go and get offsets for as little as a dollar if I’m buying them in bulk. So how do you value what one ton of CO2 is worth and how do you really account for that? Then there’s the opportunity to talk about offsetting future emissions versus actually drawing down carbon from the atmosphere. So there are all these different elements that come into understanding how we get to our net impact. We have set a goal as a company to make sure that we’re pulling at least 20 metric tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere for every single carat of diamond we sell.

What’s really interesting when we talk about consumers is that outsize impact I mentioned. Do you know what your footprint as a consumer in America might be on an annual basis?

CHRISTIAN: I couldn’t tell you.

RYAN: I would venture that 99.9% of people couldn’t tell me that either. It’s roughly 16 metric tons per year. If you wanted to offset the next ten years of your life, you could work with someone who’s doing carbon sequestration and buy 160 tons of CO2. If we all did that, that would be pretty material, but it’s probably not going to happen. Now, the reason it’s not going to happen is [1] it’s costly and [2] how do you go about doing it? You’ve got to spend some time researching, there’s all this friction involved. We wanted to empower consumers by allowing them to have that outsize impact without introducing friction. If you buy from our brand, we’re not changing your consumption habits, we’re just swapping the brand that you’re buying from. For that two carat diamond ring you buy from us, we’re going to pull down 40 metric tons of CO2. That’s two and a half years of carbon from your personal carbon budget.

Now this is something that becomes easy for consumers. And by doing that, we’re putting pressure on the industry at large. They say it takes pressure to make a diamond. Ours are made in a vacuum, so that’s not necessarily true in this case–but what is true is that we’re putting pressure upward into the industry by operating with radical transparency and trying to standardize things that we think the industry needs to adopt across the board. If every carat of diamond sold in the world had a 20 metric ton offset effect, the industry would be responsible for drawing down three gigatons of carbon per year. That’s almost 10% of our annual emissions; think it’s roughly 40 metric gigatons right now.

If every carat of diamond sold in the world had a 20 metric ton offset effect, the industry would be responsible for drawing down three gigatons of carbon per year. That’s almost 10% of our annual emissions.

That’s a serious impact. Will that happen? Not just because of us, at least in terms of our direct production, but if we can start to create a snowball effect and inspire other companies by building consumer demand, we can drive real change.

CHRISTIAN: That’s remarkable. Could you elaborate on how what you’re doing contrasts with where the industry is at presently in terms of environmental and social impact?

RYAN: Sure. Historically you have significant cost to pull diamonds up from the ground, operationally and environmentally. You’re digging these giant strip mines that are pockmarks in the surface of the earth that can be seen from space. There are strip mines you can’t fly across because they’re so deep and so wide that it creates a pressure drop and you've actually had planes crash. Beyond that there are a ton of secondary effects. You have all these different minerals that are pulled up from underground; when rainwater mixes with them, it runs off as this acid mine runoff that destroys local ecologies. And then there are the human rights concerns. The industry has taken steps to better the way we produce diamonds–and there has been improvement. The Kimberley Process was put in place to prevent conflict diamonds from entering the market. It doesn’t catch 100% of conflict diamonds. It also doesn’t label bad diamonds that shouldn’t be entering the market as conflict diamonds. If we’re not openly engaged in a state of civil unrest in the country where we’re producing diamonds, they may not qualify as conflict diamonds even though in the spirit of what a conflict diamond is they really are. Beyond that, child labor is a factor to consider.

Before I did this, I worked in the industry, and I sold diamonds. The gravity of that reality didn’t hit me until we started working on this project. The industry likes to say, oh we stopped the vast majority of conflict diamonds from entering the market. It’s still tens of tons of diamonds. Think of garbage trucks full of diamonds entering the market. These are illicit diamonds that should not be here.

Take a step closer to where we are today, and there’s another massive improvement with the introduction of lab-grown diamonds. What we produce is a lab-grown diamond–it’s just a little bit different in one key way. The lab-grown diamonds that are produced today still need to source their carbon from somewhere, and they’re getting it from fossil fuels. You can’t make a lab-grown diamond today without oil drilling or fracking. How can you consider yourself sustainable if you rely on those activities? So you get a lot of greenwashing–brands saying oh we’re sustainable, we offset our operational carbon footprint by spending $10,000/year on carbon offsets. There’s just a huge level of audacity in making such a claim. If you are reliant on the fossil fuel industry, you are at a fundamental level not sustainable.

We’re offsetting our operational footprint right now. We have to, it’s something that sits alongside what we’re doing on the manufacturing side. I take flights; we have partners internationally that I have to be in the room with. Right now, we offset our operational footprint with natural climate solutions in conjunction with our own tech-enabled climate solution. We’re working with natural capital partners to source high-quality, vetted carbon offset programs. Right now, we’re funding afforestation efforts in South America, for instance, that protect the Amazon from deforestation. You have to do that in a way that is vetted, otherwise there are a ton of challenges with the legitimacy of those offsets. This has been a big focus for many people in the sector for a while now, and there are some really great advancements happening. I’ll give a shout out to Pachama–what they’re doing in that space is phenomenal. We know a bunch of the folks over at Pachama and actually intend to work with them very soon. I’ve got to give hats off to them as well as the folks over at Nori with their regenerative farming efforts. I think this is something that makes us feel great because we are working to pull carbon out of the atmosphere–it’s not just about getting a free pass to emit through offsetting other people’s future emissions. I understand the role that emissions offsets play; I don’t personally subscribe to that structure.

It’s a heavily contested and debated topic, but what I will say for Aether in particular is that we want to make sure that everything we do is out in the open for consumers to see. The diamond industry at large has been designed to obfuscate. It’s been designed to be challenging to navigate. If we didn’t have backgrounds in this industry, I don’t think we could do what we’re doing effectively. For a new entrant who wanted to do something like this, it would be harder. When we started out, we talked to everyone in the industry to say hey, we want to make diamonds from atmospheric CO2. They said that’s crazy, you can’t do that. We thought for sure someone must be working on it, but we couldn’t find anyone.

CHRISTIAN: Where was the technology at when you first started working on this?

RYAN: There are three tech stacks that need to work in unison in order to do this. You have direct air capture–pulling carbon out of the air. Then on the other end, you have growing diamonds in a laboratory. Those are both fairly mature technologies; one has commercial viability and the other is starting to figure it out, find its way in the world. We needed to bridge that gap. We said alright, let’s essentially take this atmospheric CO2, purify it, manipulate and bend those carbon atoms to our will, and make it sufficient as a feedstock for a chemical vapor deposition reactor so that we can make diamonds out of it.

Climeworks’ first direct air capture plant had just come online, I want to say in late 2017–so right around the time we were formulating this concept. I think because of the sexiness and the unique narrative we were pitching, we were able to start conversations with established players in the direct air capture space, which enabled us to go out and leverage partnerships to move the ball quickly. We went from concept to shipping product in under three years. Those were three years of late nights, a lot of complex engineering. The technical challenges aren’t insurmountable but really, really, really complex. This is something that required very specialized PhDs; they come in and build the recipes to take the feedstock we’re making and grow it into a gem grade diamond. Even now that we’ve got it working, scaling it is going to be a challenge.

People ask me well, what if you flood the market with your diamonds? I’m not worried about that; over the next twenty years, half of the global production of diamonds from the ground is going to disappear. Diamond mines are closing. When you start a new mine, you know what the shelf life is, and 70% of all mines operating today are going to dry up by 2040. If demand is growing and supply is dropping precipitously, surely the industry needs to backfill. Man-made diamonds are the only way we’re going to be able to backfill, but even with a combined global effort from everyone who’s making diamonds today, we can’t make them fast enough to fill the gap. We kicked off the first phase of production in September. On December 21st, we launched our brand. Initial reception by the press and by consumers has been fantastic. Extremely conservatively, if you were to extrapolate and scale that over a year we’re on track to make five to six million dollars this year, which is a great trajectory to be on.

CHRISTIAN: I love the name, the branding, the feel that you’ve built around Aether. Lab-grown diamonds have come with a stigma. You’re getting such a different reaction–what else do you think is behind that?

RYAN: We thought we might be able to take that paradigm and flip it on its head. The mining companies, especially over the last four or five years, have really been trying to demonize lab-grown and make them devalued in terms of how consumers perceive them–which then impacts what you can sell them for on the open market. We understood that there’s no romanticism with a lab-grown diamond. With a mined diamond, you can tell a story, oh they were forged in the earth’s crust millions of years ago and they’re extremely rare, and this and that. They are rare; there are people who think diamonds aren’t rare, that there are these stockpiles all over the world. There’s a lot of mythology around diamonds that’s simply not true, or was true and no longer is. As diamond mining reduces in its output, diamonds are going to become more and more rare.

Lab-grown diamonds don’t really do anything to address that story. They are highly commoditized; people are trying to pump them out as fast as they can (trying, maybe not executing). Their production is associated with a ton of pollution, for the most part. They’re coming from parts of Asia where maybe there’s not the right level of transparency or accountability or clean power (energy use is one of the big costs of goods for lab-grown diamonds.) We get to say alright, we understand why up until now man-made was not a good thing, but that ends today; man-made is now a great thing because look what we can do. We can use this opportunity to grow diamonds in a lab to do something that’s going to save our planet. We’re not the only actor in this space, but what we’re doing and how we’re going about it gives us probably more legitimacy than any other brand out there.

CHRISTIAN: You’re doing two things. One, you’re making a really high-quality diamond. You have very tight standards about what you’re producing. You’re also, as you look to grow the brand, really focusing in on that story. Could you talk more about the mythology that’s been built up around diamonds and how Aether brings a different lens but is still a very emotionally-driven approach to selling them?

RYAN: Essentially, diamond and the way we know it and treat it today–especially with engagement rings–is a man-made construct entirely. It’s been invented by a marketer. De Beers gets a lot of credit; they worked with an outside agency, but they were the client that drove that. Diamonds have become a deep-seated part of human culture. For a while, it was very much an American tradition, but it has since expanded to Europe, to Asia, to all parts of the world. This is something that, up until now, has just been driven by blind consumption. We understand and respect the storytelling aspect; it’s not just diamonds, it’s how the industry operates. When I worked at David Yurman, so much of what we did on the men’s line was driven by storytelling and materials. We introduced different composites, alloys, meteorite–you name it, we played around with it. Stories are what get consumers excited; that’s what gets you to buy. So I’ll tip my hat to the folks who have created this beast that is the diamond market and consumer demand for it.

There’s a lot of mythology, all the way down to the characteristics that determine how a diamond is graded. Fluorescence is a great example. Fluorescence wasn’t really a major factor in grading diamonds until black lights became really popular–think about the late 60s, 70s. People realized that some diamonds would irradiate underneath a black light and give off that nice little bluish hue, mostly blue. People ask me all the time about fluorescence and it’s not something you’ll really see, especially indoors. Generally speaking, the industry has taken things that would otherwise be arbitrary and used them to build a framework for how consumers look at diamonds, how they’re priced and so on and so forth. We have to lean into that; we have to lean into the storytelling aspect. What we’re doing is telling a great story, but it’s a story rooted in truth and technology, and something that effectively will drive positive impact if we do our job right and if we can scale.

So this story will be followed by real, tangible change. That aligns with where consumers are at today. The age range for people buying engagement rings starts in the low twenties and goes up through the thirties, and that aligns with who’s buying diamonds in general. If you look at 2019 data–we don’t quite have 2020 data yet–two-thirds of all diamonds sold were bought by Gen Z and millennials. Young people are the ones who love diamonds, far more than our parents. This is really interesting because these are also the first consumers really ever who are seeking brands that have value alignment. They’re seeking brands that are looking to do the right thing, and they’re voting with their dollars. What’s special about our story is that it has the opportunity to open the market up by pulling in consumers who otherwise would have never purchased a diamond. I will not say that was ever something we thought about ahead of time; it was something we’ve learned since launching. We get messages from people who say, I would never have purchased a diamond and then I heard about what you guys are doing, and I need to buy a diamond from you. The fact that it can inspire that shift in thinking for people tells me that we’re doing something right.

CHRISTIAN: You previously alluded to putting pressure on the industry, and you’re doing this partly by telling a story that resonates with consumers at a deeper level than a narrative manufactured by an advertising agency that isn’t rooted in shared values. You’re also looking at ways to partner with the industry; how are you thinking of engaging with some of the larger companies?

RYAN: I’m sure there are entrenched players that are keeping a close eye on what we’re doing. We can drive change first by launching direct-to-consumer, mostly because you want to control the narrative. If you were to launch with several B2B customers–if I was going to sell to a couple different brands out of the gate–I’d get a couple different stories, which would be confusing for consumers. This isn’t really a complex thing to understand, but we do want to distill it to its basic points and communicate those in a way that can be digested.

Here’s something that happens. Every time someone gets engaged and shows off their ring to their friends, they’re talking about where it came from, how they were proposed to, and so on and so forth. The thing about Aether is that there’s a really cool and easy story for them to tell in that moment; they get to say, this is a two carat ring that offset 40 metric tons of CO2, so the next 2.5 years of my life has just been offset. That takes five seconds to say–and it lands with people.

But we do really change the industry by catering to the large heritage brands. Up until now, the high-end luxury segment of the jewelry market has not touched man-made diamonds. They wouldn’t; there’s no romanticism, no story there, there’s a misalignment in consumer perception. We get to tell a story that is high-end, it is luxury–and we’ve had a number of these heritage brands reach out to us, which is really exciting. Frankly, I don’t have enough production capacity to cater to them right now. Our goal is really to own what we’re doing from a direct-to-consumer perspective, build up as much brand equity and cachet as we can, and all the while in the background ramp up production. Think of what Tesla has done for automobiles; think of their gigafactory. We want to have a mega-facility equivalent where we will be doing everything from onsite power generation all the way through to setting the final cut and polished stones into jewelry and shipping to consumers. Vertical integration is a big thing, because it allows us to have a much tighter level of control over the emissions and waste associated with what we’re doing.

The downstream benefit is that when we supply these big brands, we’ll know that that supply chain, which we control entirely, is responsible and is doing everything it can to serve the biggest stakeholder here, the planet. If we touch on what drives decisions for big brands or big companies in general, oftentimes it’s protecting shareholder value. You are beholden to your shareholders as a corporation. We are a public benefit corporation; we are beholden to our shareholders, but it’s written into our articles of incorporation that our mission is to advance global decarbonization efforts through the manufacturing of carbon-negative consumer goods and industrial raw materials. We get to work with the industry to make this a much wider-spread source of stones, which is going to help drive mass adoption–and that’s where we’re going to see the net impact really skyrocket.

CHRISTIAN: How did your first diamond come out? What was that moment like for you?

RYAN: The first diamonds weren’t all that great, tons of inclusions and stuff. It’s an ongoing development process so that was to be expected. Even though they weren’t perfect gem grade, they were far better than anticipated. It was probably the closest thing–my wife is going to kill me if she hears this–to holding my son for the first time (laughs). I have one of our first-ever samples sitting four feet away from me right now, in its own little shrine. That overwhelming sense of accomplishment; we’d been working tirelessly for such a long time. I can’t take all the credit for this, we have a fantastic team; the brain trust associated with Aether is really the thing that I’m most excited about and impressed we’ve been able to pull together. So credit goes to the team, but I was the first to actually hold it in my hand. It just occurred to me that what we’ve been hoping to achieve is real and here is where it gets fun and where we can really turn it into something and mold it as it grows-not dissimilar to my son! My little boy is five months old and I would say that emphatically the happiest day of my life is when he came into the world and the best moments are with him and with my wife–and if you distilled those down and took an eyedropper and extracted some of that magic, that’s kind of how the diamonds felt. I don’t want to understate the joy that either of those two things have brought me. Both happened in 2020, coincidentally, and that’s why I tell people that for all that it was, and 2020 was a challenging year for humanity, I got to bring both of my babies into the world in 2020, which for me, in my own journey, is something I’ll never forget.

CHRISTIAN: That’s wonderful!

Circling back to the history of diamond mining, there’s this concept of the resource curse, where places that are exceptionally rich in natural resources often end up without autocratic or totalitarian regimes, which are able to use those resources to fund their regimes and act without accountability, because they don’t rely on their constituents. You’re not solving this dilemma–that’s not your focus–but what you’re doing is really a step towards not just climate mitigation but a world that requires more transparency across the board. I think that’s really exciting, if you look at how an industry changes; it starts with those first people who are able to create something that, in this case, came out of the air and hopefully that grows in ways beyond just the product, beyond just the direct carbon capture.

RYAN: Just think of how much value has been extracted from the African continent by the diamond trade. If anyone’s trying to get into the trade, one of the first things I suggest is studying what has influenced everything that’s at play today; then you can start to understand the importance of transparency, the importance of doing the right thing. Part of our mission at Aether is economic injection in areas that have been historically impacted by the trade. We can make diamonds anywhere, we don’t have to go where the Kimberlite deposit is. Nothing would stop us from building out a base of operations in Africa to produce diamonds for the African market–creating jobs, bringing value where it has otherwise been extracted and exported. The industry, in line with the Kimberley Process, and in line with the adoption of lab-grown, has taken some steps to correct previous actions, I just again don’t think it’s been enough, and I don’t think it’s been fast enough. If we can come in and put pressure on the industry by doing the right thing so openly, it will help force decision-makers at these companies to take stock of what they’re doing, what initiatives they have in play–can they accelerate them, can they put more money into them? The amount of cash flow associated with the diamond trade is significant; we’re talking about an $80+ billion dollar global market. There are dollars out there that could be spent better.

CHRISTIAN: Can we return to offsets before we wrap up? You and I both have mixed, at best, feelings about them.

RYAN: Say you would never cheat on your partner. I would never cheat on my partner either. But if you pay me to continue not cheating on my partner, then you can go and cheat on yours willy-nilly. Some people take offense to that analogy; it’s a little crude, rough around the edges. But it helps people who didn’t understand maybe start to understand. The project you might be funding may have already been planning to do that good thing. That’s why I’m not a big proponent of carbon emissions offsets.

Anything that relates to drawdown, sequestration of carbon–that I’m all for, and I really wish we saw more dollars going into that than the former. The word offsets gets thrown around, carbon credits gets thrown around, and most people don’t understand the difference between something that’s an offset against future emissions versus something that relates to drawing carbon down from the air. Even if we cut off the vast majority of future emissions, we have still been pumping carbon into the atmosphere at an industrial scale for a century. There’s a tremendous amount of legacy carbon that we need to do something about. The challenge we’re facing right now is that we’re in this cycle where we’ve already warmed the planet enough that icecaps are melting, and trapped in the ice is methane, which is way more volatile than carbon dioxide. So even if we cut off human emissions, now we’ve got this natural source of emissions, and it becomes this really terrifying snowball effect. I don’t know what the opposite of a snowball would be in this capacity, because it’s certainly not snow–we’re losing that!

CHRISTIAN: We don’t have any excess carbon that we can afford to release into the atmosphere; we need to be sequestering as much as possible and emitting as little as possible at the same time. To use sequestration as an excuse to continue to emit is not something I feel good about, and I think it can be used as justification for saying we’re climate-neutral. It’s one thing to say we are emitting and we want do something to mitigate those emissions, which is what you’re talking about. It’s another to say we have enough money to buy as many credits as we need and so we’re not going to change the way we do business.

RYAN: This is part of the greenwashing that we see, not just in jewelry. It’s not something that can be overstated, the importance of drawing down carbon. If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that we can drive drastic changes really quickly planetwide when we are faced with an existential challenge or threat. I just don’t think many human beings realize the significance of where we’re at with respect to our carbon budget. We’re burning through our carbon budget terribly fast! If we want to stop or limit the rate at which the planet is warming to contain this before the level of change in the climate is catastrophic, we need to move quickly. I want an Operation Warp Speed for climate. We can absolutely do that, and we have to do that, moving forward. So you’re entirely right, as much as I was maybe holding back on it before, I’m with you… I don’t want to see people use sequestration as an excuse to promote further emissions. I think we need to embrace sequestration–we need to adopt it everywhere we can. Hopefully we at Aether can play a small role in that.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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The founder of Remake discusses PayUp, California Senate Bill 62 and how years of pushing for change from within corporations and the UN led her to the realization that accountability will be ensured only when garment workers have a seat at the table.

CHRISTIAN: I’m here with my dear friend Ayesha Barenblat, who has lived many lives in the apparel industry and recently led an impactful campaign called PayUp.

Ayesha, welcome. I’d love for you to start with PayUp; what is it and why is it so important?

AYESHA: Hi Christian, I’m so delighted to be here.

In terms of PayUp, as you know, Remake is an advocacy organization focused on making fashion a force for good–and one of the core tenants of our work is to push for transparency and accountability when it comes to this $2.4 trillion industry that is mostly deregulated. At the start of Covid, our network of supplier partners, factories and worker organizations started to report that brands were en masse cancelling orders.

For people less familiar with the fashion industry, it mostly operates on debt. Factories take on the fabric liability, they put in the wages, and then once a product is shipped, it can take 60, 90, 120 days to get paid. Starting in March, we were sheltering in place, everyone was in sweatpants and ecommerce sales were sluggish. So fashion brands thought well, how can we assure supply chain savings? They did so by essentially saying–those goods we ordered? We don’t want them.

If you think about the people who make our clothes, who already live paycheck to paycheck, putting untold hundreds of thousands of hours to make product, and then going into factories where either your pay is being docked or you are simply told that you are being furloughed because there’s no money… it’s really a humanitarian crisis.

In a nutshell, PayUp is about good business practices, not charity. The fashion industry cancelled upwards of $40 billion in goods that were either fully produced or in production at the start of the pandemic. And through relentless campaigning, working across union groups, labor groups and other campaigning groups, we have at this point recouped $22 billion of that $40 billion. So PayUp is really an example of worker and citizen solidarity to do what’s right.

The fashion industry cancelled upwards of $40 billion in goods that were either fully produced or in production at the start of the pandemic.

CHRISTIAN: I want to dive into that. We saw brands that were consumer-facing struggling, we saw retail bankruptcies, brands’ numbers falling off a cliff–but what we didn’t see were the downstream effects. Garment workers, by and large, have remained invisible to consumers.

Forty billion dollars is a tremendous amount of money. I think there was already some tension between factory owners wanting to do well by their workers, wanting to do well for themselves and at the same time being squeezed by brands. They’d either paid wages or committed to pay wages without the money to follow through. What was the response from the manufacturing side of the industry to this campaign?

AYESHA: To your first comment about the makers of our clothes remaining invisible–that’s really why I formed Remake. I’ve had the privilege of getting to know the amazing, fierce feminists at the other end (I say feminists because primarily it’s a women of color population that’s often forgotten) and it was striking to see, even when it came to media reporting, how we were hearing about bankruptcies, about perhaps the inability for big retailers to pay for their leases and retail operations, about what this meant for shareholders, but there was very little on the worker reports of hunger or the state-sponsored violence against them as they were protesting outside for money that was legally owed to them. Meanwhile, as earnings reports started to come in, you saw that shareholders did just great, and even brands filing for bankruptcy were essentially making sure that their executives were paid before their suppliers–and forget about workers. So I think the inequity that we are tending to see with this supercharged capitalism–unchecked, unregulated–really made people angry across the globe. I think that was part of the secret sauce that made PayUp so successful; we had warehouse workers and retailers from places like Urban Outfitters saying, “Yes, it’s a terrible place for us to work with, and now we’re really angry because they continue not to pay up.” What was interesting for us is that we tend to mostly work with worker organizations–labor organizations, union organizations–and this was the first time that suppliers were really on our side as well. What this pandemic and brand behavior really showed was the power asymmetry, the power dynamics between brands and suppliers. This is a largely illiquid industry; a lot of suppliers were out the fabric liability, they had to make payroll and, in places like Bangladesh, executive bonuses had to be paid. Suddenly they’re begging six, seven, nine months into the pandemic, “Can you please just pay for the purchase orders in place?” Covid has cracked open the injustice and, in many ways, the racism that’s embedded in the fashion system. You look at some of the largest brands in Europe or the US, and they did alright financially; some of them even made a profit. But I think what people need to understand is that it was done on the backs of the people who brought their product to life.

CHRISTIAN: What are the continued consequences of that? You’ve got $22 billion in commitments to pay for orders. First of all, have those been paid? And secondly, even if they were paid, what has been the continued impact you’re seeing on workers?

AYESHA: When people were super excited about PayUp and declaring victory–there were a lot of brands in the early days who were absolutely not going to move, or brands like Gap who were in financial trouble themselves, and we were able to move them–so it’s not to undercut the importance of the success of the campaign… money did get directly in the hands of workers, and we know from supplier partners that it meant that they were able to weather at least the spring and summer. But as we look to the fall, Mark Anner over at Penn State University has done some really important and telling research, revealing how brands have gone back in many ways to their bad behavior. So you continue to have brands that have still not paid up, brands like I mentioned, like an Urban Outfitters or those who are in financial crisis themselves, like a Kohl’s or a JC Penney. For those brands, the fight continues.

But there is another disturbing trend beyond order cancellations; we’re seeing a lot of downward pressure in price. Globally, brands are asking for upwards of 12 percent retroactive discount across product that is being shipped. If you understand the thin margins that this industry operates on, we have suppliers saying, “Essentially, brands are asking us to make the product for free. And because we need the continuity of business and for our factories to just keep running, we are in the untenable position of having our back against the wall to take these orders for whatever discounts.”

We’re seeing a lot of downward pressure in price. Globally, brands are asking for upwards of 12 percent retroactive discount across product that is being shipped. If you understand the thin margins that this industry operates on, we have suppliers saying, “Essentially, brands are asking us to make the product for free.”

CHRISTIAN: I just want to reiterate this. Factories are at best running on very small margins, single-digits is fairly standard. So to ask a brand to go 12 percent lower very likely puts them where they’re producing at a loss..!

AYESHA: Exactly.

CHRISTIAN: But they’re doing it because they feel like they don’t have another option, and it keeps operations running even if they’re losing money.

AYESHA: That’s exactly right. The other disturbing trend here is that in this Amazon one-click prime world where everyone is suddenly used to their goods arriving very quickly, we’re hearing from factories of this pressure to produce quickly. Now remember, it’s Covid (even though fashion brands have somehow worked with producing countries to declare factory workers essential workers who must produce even if they’re not making PPE) and lead times average 10, 12, 15 days during the holiday rush–so what this means from a health and safety standpoint is a disaster. Workers are reporting an inability to wash their hands, not wanting to wear masks because the factories are very hot and this pressure to hurry up because you’re already in a pressure cooker situation. So what we’re seeing from Sri Lanka to Los Angeles is Covid outbreaks in factories. People who don’t have safety nets, likely not an ability to get tested, let alone healthcare. You’ve got the safety implications of rush, you’ve got the price pressures, which means we’re directly seeing perfect implications from a wage-theft standpoint; factories are finding legal and illegal ways to not pay workers what they’re owed. A person in Ethiopia makes $24/month. In Bangladesh it’s somewhere closer to $96/month. These are people who already live paycheck to paycheck without savings. Recent studies through the Worker Rights Consortium are showing hunger across the industry, workers deciding whether to eat two meals or one, an inability to buy eggs or protein for their families. The profitability of brands, the ability to handsomely reward their shareholders–it’s being done at the expense of people who can’t put food on the table.

Recent studies are showing hunger across the industry, workers deciding whether to eat two meals or one, an inability to buy protein for their families. The profitability of brands, the ability to handsomely reward their shareholders–it’s being done at the expense of people who can’t put food on the table.

CHRISTIAN: There’s only so much money being made. I keep coming back to the importance of recognizing that; there’s not unlimited profit. In the impact investing world, in this stakeholder capitalism, there’s this idea that somehow we’re going to be able to pay out to shareholders as much money as they’ve been making, and pay even more to the supply chain. There may be success stories where that is possible, but there are a lot of businesses where there’s a finite amount of profit.

AYESHA: Completely.

CHRISTIAN: And what you’re talking about is when that profit isn’t distributed, hmm..

AYESHA: …equitably.

CHRISTIAN: Yes, equitably.

AYESHA: Look, when it comes to the fashion industry–whether luxury, high street or ultra-fast fashion–the downward pressure in price was already happening. Our clothes were coming to us cheaper and faster. We’ve been trained that product is disposable. If you have a $10 dress, you know there’s exploitation happening somewhere; the only variable in that equation is the human capital and the ways to depress it… which is exactly what we’re seeing. One of the issues beyond wages that’s often not seen is the gender-based violence. You’ve been in factories, you know it’s a high-intensity situation of let’s turn out products sooner, faster. When supervisors have their backs against the wall, they resort to a lot of verbal and physical abuse, and most of the people sitting on the assembly floor happen to be women. So that’s the other thing that we’re picking up on–a rise in gender-based violence in order to get product to us this cheap, this fast during a pandemic.

CHRISTIAN: You see across factories men in positions of power and women making up the majority of the workforce.

AYESHA: And without being promoted to positions of power. You see the same even on the union side. How is it that this industry that’s widely profitable mostly because of womenswear, that’s sold to us and marketed by women, that’s made by women.. how is it that it continues to be run mostly by men?

CHRISTIAN: I want to take a step back at this point; we could talk all day about issues in the industry, but really what you’re working on is how to solve them. You’ve taken different approaches that led you to Remake in its current form. As someone who’s trying to create the most positive impact, how did you arrive at Remake?

AYESHA: It’s a nice time in the year to reflect on your life’s work, isn’t it, so I appreciate that question. I really think of my own position of privilege as a Pakistani first-generation immigrant to use my voice to make a difference for women who look like me, who bring our fashion to life. She is my end customer, and I have tried in many many ways to make sure that at the end of the day her life is better off. Coming out of graduate school, where I got a degree in public policy (UC Berkeley, home of United Students Against Sweatshops–really embraced my radical roots there), it was the early days of corporate responsibility and sustainability. In some ways we were taught this myth, right, that the private sector, whether from the goodness of their hearts or reputational risk or because we can have this winners take all mentality of “it’s going to be good for workers, it’s going to be good for business, business is going to save the world.” And business has a role. But working from within one of the largest consultancies, running the fashion vertical, working across high street brands, luxury brands and discount brands to make the business case for investing in workers’ lives– the minute we got to the hard stuff, we would hit a roadblock. I’ve written Nike’s corporate responsibility report, I’ve sat across from Levi’s telling them why they must invest in the health and well-being of workers, I’ve looked to Gap around how you can empower people within your supply chain. And honestly, seven years in, I was really disillusioned. Because what we weren’t seeing was improvement in wages or the ability for brands to make a substantive difference when it came to addressing their core business practices. At the end of the day really, it just comes down to money. All the pretty marketing around what brands are doing from a training standpoint, or investing in workers’ well-being… I really came to the conclusion that it’s window dressing. Unless we get to purchasing practices and how product is fundamentally sourced and produced, we’re not going to make progress; what we need is regulation. Which is why I then went on to work within the International Labor Organization (part of the UN system) to say well, policy, right, if we get brands, unions, government to the table, we’re going to make a difference. But even within the tripartite structure, you realize that workers are often the weakest link. At the end of the day, the employers–the factories and brands–are the ones with all the power and that tend to always win.

When Rana Plaza fell down, the biggest industrial disaster of our lifetime, it felt very personal; the Ali Enterprise factory fire had just happened in my hometown of Karachi. It took days to pull the young women from the wreckage. For what? For making children’s pajamas for $9.99? I thought: we need an uprising. We need a movement of concerned citizens who are getting policymakers to do their jobs, to essentially hold this industry to account, because making the business case and working within the bureaucracy of a multilateral setting were simply not going to bring change soon enough.

That really was the genesis of Remake. We do a lot of education work on campuses, and I often hold an informal survey with graduate students and undergrads on who they think is going to make the most difference in the world. Across the board, people say companies; companies are going to save the world. Or they talk about consumers; consumers are going to somehow consume our way into a sustainable future. But what we’re not teaching young people is to really understand that a lot of the legal protections, a lot of the wins we’ve had, are really thanks to the labor movement. Americans hate unions, but the progress we’ve made is really thanks to them, and if we are to truly get this fashion industry under control, the silver bullet for me is regulation.

But what we’re not teaching young people is that a lot of the legal protections, a lot of the wins we’ve had, are really thanks to the labor movement. Americans hate unions, but the progress we’ve made is really thanks to them, and if we are to truly get this fashion industry under control, the silver bullet for me is regulation.

In order for us to get there, we need for us as everyday people, beyond just voting in the federal elections, to really engage at a local state level. I’d encourage us to think of ourselves as citizens rather than as consumers in order to build the type of world that we want.

CHRISTIAN: That leads into one of the next things you’re working on at Remake, which has to do with proposed legislation in CA. Before we talk about the bill, can you set the stage for what it means to be an apparel worker in LA?

AYESHA: You know, I’ve always been struck by the two most consistent things I hear at press appearances or when I’m teaching at colleges. People are like, “First of all, you mean robots don’t make our clothes?” There’s just little understanding that it’s women, mostly women, who make our clothes. And then there’s this perception–I think especially now, when nativism is so alive and kicking and we feel like we’re going to hearken back to our manufacturing roots here in the US–that somehow if it’s made in the US, it’s ethical and sustainable. That frankly is a myth that a lot of locally produced brands have fed us.

The reason we’re so focused on LA is that it’s the largest manufacturing hub. We don’t do much production in the US anymore, but the little bits that we do happen here in LA, where there are upwards of 45,000 people part of a formal workforce and a much larger underbelly of undocumented workforce. She happens to be mostly from Mexico or Central America, though workers come from as far as Indonesia. She relies on that income to support her family and to try to lift herself out of poverty. It’s a largely mixed-immigration workforce, which I think is important for people to understand, because as you’ve seen contraction in manufacturing, people often ask, “Well in LA, can’t you just get unemployment benefits?” and you have to remember the immigration culture and how scary that is. These are people who, during these outbreaks, have often had no medical recourse, no benefits.

The other thing to know about LA is that, unlike other parts of the world where there’s a minimum wage, we operate in a piece-rate system. That means you take home what you can make, and most of that is far below minimum wage. The typical rate for mask production here is three cents, four cents a mask; the average worker in LA’s take-home pay is $200. These are not wonderful, ethical jobs. Yet LA has so much opportunity; you’ve got the creative industry, the modeling industry, up-and-coming designers, ethical brands. So if LA was to become the sustainable capital for fashion in the US, we’ve got to clean this up. Because from a production standpoint, it’s predominantly a sweatshop market.

CHRISTIAN: Ok, so the way this is structured is that there’s no minimum wage; manufacturers are allowed to pay you at a rate per piece that you produce, and those rates are often set so low that no matter how efficient of a machine operator you are, you’ll never reach a level that allows you to sustain yourself. What you’re working on is putting in place a minimum wage. You wouldn’t think it would be this hard.

In the garment industry in LA there’s no minimum wage; manufacturers are allowed to pay you at a rate per piece that you produce. And those rates are often set so low that no matter how efficient of a machine operator you are, you’ll never reach a level that allows you to sustain yourself.

AYESHA: In the US, so many service jobs are just not good jobs. You look at the take-home pay of an average waitress and you have to rely on tips. The only ask here for the garment industry is a minimum wage; this is not an outlandish request. We love to point fingers at other sourcing countries with sweatshops, but we have them right here. And the industry–predominantly Fashion Nova, one of the biggest brands sourcing out of LA–has sort of couched this bill, which has been written primarily by garment makers and spearheaded by the Garment Worker Center, as a job-killer bill. But you have to understand, these are not good jobs. There are sustainable brands trying to do the right thing, versus some of these predatory brands that use the dehumanization of this workforce to bring us disposable, ultra-fast fashion.

So we’ve already tried once. The clock was run on the assembly floor, the votes were there, but with all the delays from Covid, there were so many things that the California Senate essentially didn’t have time to ram through at the end of the year. So we have a new bill number, CA Senate Bill 62. For those who are interested in actively participating, you can go to the Garment Worker site and sign the petition to support the Garment Worker Protection Act. It has a very clear way to call legislators and to make the case to business, because we really need business to support this bill. But what’s amazing about this bill is that it is directly a demand from the source, the makers of our clothes, to say clean this up. LA has an opportunity to really shine.

CHRISTIAN: It just blows my mind how you could justify paying people a few cents to make a mask during a pandemic, when they’re putting themselves at serious risk, and then say that if they want to earn a minimum wage that’s somehow job-killing. I think we’ve allowed the narrative to be set by people who are profiting off of exploitation. Look at Los Angeles Apparel, where over 300 garment workers in a single factory came down with Covid, which led to several deaths. What we’re saying is that that’s the best we can do and that if we don’t continue that model, production is going to go away.

AYESHA: Exactly right, you said it so succinctly. It’s unconscionable. The irony shouldn’t be lost on anyone that these are people making our medical gowns and our masks and putting themselves at risk with nothing to fall back on and, as the primary breadwinners within their families, coming down with Covid. We can do better.

CHRISTIAN: We have to.

So this is a somewhat new area for Remake to get involved in; you were involved in the push last year a bit and look to be even more so this year. Can you tell me about the Garment Worker Center and why it’s so important, but also new, to have workers at the table with this bill?

AYESHA: Within Remake we focus on three things. There’s our transparency work, which is where PayUp and getting this bill passed fall, because it’s all about ensuring that there’s accountability and transparency within the industry. We do a lot of education (on our site) and leadership development. We now have 612 ambassadors, young women up and down the country, who are organizing and bringing others along. For us, we’ve known that any kind of work has to be rooted in the communities you’re trying to serve. In the era of social media, we’ve seen so much slacktivism; you sign something or like something and then feel like you’ve made progress. But one of the things we really teach our community is that our end customer is the garment worker and we need to be in close touch. Historically this has been a global conversation, but in many ways Covid has crystallized for us that we’ve got work to do right here at home. Really workers are the ones who should be leading this conversation, and we as allies are essentially following along–whether that’s with press engagement, brand engagement or other ways to amplify the message.

The Garment Worker Center is an incredible organization. They consider workers to be worker partners; they sat down with workers already before the pandemic to say okay, what would it look like to author this bill? Beyond this bill, they do amazing work, whether it’s providing childcare or dealing with individual cases of wage theft. One of the things I’ve been so struck by when it comes to the Garment Worker Center is just their ability to be this community for workers to lean into. I think what we’re starting to see is a lot more of this women-led organization happening, with Awaj in Bangladesh and Stand Up Movement Lanka in Sri Lanka. We’ve been facilitating some cross-learning with these women as they come into their power and lead the way to a better and more just industry, to say what can these labor organizers learn from each other and how can our citizen population support them?

CHRISTIAN: How have you been able to communicate with each of these players what their role is? And who else do you need at the table to move this bill forward?

AYESHA: This is what movement building is all about; within a coalition understanding where our skillsets are to clarify who’s at the center and who’s an ally. I think that for too long the sustainability and CSR conversation has been co-opted by brands. We’ve been very honest; we put forward a seven-point action agenda that’s been written by garment workers themselves. It says look, business is very good at one thing, maximizing shareholder value; we shouldn’t pretend that business is going to clean this up.

For any sustainability conversations, we have to first and foremost give workers center stage. I don’t take conference invitations if there aren’t workers at the table, because unless you know who you’re serving, you could be doing more harm than good. I think for people listening in, as you take up a cause, consider who you’re really serving and whether those people are in leadership positions. The ability of influencers and celebrities to lend their platform for good is so powerful; Instagram can be such a wonderful way of amplifying protest. The fact that Amber Valletta is sharing this bill, and Maggie Q, has been so powerful for garment makers. But you also see a lot of noise out there, influencers who are endorsing product that is allegedly sustainable but isn’t. So for people in the marketing world, be sure the message is authentic, because your platform could be pushing greenwashing. Then there’s the question for customers and citizens, which is how are you mired in local issues? At Remake, we know you’re busy, we know everyone’s life has been upended, so we try to really make it easy: sign the petition, fire off the right tweet, all very cookie-cutter, while also providing you with a community to lean into. I can’t stress how important community building is within movement building, because this work is lonely and the burn rate is high, but if you’re having fun and have essentially found your tribe, that really matters.

Who else we need at the table? The investor. We’re currently looking at brands who have made profit but not done right by workers. I am an activist at heart, but I don’t have a financial background… like my gosh, I would love someone to take a look at these financials and help me understand this. There’s so much education to be done within the ESG world, because the S within ESG is quite weak right now, and doesn’t really look at these issues in a systematic way. That is really one of the missing pieces.

And frankly, policymakers who are really championing these causes. I love the fact that President-Elect Joe Biden talks about union jobs. When Robert Reich was our Labor Secretary, we made a lot of inroads. We need brave politicians who are really standing up for workers and union-led movements.

CHRISTIAN: I think often those worlds are siloed and maybe there are more shared values than we realize, but they don’t know how to plug in. You’ve built this foundation and community that has allowed you to tap into these groups. What I’m hearing is that there’s still a need to bring more people in.

AYESHA: Yeah you know, I would say yes but. I’ll tell you why. I can’t tell you how many sustainability or social impact communities, conferences, retreats etc I’ve been invited to. Sometimes I look at the food waste, at the amount of money we spend on travel and entertainment, and in many ways it just becomes a glorified way for people to feel better. I think people coming to the table is very important, but it has to be for a very concrete issue or a set agenda with a timeline. I don’t believe that somehow if we bring all these magical players to the table and drink and talk about social impact and enjoy ourselves that somehow we’ll make progress. With this bill, it’s very concrete, it’s like hey policymakers, here’s what we need; hey citizens, here’s what you do. So as we walk into 2021, knowing the climate emergency is here, knowing that inequity around the world is growing, I really want people to feel that urgency to do more and talk less.

CHRISTIAN: Are you doing this to feel good or are you doing this to do good, and those aren’t mutually exclusive, but they’re also not the same thing.

AYESHA: Correct. Because I cannot tell you how many people your age–and I can say that as sort of two generations older than you–or coming out of college or early in your professional career say, “I want to make a difference in the world; I want to do good.” But it’s hard to know, well, how can I do that? Companies have been very good at co-opting this interest by saying come within (McKinsey or what have you) and you can make all kinds of good. That’s simply not true. So partly it’s to look closer to home. Is there a local issue you can really be a part of? Because the beauty that comes from community organizing, local organizing, that comes with an end goal… it’s practicing some of the muscles we’ve lost in this globally connected social media world.

CHRISTIAN: I want to touch on one more thing. You no longer accept funding from brands for Remake. I think that’s a really important thing to highlight when you look at how many of the sustainable fashion events are being sponsored by brands. I don’t know how much you can share about your experience, but why is it so important to understand who’s funding your work?

AYESHA: That’s such an important question. You know how a lot of climate-denying research is funded by the oil and gas industry. Much like that, we don’t seem to look in a critical way when it comes to the State of the Industry reports like McKinsey’s, or the research coming out of the Copenhagen Fashion Summit that’s underwritten by Kering and H&M. Well if the brands are controlling the research, if they’re deciding what their sustainability goals are, when they can’t reach their goals–like H&M didn’t reach their living wage commitment so they just changed the commitment–then you’re just not going to make progress. The same goes for the conferences, the glitzy events, we’ve both found ourselves at; essentially the industry is controlling the conversation. There are never many people of color, who are mostly the makers of our clothes, so there’s kind of a colonial-racial dimension to this as well.

When it comes to money, this is where I think it’s so hard, this work. Because as social impact and impact investing were taking off, a lot of activism and advocacy work started to fall out of favor. A number of foundations told us activism and advocacy are not what we do, we now have a social impact fund. It’s sort of the bright, shiny object; somehow I’m going to invest in a sustainable business that’s also going to have all this amazing impact. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for that, but the truth is that a lot of that world remains largely deregulated: what social impact is, who decides that. And again, it’s putting the onus on the private sector to fix all these problems that they’ve caused to begin with.

CHRISTIAN: Or, put another way, you’re asking people to police themselves.

AB: As social impact and impact investing were taking off, activism and advocacy work started to fall out of favor… The [impact] world remains largely deregulated: what social impact is, who decides that. It’s putting the onus on the private sector to fix all these problems that they’ve caused to begin with.

CB: Or, put another way, you’re asking people to police themselves.

AYESHA: Right! And in the early days of Remake, because I’d worked inside the industry, I obviously called in some favors. It was my first time running a nonprofit, which is to say I believed, stupidly, that well, as long as the money is coming from corporate foundations, there’s a wall; we’re safe in our advocacy and transparency focus, because the money is coming from the foundation and not the brand. But the more hard-hitting our documentary work got, the closer to the truth our campaigning got, the more our community started to grow, the foundations started to micromanage what the narrative was that we should tell. A lot of corporate foundations want to talk about sustainable materials and circularity but don’t want to talk about how much output they’re putting out in the world. They want to talk about worker wellbeing and their investments in the literacy of their workforce, but they don’t want to talk about wages. And so our board made the very difficult decision, right before Covid hit, to say we should just take no money from fashion brands whatsoever. This has allowed us to be freer when it comes to our message–to be more authentic, so people coming to our community know that no money from brands has exchanged hands. Our sustainable brand directory has no affiliate marketing. Our transparency campaigns have no brand input. I think that that’s really important for people in nonprofits to consider: where your money is coming from and will that muzzle or amplify your mission? For anyone who’s thinking about this from a funding standpoint, there’s a lot of donor education to do on the importance of activism and advocacy. The truth is, there isn’t a lot of money out there for this type of slogging work. How are you to take on a $2.4 trillion industry when you’re trying also pay your staff and keep lights on? It’s hard.

CHRISTIAN: As someone who’s very active now in the impact investing world, it feels so important to understand the need for a wider range of solutions. I think you see a lot of foundations and socially conscious investors who have pulled back from grants and nonprofits and said that you can solve problems better by doing so profitably. With Remake, your focus should not be on making profits; there’s not a for-profit model for the work that you’re doing.

AYESHA: No, and investors have tried to tell me that, they’re like why don’t you take affiliate marketing and build an app where people can discover sustainable product? And I’m like because that’s not going to leave a generation of women better off from a health and safety and wages standpoint. I’m not in this work for the glamor of it or the money; I’m here to ensure that workers are paid better and that there’s equity and justice in the fashion industry. If you look at any of the most intractable issues of our lifetime, there’s no profit to be made from most of this if we’re actually to make systemic change.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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As some of you may know, Christian is a founding board member of the Industrial Sewing & Innovation Center. This spring, ISAIC opened a 12,000 sq. ft factory in Detroit, filled with skylights and plants and humming with activity. Christian sat down with the CEO, Jen Guarino, to discuss the role ISAIC is playing within the broader conversation around American jobs and reshoring apparel manufacturing.

CHRISTIAN: I’d like to begin with your background. You didn’t start out in the world of production, but you’ve become a leading advocate for a new way of domestic manufacturing. How did that transition take place?

JEN: My career in fashion is not a linear one… I started on the creative side, as an illustrator for designers, and I found the design process to be absent of a connection to the customer. You could design something, but what happens after it leaves your desk? I began to get more curious about the process of manufacturing; without manufacturing, a design just stays a design and never becomes something marketable. After many decades in the industry, I ended up buying a 100+ year old leather goods company, with its own factory in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It happened to be at a time when we were growing rapidly, and there was a shortage of workers with the skills we needed, so we reached out to workforce development agencies. We discovered that other companies were having similar issues, and we began to look at how you bring skill back into an industry that has been, for years, all but dormant in the US. As we started to develop ways to train workers, I became painfully aware of the stigmas attached to manufacturing careers. That’s when I became passionate about how we value those skills.

Flash forward to meeting Tom Kartsotis, who was launching the brand Shinola in Detroit. He invited me to open their leather goods design and manufacturing operation, and I felt like it was an opportunity to expand this work beyond my little company in Saint Paul, to a city that had employment issues and for a brand that was going to be national in stature.

CHRISTIAN: I’ve heard you talk quite a bit about this skills gap… can you elaborate on the experience of trying to hire in Minnesota and then in Detroit, and your perception of what it meant to work in a factory?

JEN: Thank you for asking that question; as you know very well Christian, whenever I hear skills gap it drives me a little nuts [laughter] because I don’t think that it’s a skills gap–it’s a values gap. Nobody wants to become or be known for something that isn’t respected, it’s that simple. How do you build talent and skill in an industry, if it’s a talent and skill that people don’t value in our society? I think of it as being out of sight, out of mind. That’s what’s happened with American manufacturing. It left, and now you don’t know anyone in manufacturing, you don’t understand what it takes. One of the benefits of working at Shinola was that they believe in changing that; they highlight the skills and the people who make products possible.

Nobody wants to become or be known for something that isn’t respected–it’s that simple. How do you build talent and skill in an industry, if it’s a talent and skill that people don’t value in our society?

In starting ISAIC, it was clear that we have to rip apart the stigma that laces the industry. If you don’t give people a good reason to be a part of it, why would they? Why would parents want their kids to be in it? I think that’s at the core of what must change. And I do believe it’s beginning to change, but it’s plagued the industry for decades.

CHRISTIAN: American manufacturing has rightly become, while I wouldn’t say mainstream, certainly a topic that we’re hearing more about today than we were ten years ago–which Shinola played a role in. However, just because something’s made in America doesn’t mean that it’s made ethically. Could you speak to the state of American manufacturing these days?

JEN: I can go into a factory in LA or New York that I went into 30 years ago, and, not only have they not changed, but they’ve disintegrated. Going into all the reasons would be a whole other 2-hour conversation, but that’s the reality; the industry stopped investing in itself, so it aged and became more archaic and, I believe, more unethical.

As we look forward, it’s not enough to onshore production. What does it look like to build an industry as it could and should be, in a way that can be both profitable and good for people? I don’t want it to sound like some kind of philanthropic effort; if it’s good for people, it’s good for business, and I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that, the fashion industry just hasn’t had a reason to do that. Now I believe that it does.

At ISAIC, we’re balancing supporting industry with challenging industry to look at the environment they’re working in. How do they do things like providing their people full medical care, what does that look like, what does the math look like? There’s a difference between simply manufacturing in the US and doing it in a contemporary way that doesn’t exploit people.

CHRISTIAN: If you look at American apparel manufacturing, right now LA and New York anchor the industry. The industry is in the middle of a generational shift in how it thinks about supply chains and manufacturing; if that wasn’t the case, trying to do what we’re doing in Detroit would be a fool’s errand. But what we’re doing is so different that it gives us a chance; this transition is an opportunity for Detroit to step up and own what the next generation of production looks like.

There’s this rich history of manufacturing in Detroit, and it sets us apart–as a city that’s known for making things, for being innovative, for being able to lead the charge on thinking differently about production. And while fashion hasn’t exactly been a dominant industry here, you can’t ignore that all the music that has come out of this city was accompanied by decades of influence in fashion.

Jen, you mentioned having the right partners at the table. Who are they and why have they helped us go beyond other efforts you’ve seen to bring back manufacturing?

JEN: I think there are several reasons why ISAIC has been able to gain traction and find its role in generating real change. There was a confluence of events happening at the same time, which you always have to attribute largely to luck. But beyond that, I think everyone involved was operating from the same ethos. We saw no reason why we couldn’t make things differently; it felt horribly overdue and, in many ways, inevitable. If that was true, then what a great place to do it! I mean, what was San Jose/Cupertino 50 years ago? It didn’t become Silicon Valley overnight, but it became what it became because it was able to attract like-minded people who had an interest in a new way. We believe Detroit could be the same for apparel. There are plenty of reasons why it will be different of course, but fundamentally, the idea that you go to a place because of your understanding of their approach to innovation.

We triangulated corporate interest, public sector support from economic development agencies and the mayor’s office, and academic partnerships, looking at how we can step outside the four-year degree and train people with stackable credentials. Thankfully Shinola had already shattered some glass. This created an environment where we could celebrate what Detroit does well, which is to innovate and to understand production and logistics. Often we will talk about why brands are coming to Detroit and considering relocating… if you ask them this same question, they would tell you it’s because of that coordinated effort that’s coming from a common perspective.

CHRISTIAN: And I’ll jump in to say it’s industry-led. American manufacturing can’t be philanthropic and it won’t survive on patriotism; this is being driven by industry needs. It’s not that we don’t need philanthropic support to get the ball rolling or that we shouldn’t create opportunities for the sake of employment, but really what we’re talking about here is something far more foundational to the success of an industry, and, because of that, hopefully it’s more stable. This is something that could become a serious part of Detroit’s economy.

JEN: The fact that it’s industry-led has real power, and what I mean by that is there are a lot of workforce development agencies across the country–I think Detroit has like 120. But frequently the ways people are trained are missing what industry really needs. If you don’t have a strong relationship with industry, you’re not going to get it right. So, coming at it from the other side: realizing industry needs to play a more active and leading role in skill development, that it’s going to be good for its own future...it’s going to develop the talent it needs, it’s going to develop jobs for sure, it’s going to have longevity and it’s going to make much better use of dollars invested in workforce development.

CHRISTIAN: Yep. So let’s jump into what we’re actually doing. In many ways the apprenticeship is a foundational piece of our programming, so maybe you can start there and walk through what ISAIC is in its current state?

JEN: It helps, I think, to start with a visual. Carhartt built out this beautiful home for ISAIC. It has a learning factory that hosts ongoing apprenticeship, which is just a fancy word for paid on-the-job training that’s worked very well in European countries like Germany. This is usually reserved for a pure manufacturing environment, but if you can envision a 12,000 sq. ft learning factory–which, by the way, is a fully operational contract manufacturing facility–and see it next to a classroom where we’re teaching certification workshops for ongoing career development. In one area you see technology being developed; we have a sonic welding system for masks, and a circular knitting system, and we’re working with Siemens and with researchers out of Carnegie Mellon to be the usage case facility for robotics. On one end, there’s a cafe, divided by plants and music, and on the other end is our support staff, who are not divided by glass or walls; we all share the same space. So there’s this general environment of learning around manufacturing.

The apprenticeship program requires 200 hours of certification on the front end, which gives you a foundational understanding of industrial sewing, and then you move into an apprenticeship program for a year. It’s modularized learning and on the floor, not theoretical. We do this in an incredibly human-centric way–a word that’s used so often, but the minute you walk into our facility you feel it–it’s a place you want to be. And you also immediately notice that the people on the factory floor are young; if you go into most factory floors, the average age is above fifty.

CHRISTIAN: It’s a testament to the support of Carhartt, which has been an incredible partner, and also to thinking about people differently; you don’t invest in skylights and plants if you’re not also investing in the people. We talk about sustainability in our materials and the energy sources in the building, but we’re starting with people. I wonder if you could talk more to the programming and how we think about supporting people in the industry?

JEN: If I had to describe as succinctly as possible what that means, it means that everyone is contributing and everyone’s contributions are valued; there’s a level of inclusion in activity and thought. So for example, we have employee circles, and one of them is on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. It’s not because every corporation should have it, it’s because we believe DE&I is an absolute strength. The leaders are nominated by their coworkers and what comes out of the circles is driven by the people who are affected the most by our company culture. It’s also driven by youth, and by how they want to shape their world. One of the leaders of the DE&I circle will represent his coworkers on the board’s DE&I committee, so now he has a voice on the board.. these are incredibly important things. And the way they end up manifesting is you see a level of engagement that is far beyond someone clocking in, clocking out. Everybody there knows that while they might be starting on industrial sewing, there’s a path for them that mirrors their interests.

CHRISTIAN: In many ways we’re focused on the apparel industry, but what we’re tackling is: what does the future of work look like in this transition to an automated economy? We’re on the road to having more automation in production, so how do we teach traditional skills, get production going, but then create career pathways that don’t dead-end in minimum wage jobs?

JEN: So often industries wait until the writing’s on the wall, and then they’re left with a labor force that has to be retrained. We think about it as pretraining for what’s coming, instead of waiting until you have to retrain. But how do you train for a future when you’re not sure what form it’s going to take? Well, you train on skills that can be used on different equipment, in different settings. A manufacturer doesn’t have time to figure this out, they’ve got a business to run, but as an institute, we can be completely focused on these challenges. So, while we train traditional skills–which, by the way, is very important as it helps you understand what you need technology to do for you–tech is still so far away from replacing human touch, but what human touch is it going to replace first? We believe this largely starts by making sure that whoever is industrial sewing is also digitally literate, which in the past hasn’t been a thing; you’re expected to be a strong sewer and retire there.

So often industries wait until the writing’s on the wall, and then they’re left with a labor force that has to be retrained. We think about it as pretraining for what’s coming, instead of waiting until you have to retrain.

Bridging design and manufacturing will be the way technology will make maybe the biggest difference. How do you go from design to factory floor in a seamless, nonwasteful, accurate way? A lot of work is being done on 3D Product Development, which only 3-5% of companies are using. This is nuts–some factories went that route 20 years ago. So if that’s the opportunity, then all of a sudden you’re starting to train someone who understands design to manufacturing, and that person will be better prepared for the future of manufacturing, with much greater job satisfaction and much better career potential.

CHRISTIAN: And I would add that as supply chains become more agile and it becomes more important to manage inventory and respond quickly to demand, it’s also important that they’re learning from production through to the end consumer. As we look at our role as a manufacturer, it’s not to make as many products as possible at a high volume and low prices, it’s to set up a far more responsive supply chain that reduces waste and allows us to deliver what the customer wants, when they want it. I think you’re seeing across the ISAIC team a much more robust understanding of the whole process of making and selling a garment. Who knows where the team members are going to end up, but I’m sure it’s going to be a diverse set of career experiences.

JEN: Absolutely, and career diversity is a success in its own right. I think you helped explain the broader landscape of how we design, deliver apparel and manage the whole supply chain, back to: where do our materials come from, how do we limit overpurchasing or purchasing the wrong things, how do we get the consumer a more right piece of apparel on time. These require different skillsets. And they aren’t siloed anymore; there’s no way you can speed up this process and reduce waste unless all those functions are deeply connected.

We’ve been operational for seven months now, in terms of our facility being up and running, and we made a decision to invest heavily in an ERP system. Typically you wouldn’t do so at this stage; we’re not manufacturing that much yet… we had over a million dollars worth of production in six months, which is amazing considering we did this during a pandemic, but the size of our company is not big enough to justify an ERP system yet. However, we know now is the right time to purchase it, so that everybody can know how to implement it, learn how it touches all points of a business and then design into that technology so it can work as you need it to work for you. That’s a very unusually early approach.

CHRISTIAN: Can you explain what an ERP system is for people who aren’t coming out of production?

JEN: It’s an enterprise resource planning system. It does everything from taking in an order to shipping it to a consumer, but there are different ways that can happen and that you can plan for it. Depending on how robust the system is, if I get an order in, I can check to see what fabric I have, I can look to the factory floor and see that oh, I’ve got a window on Thursday where I can kick out this on-demand order for 50 t-shirts, and then the system can turn around and quote that for 3 days, and it flows through the system all the way through ecomm. It helps you manage your supply chain; instead of designing and then going out to find your supply, perhaps you have a library of supply that designers design within, so you’re not strangulating yourself with too much material inventory and you become cost-efficient. If you’re developing something, this ERP system is built in a way that you can use a platform to deliver the information to the first operator on the floor.

CHRISTIAN: Yes, and all this sounds like common sense, but it’s not actually common practice. Maybe we’ll step away from ISAIC for a second; it’s been interesting to watch us and the industry at large try to catch up to the way that customer expectations and brand needs have changed, but supply chains haven’t. The system of production that’s been dominant for the past, let’s say, 30 years since offshoring took off in the late eighties, early nineties, was built for a different supply chain. And what we’re doing is I think the next generation of that, which is starting to apply some best practices from other industries in terms of material planning, production, what you were just talking about.

Jen, let’s go back to April. We were in the very early stages of the pandemic, and there wasn’t huge demand for apparel manufacturing. But since then, we’ve opened a factory, grown the team to thirty employees, switched the category we were producing in and the customers we were selling to, and played a role, not just in producing PPE within our factory, but also in helping to develop an ecosystem of local factories. So can you give a quick overview of how crazy the last seven months have been? I’ve watched from afar as you and the team worked to deliver products that were vital to workers on the frontlines. But what went on behind the scenes over that stretch?

JEN: Well, to set the stage a bit, we were within a couple weeks of a launch party and moving in. And when Covid hit, no one had an idea of how long it was going last, how extreme it was going to be, but we knew it was serious. We paused and said, regardless of whether there was apparel to make out there, was it the right use of our resources? We realized that we had the expertise and support to perhaps deploy them towards a desperately needed product. We went to the state and the city, and to a medical center here in Detroit that helped us develop a gown, which we understood at the time was in high demand–so high that we knew there was no way we could fill it alone. But over the last three years we had developed an incredible network of people in the industry. We called all these companies that had varying sizes of cut and sew facilities, and of course they were thrilled, because their businesses were shuttered and–in a couple of cases–looking at closure, permanent closure.

We purchased bulk material, which was in itself challenging, trying to learn the medical industry in two weeks, to learn what kind of material we needed, where to get it, during a time when there was this global scavenger hunt for the right materials (and when you found it, you had to put cash on the table and buy it right away). This was the environment we were walking into. We committed to taking the lead on this, mitigating the risk that small companies would be exposing themselves to if they tried to do it themselves. We cut and distributed the material to 12-15 companies and manufactured for the state and a couple regional medical centers. It was just crazy… the need was so high, and we had never made medical gowns before. But again, as an institute, we were in a position to be agnostic–or, shall we say, an unbiased, non-profiteering organization to lead the charge. We successfully did that, but not without a lot of pain; it was hard and we were working seven days a week for nearly five months. It developed deeper relationships between industry partners; we now have an industry council in Michigan that works closely together on initiatives, and we deepened our equipment partnerships. We’re in the position now where we have an incredibly trained staff, because they were sewing the same thing over and over again for months; what a great thing to train on in the beginning, it actually by default was an incredible training mechanism. But it was fast and furious and, Christian, I know you and I had many, shall we say, situation room phone calls at 10:00 at night with people all over the country, trying to figure out what to do about it.

CHRISTIAN: I don’t think there will be many moments in a career where there is that much need and not misinformation, but just a lack of information, right, where the infrastructure wasn’t there that needed to be there. It speaks to the vulnerability that comes when you don’t know how to produce things.

JEN: Oh my goodness yes, it pulled back the wizard’s curtain and it was like, oh my gosh, what’s going on behind there? Well, we don’t know how to make this stuff in the United States, that’s what’s happening. So in a way, we were beautifully positioned to respond but also.... to say, see, we told you [laughter], having some control of your supply chain is critical, you know, critical! Yes, this is extreme because people’s lives are at stake, but it’s critical, period. You’re exposing your society to all sorts of risks when you don’t know how to make things anymore.

CHRISTIAN: And in the case of PPE, as you mentioned, that was amplified. I think there’s a reckoning that still needs to happen… we’re still in the heart of a crisis, but the vulnerability of relying on foreign supply for vital life-saving materials is something that, as a country, we need to wrestle with. During that time, I was talking to factory after factory that was asking how they could help. They went out on a limb to buy equipment and material, and one of the things that was disappointing was how quickly support disappeared. You have people who were putting their businesses and their lives on the line, and then, as soon as we got access to cheap product again coming in from out of the country, orders were canceled... it dried up overnight. ISAIC, as well as so many others, went through that rollercoaster ride of it’s vital, we can’t pay for it, it’s vital, we can’t pay for it, at a time when there was still clearly a need, and a willingness of people to go to work.

JEN: It’s unfortunate, and it’s going to take advocacy and, I believe, legislation to get serious about it. We saw a mad dash for domestic supply, but as soon as the supply chain opened up again all we heard was you’re too expensive.

I should say, we’re not purists; we’re not saying that everything should be made in the US. We believe in a sort of progressive good approach to changing the industry, but the idea that you wouldn’t find a way to produce just 30% of your PPE here, regardless of what you pay for it..? It’s an economic driver and, as you said, it mitigates national risk. But I think we’re going to see some changes. This will be the last time this sort of thing goes down.

CHRISTIAN: We’ve talked to individual politicians who are certainly trying to find ways to support it. It feels like a bipartisan issue; it can drive economic growth, maintain national security. It’s also an amplified case of looking at the total cost of ownership instead of a single unit of inventory. I hope that at a policy level we’re able to make that argument for why a cheap price doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the lowest cost option.

It’s an amplified case of looking at the total cost of ownership instead of a single unit of inventory.

JEN: …that’s right.

CHRISTIAN: I just want to wrap up here with a couple thoughts. Everything we’ve talked about has been taking place in Detroit, but that’s not all we’ve been up to. Maybe you can touch on how we’re anchored in Detroit but are looking at ways we can be a resource across the country?

JEN: Yes, our efforts are nationwide. As a new institute, they’re limited, but they’re growing. We’ve worked with the CFDA, the Council of Fashion Designers of America; they’ve doubled down on their commitments to supporting US manufacturing. And we’ve worked with the CFDA alongside the NY Economic Development Corporation. We’ve installed curriculum all over the country… Nashville, Seattle. And we’ll be producing for global and American brands. We’re set up for manufacturing now and are committed to finding brands built around sustainability. We don’t believe that if you have a sustainable product that relies on unsustainable lives, that you can rightfully call that a sustainable product. And what we’re finding is that brands are interested in aligning with this.

CHRISTIAN: There’s one thing we haven’t touched on that I think has been foundational–the idea of equity and employee ownership. We’ve been looking at how you can develop this industry from the ground up with a grassroots approach, but also with partners like Carhartt, like the CFDA, like the mayor’s office. And one of the things we’ve said from the very beginning is that the people who are doing the work need to share in the equity and benefits of that growth. So can you talk a little bit about what the next phase might look like for the manufacturing facility that we’re developing?

JEN:Yes, I’m so happy to talk about employee equity, it’s such a critical part of our long-term vision. Within the next 18-24 months, we’ll be opening a worker-owned, for-profit satellite facility. What this means is that the people who are working there–and part owners in it–will have a voice in how they want to run their company; they’ll be the stakeholders. There will be room for social impact investors as minority partners, but the employees will be the majority partners. It’s an opportunity to say, ok, we’re going to play a role in changing this industry, and we don’t want to be the only people to benefit from that. You come in through the ISAIC institute, you get trained, you work there for a couple of years, and then you have an opportunity to become an owner. And for sure in Detroit, this is an opportunity that the African American population doesn’t get very often–it just does not get the opportunity to have equity, and, at our core, we believe that workers just have to have more equity, not just in the growth, but in the redefinition of our industry.

CHRISTIAN: As you look at the fashion industry globally, it’s not like there’s not money being made. You hear brands complain that they can’t afford to pay more for products, you hear stories from both workers and factories about getting squeezed, losing huge orders for a penny per piece, and it’s been essentially: how much can the owners of large corporations squeeze out of the people who make the product? They haven’t been able to benefit from an industry that still creates a tremendous amount of wealth. So it feels like a really important step towards saying this needs to be a fundamental shift, not just using technology to produce in the US, but saying that the way that profits in this industry get distributed needs to reflect the contributions that are made at every level. Which is a conversation that America is starting to have across every industry.

The way that the profits in this industry get distributed needs to reflect the contributions that are made at every level.

JEN: I think that’s right. And the other thing that happens by default when you do that, is that you engage the employee-owners in learning the whole business. And what does that lead to? That often leads to people starting their own businesses. If I go back again to how I started in this business, it’s because I had the benefit of many a business owner teaching me the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, until I bought my own company. The communities we’re looking to serve do not get that opportunity–and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t.

CHRISTIAN: Jen, how can listeners support ISAIC? What does the organization need to continue to grow and develop the work that it’s doing?

JEN: The way we will grow is really with substantial financial support. Maybe helping us pay for apprenticeships; for example, we provide full benefits, so that’s more than $40,000/year for each apprentice. Buying advanced technology–we need hundreds of thousands of dollars for that. Or supporting manufacturing–if we want to invest in the manufacturing of sustainable materials, we have to buy that material, and, like anything, that is a strain on cash flow, so we need operating support.

All to say that we need some substantial core support that can help us continue to say yes to the opportunities we have ahead of us. There’s more than we can say yes to right now… and that’s just purely a function of limited resources.

CHRISTIAN: Jen, thank you so much for your time, it’s been a pleasure as always. I look forward to touching base again and giving an update on some of the work that ISAIC does over the next year. In the meantime, thank you for all the leadership you’ve shown in this organization.

JEN: Thank you, Christian, it’s been such a joy to work together–and more to come, right?!

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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