The solution to environment issues is to find common ground

There’s a new vision for some public policy, and the country cries out for it. It doesn’t matter whether those cries come with tears of frustration, tears of sorrow, tears of joy, or tears from pollution.

Jobs can be created by promoting smart energy solutions to global warming. The planet can be helped without sacrificing people’s livelihoods.

Finding common ground for mutually beneficial results isn’t new, of course, but in a political climate made volatile – venomous — since Bill Clinton defeated the first President Bush in 1992, it’s refreshing.

Finding common ground for mutually beneficial results is effective, in downstate Illinois as well as nationwide.

Finding common ground for mutually beneficial results is accelerating – hopefully in the nick of time.

As the sign said at the mass demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999: “Teamsters and Turtles, Together at Last.”

In the Peoria area, fresh cooperation is happening between what conventional wisdom might suggest would be opponents, especially between environmental activists and the Army Corps of Engineers, hunting and fishing groups, corporations, and maybe even utilities.

“Groups we call ‘hook and bullet people’ are teaming up with environmental organizations to lobby for more public land,” says Kiersten Sheets, an activist with the Heart of Illinois Sierra Club who’s been coordinating the November 2-3 Wild & Scenic Environmental Film Festival at downtown Peoria’s Apollo Theater, not only featuring “Who Killed The Electric Car?” but financial support from central Illinois’ Firefly Energy and the national outdoor-clothing maker Patagonia.

“The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Prairie Rivers Network are teaming up to pass legislation to restore and protect the Upper Mississippi River and Illinois River,” she added.

That effort centers on part of the Water Resources Development Act dubbed the Navigation Ecosystem Sustainability Program (NESP), which has key elements that contribute to the ecological health of those river systems. NESP projects could include building islands to slow river currents and creating habitat, restoring floodplains, lowering water levels during the summer to promote the growth of native vegetation, controlling harmful invasive species, and dredging channels.

A group within the Sierra Club, Central Illinois Global Warming Solutions Group, has started efforts to raise money to sustain a Compact Fluorescent Lamp recycling program and hopes for a partnership with utilities, Sheets said, but such partnerships are emerging from coast to coast, in many sectors. A successful legislative effort in Illinois focusing on mercury was backed by the auto industry as well as environmental groups, she said.

“Major corporations are encouraging Congress to institute something like a carbon cap,” she said. “The number keeps growing.”

Such growth may be reflected in sustainability reports issued by Caterpillar. Company chairman and CEO Jim Owens wrote of Cat’s goal of “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

Cat also was a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), 4 environmental and 10 companies that call for stepped-up regulation of greenhouse gases by the U.S. government. The other original corporations included Alcoa, BP America Inc., DuPont, General Electric and PG&E Corp., and the environmental groups Environmental Defense, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and the World Resources Institute. Twenty influential concerns have followed Cat’s lead, including Deere and Co., all three American auto companies, the National Wildlife Federation and the Nature Conservancy.

An equally dramatic example is the cooperation between the Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers union, organized in various endeavors as the Blue-Green Alliance, the National Energy Initiative, and the Apollo Alliance.

The sheer number of members makes the joint activity impressive, as the Sierra Club’s 750,000 members make it the country’s largest grassroots environmental group, and the USW’s 850,000 members make it the nation’s largest private-sector manufacturing union.

“Business as usual is no longer an option,” said Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting any longer to fight global warming. We have the technology and the know-how to create affordable energy solutions. It’s time for our leaders to show the political will.”

Such cooperation makes sense for many reasons, said Steelworkers president Leo Gerard, from appreciating the logic of taking care of where you live to working for the self-interest of better jobs.

“Investments in alternative energy programs at the state level, supporting by federal initiatives, can create a new surge of quality job growth while significantly reducing our dependence on foreign oil,” said Gerard after a “Road to Energy Independence Tour” with Pope a year ago this week. “We have a historic opportunity to forge a new direction.”

Since that barnstorming tour from the Midwest to the East Coast, Gerard has been instrumental in building bridges between former foes. Gerard’s endorsement of and enthusiasm about the ambitious Apollo Alliance — the 10-year, $300 billion program to develop clean alternate energies some see as a 21st century parallel to the space program— translated into other labor unions joining.

The Apollo coalition now includes the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Machinists, the Operating Engineers, the Laborers and the United Mine Workers – not among the groups one would immediately associate with environmental stewardship.

“Good jobs and a clean environment are important to American workers,” Gerard said. “We cannot have one without the other.”

Whether local environmentalists and big industrialists helping a river or national environmentalists and international unions pushing an energy plan, common ground makes common sense.

“How do we persuade people who are so different?” asked Bernie Horn of the Center for Policy Alternatives. “By assuring them that we share their values.”