Environmentalists From The United States

"The most ambitious effort to fashion a new-age manifesto was Mark Satin's comprehensive but quite readable New Age Politics. ... More historically grounded than the bulk of new-age literature, Satin's book found transformative significance in the feminist and ecology struggles of the period, which, however, he tried mightily to fit into the new paradigmatic shift; these movements were important [to Satin] precisely insofar as they transcended "politics" and could be integrated into a spiritual outlook. Satin conceded that efforts by movements and parties to win reforms might be useful here and there, but they could never be the heart of the matter. ... Satin was convinced that, in the end, the desired aim of a new harmonious world comprised of people fully in touch with nature and their inner selves would have to be realized outside of and against a hopelessly corrupt and dehumanizing institutional system."

"After Satin accepted amnesty in 1978, he was invited to speak at a gathering in the States. He had just returned, and he was awake all night before the talk with excitement and fear. ... The speech got a standing ovation, and Satin wept. His vision of what was possible, of what in fact was already moving through the culture, had evidently struck a nerve. ... Two decades later, we know that Satin's hopes for a new political platform did not materialize. But over those long years in Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver Island, he caught sight of and began to plan for the general movement for change that is taking form now."

"A lot has changed in the forty years since I stood before Mark's table at the World Symposium on Humanity and purchased his ugly but powerful little book. Mark and I have changed. Undoubtedly, if he were to write this book now, it would be different. But it stands as the first comprehensive articulation of a transformational political ideology. It shows, in great and systemic detail, how we can depthfully understand our world of crisis and get to a world of collaboration and wholeness. And, by the way, it restores the true meaning of "New Age" – from a prophetic image all too often used to justify narcissism, to an image of the innate potential in all of us to make things new for the benefit of all."

"From the United States there seemed to be not one but many different kinds of movements developing ... as well as a number of ideologies that already then seemed to be in competition with one another: the social ecology of Murray Bookchin, the new-age politics of Mark Satin, the appropriate technology of Amory Lovins, the ecofeminism of Carolyn Merchant, to name some of those that I became acquainted with."

"New political parties such as the Citizens Party have formed in the United States. ... The more visionary, global movement coalescing around the prodigious communications efforts of Mark Satin, author of New Age Politics (Delta, 1979), has now incorporated as the New World Alliance."

"The New World Alliance (NWA) is a conscious attempt to create a national political movement based on values that have traditionally stood outside politics. NWA is the brainchild of Mark Satin. ... When Satin returned to the United States under Carter's Vietnam amnesty program, he decided to take a cross-country bus trip to assess the mood of "new age" activists, to learn from them what was needed to start a new national political organization. "I went systematically to 24 cities and regions from coast to coast, ..." he wrote to us in a letter. "I stopped when I found 500 people who said they'd answer a questionnaire ... on what a New Age-oriented political organization should be like – what its politics should be, what its projects should be, and how its first directors should be chosen." ... In December 1979, the NWA held its first governing council meeting in New York."

"The thirty-nine members of the NWA Governing Council included teachers, futurists, environmentalists, feminists, think-tank members, an others from a variety of professional backgrounds. ... The NWA sponsored a number of conferences and facilitated local and national networking. In 1981 the group put forward a "Transformational Platform," which was the first attempt to take ecological, decentralist, globalist, and human-growth ideas and translate them into a detailed, practical political platform with about 300 specific proposals. ... Yet something was missing. Satin observed: ... "We are engaged in theoretical-verbal overkill in exactly the same way the military people are engaged in stockpiling weapons and for the same kind of reasons. ... We don't know what to do.""

"The purpose of the Alliance was to "articulate new decentralist / planetary politics, launch practical and realisable projects and to serve as one of the organisational vehicles for transformation." ... Its political vision included healing, rediscovery, human growth, ecology, participation, appropriate scale, globalism, technological creativity and spirituality. ... Mark Satin ... eventually settled down to producing an interesting monthly newsletter called New Options, which in March 1988 reported a circulation of over 10,000."

"The New World Alliance ... was a short-lived precursor of the North American Greens. It was founded by Mark Satin (author of New Age Politics) after a nationwide Delphi-type survey among 500 academics, policy experts, and political activists interested in this emerging political paradigm. These new colleagues ... were also exploring the relationship between personal and political transformation."

"The Greens in the United States ... began as an initiative of individuals formed by the co-author of a "new age" interpretation of the West German movement, Charlene Spretnak, along with David Haenke from the North American Bioregional Congress, Mark Satin, editor of New Options and author of New Age Politics, and Harry Boyte."

"Spretnak and Satin played a significant role in facilitating the articulation of Green political thought, and the philosophies they represented have left their influence on the Greens' ideological foundation. ... Although Spretnak's and Satin's books developed their sources in different ways, both authors drew upon radical and cultural feminist critiques of women's oppression. ... The sixty-two founding Greens may have chosen the term community-based economics over anticapitalism because cultural feminism and New Age thought are both antileftist. Both Spretnak and Satin rejected leftist critiques, preferring instead the West German Greens slogan that had graced the cover of Spretnak and Capra's book Green Politics: "We are neither Left nor Right, we are in front.""

"West German Green Wilhelm Knabe and a few U.S. Greens ... were becoming impatient with the movement's slow pace of growth. Mark Satin, one of the "New Age" and more conservative participants, suggested that Greens needed to leave behind some classic characteristics of the sixties counterculture: namely, their fear of money, hierarchy, authority, and leadership. Satin felt the Greens would need both fundraising skills and a more coherent structure in order to get their message out to a broad base of the population."

"Christa Slaton ... worked with and studied the Greens in the United States. She was concerned that Greens carried "mistrust into most of their political interactions with each other ... name calling and insults are routinely exchanged." As political commentator Mark Satin noted, the irony was that the Greens made a point of saying how important it was to treat people well, yet he found that they sometimes treated each other worse than people in traditional political parties."

"New Options suggests that the New Age / New Left has to continue to evolve into the "New Center" – or fail, for real this time, to change the world."

"New Options is spearheading a movement that is still nameless. He [Satin] no longer uses the "New Age" moniker, as it now conjures up Shirley MacLaine and Windham Hill. Though he's active in the U.S. Green movement, ... he's reluctant to identify his newsletter as a Green publication. "The U.S. Green movement so far is characterized by an ineptness of organizing strategy and a substantial degree of cultural alienation from the American mainstream," he says. ... But Satin isn't reaching for the brick pile. He says he's content with New Options pragmatic stance. "I think it's a third path which alienated people can move to once they become bored with their own alienation.""

"Mark Satin, in his Washington newsletter Radical Middle, describes the domination of the public debate about the [biotechnology] issue by two different groups. ... Satin's report carries the encouraging news of an emerging group with a different voice, one that is "nuanced, hopeful, adult" and that he calls the "voice of cautious optimism." It is essentially a willingness to listen to both sides of the argument."

"The term "radical middle" debuted on the national stage in 1995 in a Newsweek cover story by Joe Klein. ... Almost a decade later, the electorate is more polarized than ever. ... Not so, according to New Age activist-cum-sensible centrist, Mark Satin, whose new book Radical Middle announces the arrival of a kinder, gentler radical middle, Think of it as a "compassionate conservatism" for the center-left. ... Satin wants his book to be the movement's manifesto. Like the political newsletter he's been issuing since 1999, .. Satin's rhetoric employs New Age emotionalism in the service of mostly hard-nosed, rational solutions to a broad spectrum of social and political problems. True to claim, the policy proposals cataloged here don't fit neatly into the standard left / right model. ... The most provocative ideas combine a leftist concern for the commonwealth with a conservative instinct for individual responsibility and self-reliance."

"Distinctions between the two parties are of little interest to Satin. Having spent his entire political life outside conventional politics, Satin firmly believes that the current system can't lead to the moderate majority he wants. The most "radical" thing about Mark Satin's Radical Middle is the extraordinary depth of the author's belief that identifying solutions to America's problems depends on spurning conventional party politics."

"Even though Satin continually inveighs against the "impractical idealism" that (by his own admission) much of his own career exemplifies, his book ultimately places him in the sturdy tradition of "idealistic" American reformers who think smart and principled people unencumbered by political constraints can change everything. For all the stylistic differences, Radical Middle echoes the message of Ross Perot's 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, which placed unlimited cash at the disposal of the proposition that a (nominally) uncorrupted and nonpartisan candidate could simply "open up the hood" of American government and fix things."

"Mark Satin's irritating Radical Middle is a timely clue to what gave liberalism a bad name. It opens breathlessly. ... Satin ... perceive[s] obvious solutions to almost everything. The greater part of the book consists of short chapters that state daunting problems and then summarily solve them. ... Why do so many liberal preachments grate like glass shards on a blackboard? Well, maybe it's the haut à bas tone, the disdain of politics, the smug armchair analyses, the insufferable smart-aleckness."

"In his new book, Radical Middle ..., which provided the initial inspiration for this article, Satin fleshes out pragmatic new policy ideas. ... Satin draws inspiration from nonpolitical realms of society where people are blending what works from various orthodoxies. He points to developments like integrative medicine, ... socially responsible business, ... and judges' increasing use of psychology, economics, and even literature in crafting legal opinions. "Politics," he says ruefully, "is the last area of society where this kind of creative thinking is taking hold.""

"The most important departure from politics-as-usual that Satin ascribes to the radical middle is a commitment to finding a higher common ground that integrates best insights from both the left and the right. ... There is no way to do justice here to Satin's outpouring of specific policy proposals. No one will agree with all of them. But there is a good deal of fresh thinking here, and some of the policy ideas Satin presents may turn out to be very important. The most troubling aspect of Radical Middle is Satin's tendency to exaggerate how far along this approach to politics really is. ... Satin's tendency to set out his own favorite policy ideas as if they are the official position of the radical middle, for which he is serving as spokesman, is problematic. It risks turning the radical middle into a new ideology with a detailed political platform."

"Satin grew up in a small town in Minnesota and felt an instinctive sort of rebellion, but unlike Bob Dylan, he did not play the guitar and so had no way of expressing it."

"That folks like Mark Satin now package their wares in the soft pastels of personalist psychology rather than the primary colors (among them, red) of Herbert Marcuse helps keep the national blood pressure down, but in truth it's simply another example of the Ralph Lauren-ization of American politics."

"Were the '80s as bad as some people think? At least one social interpreter, Mark Satin ..., says no. ... Satin maintains that a new cultural archetype emerged during the '80s, "the caring individual," or one who is equally committed to self-development and social change, to individual freedom and social justice. A true grassroots democracy, he argues, requires these personally and socially responsible individuals. ... Just as he rejects the "media caricature" of the '80s, he rejects some of the romanticization of the 1960s. An antiwar activist who fled to Canada to organize similarly disaffected Americans, Satin ... recalls the era as divisive and judgmental, with too much emphasis on us-vs.-them. "I hope what we're moving toward is an integration of individualism and community with acceptance of the diversity in our society," he says."

"It has been said that the difference between successful people and most others is that successful people "fail" more often. In other words, experiments always yield information. Mark's life – a series of experiments – shows that it's important for all of us to rediscover the importance of commitment and experiment. Mark is beginning to view his life trajectory with a little more compassion. He likes to say he's living evidence of "what you can do with determination and no fancy credentials or resources." And yet he did have one priceless resource: the courage of his conviction. In certain esoteric systems, the Fool is considered the most advanced level of spiritual attainment. The Fool, in this light, is trusting enough to throw himself headlong into life. The Fool makes mistakes – and thereby makes discoveries. This is a book of such discoveries."

"Satin ... helped create the first edition of the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants which was published under his name. ... Fetherling observed that Satin was highly publicity conscious and reports once having heard him say, "Anonymity would kill me." Perhaps Satin's interests ran in the family, for his mother was interviewed about her son in the Ladies' Home Journal and his father started a publishing house. ... A reporter who interviewed Satin ... described him as "unremarkable looking. Not tall, not terribly tidy, with brown hair and eyes and a bit of length to his nose. A bit of length to his hair, too, though not enough to startle.""

"Mark and I became "conference buddies." He and I were both on the road a lot in those days, each of us offering our particular message, and we would meet up at one conference or another. I was always glad to see Mark. I saw him then – and still see him now – as one of the true "carriers of spirit" who have dedicated their lives to bringing a fiery vision to life in order to better humanity. If anyone can claim to be a spiritual teacher, Mark can, for he teaches us how to claim and express the human spirit of freedom, potential, and wholeness."

"We live in a crazy time, when people who make food choices that are healthy and compassionate are often considered weird, while people are considered normal whose eating habits promote disease and are dependent on enormous suffering."

"We don’t realize that in the sizzle of our steaks there is the suffering of animals, the mining of our topsoil, the slashing of our forests, the harming of our economy, and the eroding of our health. We don’t hear in the sizzle the cry of the hungry millions who might otherwise be fed. We don’t see the toxic poisons accumulating in the food chains, poisoning our children and our earth for generations to come. But once we become aware of the impact of our food choices, we can never really forget… All things are deeply connected, and so the choices we make in our daily lives have enormous influence, not only on our own health and vitality, but also on the lives of other beings, and indeed on the destiny of life on earth. Thankfully, we have cause to be grateful—what’s best for us personally is also best for other forms of life, and for the life support systems on which we all depend."

"Only a few of us had been able to face directly the obscene conditions we inflicted on animals in our farm factories and modern slaughter houses; but most of us knew on some level that they entailed a suffering that was too much to “stomach.” We can appreciate now what it did to us to eat animals kept long in pain and terror. Because the mass methods employed to raise and kill animals for our tables were relatively new, we did not fully realize the deprivation and torture they entailed. Only a few of us guessed that the glandular responses of the cattle and pigs and chickens pumped adrenalin into their bodies and that we ate with their flesh the rage of the chickens, the terror of the pigs and cattle… Acting now with more respect for other beings, we find we have more respect for ourselves."

"Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair."

"I think what I really learned in all of this, was to be true to myself, to be true to my inner voice. And I began to see, that we really do have the power, our own lives really do make a difference, just by being more conscious of the food that we eat. We can heal ourselves, we can heal the environment, we can heal this planet."

"I was born in the heart of the Great American Food Machine. From childhood on it was expected that I would someday take over and run what has become the world's largest ice cream company—Baskin-Robbins. Year after year I was groomed and prepared for the task, given an opportunity to live the Great American Dream… There is a sweeter and deeper American dream than the one I turned down. It is the dream of a success in which all beings share because it is founded on a reverence for life. A dream of a society at peace with its conscience because it respects and lives in harmony with all life forms. A dream of a people living in accord with the laws of Creation, cherishing and caring for the natural environment, conserving nature instead of destroying it. A dream of a society that is truly healthy, practicing a wise and compassionate stewardship of a balanced ecosystem."

"One day, through my prayers, an overwhelming amount of love started flowing into me, filling up the dark hole that threatened to consume me. I suddenly realized that what I was feeling was the love of the Earth, the love of Creation. Every day we, as a species, do so much to destroy Creation's ability to give us life. But that Creation continues to do everything in its power to give us life anyway. And that's true love."

"I knew that if I didn't find a way to deal with my anger and hate, they would overwhelm me and I would be swallowed up in the fear, sadness, and frustration. I knew that to hate and strike out was to be a part of the same violence I was trying to stop. And so I prayed."

"Wounds on the external landscape exist in the internal landscape first. We re-create those inner wounds on the outside, on the planet. So being a vegan, practicing yoga, and taking time to exercise and do things that nourish my heart and spirit are all vital parts of my “activism.” Activists have done a great job of caring for the world around us, but we haven’t done a great job of caring for ourselves and each other. … If we’re going to ask people to open up to the pain of the earth, we ought to have systems in place that enable us to relieve each other’s pain."

"Activism is Patriotism."

"True transformation occurs only when we can look at ourselves squarely and face our attachments and inner demons, free from the buzz of commercial distraction and false social realities. We have to retreat into our own cocoons and come face-to-face with who we are. We have to turn toward our own inner darkness. For only by abandoning its attachments and facing the darkness does the caterpillar's body begin to spread out and its light, beautiful wings begin to form."

"Angels are people who pop into our lives at a need time and then disappear without a track, having helped us through a critical point."

"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."

"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a member of the natural community, a wanderer who visits but does not remain and whose travels leave only trails."

"The fact is that it is the land that has made us all Americans, and the moral is that it is the land which must be preserved to save our Americanism. Soil erosion, forest exploitation, and wildlife destruction are more insidious anti-American activities than Communism, Fascism, or foreign propagandizing."

"If the national park idea is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea."

"It has never been man’s gift to make wildernesses. But he can make deserts, and has."

"It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them too. It needs them now."

"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it."

"It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs."

"These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or "usefulness" or even recreation. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."

"The national park idea, the best idea we ever had, was inevitable as soon as Americans learned to confront the wild continent not with fear and cupidity but with delight, wonder, and awe."