Episode 30: Herb Simmens – Collaborating with Six Million People

In this episode, Herb Simmens discusses:

• The importance of truly connecting with people over informal conversations during negotiations
• His involvement in getting his local county government to pass the first climate emergency resolution in the United States (the second in the world!) 
• Qualities of a good, effective leader
• Vision, humility, and resilience
• How to cope with the sense of helplessness and despair that can arise when thinking about the state of our planet 
• How his local Climate Mobilization chapter builds a “robust shock absorber” to handle internal conflict
• Words and terms he created in his new book, such as the Kardashian Climate Index

More About our Guest

Herb Simmens is the author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future – the first book to create the beginnings of a climate vocabulary. With degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, he was chief of long-range planning for the state of New Jersey in the 1990s. In that role, he oversaw the largest effort in the USA to involve the public in the creation of New Jersey’s long-term plan. He also was a professor at two NJ colleges, a town manager, and county administrator and director of one of the first non-profits focused on climate. In 2017, he also helped persuade his county government in Montgomery to declare the first climate emergency in the USA, and the second in the world. 

He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, though the sidewalk in front of his home is in the District of Columbia!

Herb’s Resources

• Herb’s website

Resources Mentioned in the Episode

• Climate Vision for Montgomery County
• A Climate Vocabulary for the Future 
• Paris commitments 
• Sir David King
• Bernie Mayer (have you heard our interview with him in Season 1?)
• The Sixth Extinction (book)
• The Climate Mobilization (group)
• Derrick Jensen 
• The Lancet’s article about health professionals and civil disobedience 
• Dean Spillane Walker

Quotes and Highlights

[1:42] Herb talks about how during the 1990s, he helped lead the state of New Jersey’s long-range planning for the state – essentially, it was an effort to figure out where New Jersey should go in the next 20 years or so. He says, “Basically, we’re sort of legislatively mandated to come up with a plan for the future of the state. […] we were also legislated not to do it with a few of us bureaucrats sitting around a conference room, you know, coming up with ideas and writing them down, hoping that we could get them past the politicians, but rather to do an initial draft, the sort of blue sky vision, and then to send it out for detailed negotiations with every county government. We had 21, and every municipal government in New Jersey. And New Jersey had […] 566 local governments. We basically spent five years literally negotiating both the map of the state where development should occur […] The legislation, instead of just simply saying the state will write a plan, we were obligated to negotiate. In fact, there was actually a term in the legislation that I’ve never seen anywhere else, called Cross Acceptance. Both sides had to agree to accept the ultimate language that was developed. […] I learned a lot from it.”

Gord: I’m wondering if there’s some more you could share with other listeners about what you learned.

Julia: Yeah, I was gonna build on that too, and in particular what you might have learned about how to envision, as well as […] what you might have learned about conflict and also leadership. What’s required to create a vision of the future?

[05:10] Herb: “What sticks in my mind is my favorite part, which is the magic word, vision. We use lots of different techniques, but one of them that I found the most exciting and fun, and I think it had a significant impact in terms of making the process work, is the ability to literally put in illustration form, or in video form, some of the physical changes that we were espousing and recommending.” Herb discusses two examples and says “That’s one dimension, is the literal meaning of the word vision. A tangible, physical sense of what an alternative future might look like in their community.”

Julia asks Herb if he can share any lessons around conflict, such as with his staff or from engaging with others. Herb says “The first part had to do with overcoming the natural, or maybe unnatural, but very real suspicion that all of the interest groups [had]. […] They were no magic wands that one could wave to overcome that suspicion that that here we were, the state coming in, and they were gonna lose, either economically, in the case of builders, who, we would say no longer could develop on farmland, for example, or the farmers in return, they could no longer sell their land to the developers. And so a lot of it was simply going out there. And a lot of it was also, in my recollection, the kind of informal conversations that you had. Nothing dramatic in me saying that, or original, but it was as much making sure that I had enough rest to be able after the meeting ended at 10 o’clock to go out for a drink with some of the local folks and really listen and debrief and so forth. So you need a level of commitment and even stamina, just basic things like that […]. It took five years and I don’t I don’t think it was five years that was wasted. I don’t think Well, jeez, we should have been able to do it in two and a half because…it’s a trade off. Obviously, the longer to take before you reach the final product, then you’re delaying implementation of good stuff. But on the other hand, if you go too quickly, then you lose the opportunity or the risk of losing the opportunity to implement anything.”

Julia: “Yeah, and I think what you’re saying is really profound. And although, as you said, perhaps nothing new per se, but this commitment to relationship, commitment to a connection, informality. A saying that we have is to go slow to go fast.”

Herb talks about a professor he had in graduate school who influenced Herb’s practice, saying “[the professor] had come to graduate school after a very high level position and career at federal government and state government and so forth. He was one of these people who could have gotten by giving a lecture once a week and still got paid a lot of money and been a star. But instead, he insisted in his class that he meet with every one of his students one-on-one for a least an hour early on in the semester and 90% of that conversation was about the student, and I felt so – you know, today, even as I talk to the two of you now, I feel kind of warmth and gratitude. And though I haven’t always been able to remember that in my dealings with people in my life, I have enough of the time, and ultimately it’s about internalizing that.”

Julia: What kind of leadership do you think it takes to enable people to come to those places of visioning?

[11:29] Herb: “I don’t know. I mean, I’d like to be able to say, but I’m not sure how much authority I can say it with. I’d like to be able to say that a good leader, or an effective leader, somebody who really knows him or herself first, in other words is a conscious leader, is a mindful person, somebody who is open to mid-course corrections, who is open to – again, it’s certainly nothing original – to listening first before speaking, to feedback from his or her staff, being open to it and responsive in a good way. […]Another part is having a drive and a commitment to actually do what it takes – to get back to what I said before, if it means sitting down and having a drink late into the evening afterwards, or sitting down with your staff one-on-one to talk with them, or to find out about people before you meet with him to read about their background and their history so you go in feeling like you know something about these folks. It’s the bunch of, both skills and attitudes and preparation that I think has to come together. And maybe there’s some inherent quality that some people have more than others clearly do, to be able to project likability and excitement. You put all that together and you know, it’s so simple!”

[13:09] Gord: “One thing I want to underline from what you were saying was again this idea of speaking to people, you know, having the drink afterwards, because I think that happens based on an internalized value of connecting, right? You mentioned your professor and whatnot. But it’s something that you live, right? You don’t behave that way unless you inherently value connecting with people, right?”

Herb: “I mean, that’s right. Yes. I think if you just do it in a kind of artificial way because you read some guide or a consultant came in and said you should do that. People are going to see through that because you’ll be looking at your watch or your phone or, you know, waiting for it to end or not really listening. And people will pick it up right away.”

[13:46] Gord: you’ve written some documents, and one of them that you provided to us is called Climate Vision for Montgomery County. And you live in Montgomery County. This is an interesting piece of writing. What you’ve done, or how I would describe it anyway, is you’ve taken a reader 20, 30 years into the future, and then from that point, you’re helping them look backwards at the changes that have occurred in order to reach a carbon zero emission state for that county, right? And all the different things that have to happen to reach there.”

Herb explains why he wrote the book. He also says: 

• “One of things that I’ve thought about all these years and with the climate work, is that we’re really talking about, in my view, we’re not simply talking about a sort of one-on-one substitution of electric vehicles for internal combustion vehicles and electric heat pumps for gas heat or cold heat or natural or oil heat or whatever. Those are things that are necessary, but the ramifications and the consequences and the impacts of doing those go way beyond simply those substitutions. It’s really a transformation in almost everything about how we do our business – and business in the broadest sense, how we live. So that’s what I tried to convey.” 
• “In fact, after I finished, I surprised myself when I added up all the new programs and institutions that I sort of put out in this scenario, and I think I came up with 30 different institutions that this vision incorporates that don’t exist right now. Everything from, for example, a coalition to deal with the mental and emotional health of everybody.”
• “A severe climate distress that’s already beginning, and will, tragically, you know, I think it’s inevitable to have to say this, that will accelerate greatly, and that will affect not just the most vulnerable – they’ll be affected the most, almost by definition, but it will even affect the leaders. Because nobody could put themselves outside of what’s happening, except for the shortest period of time.”

Gord: “In actualizing such a vision, what are the types of conflicts that you would expect that a leader would encounter? And how would she or he be wise to think about those and respond to them?”

[19:39] Herb: “Well, I think that the first conflict is to have a leader who gets the need to even support and sponsor this transformation. I mean, that’s the biggest hurdle. Because right now, we can probably count the leaders, quote unquote, in North America who have the vision and the dedication and the position to do that on maybe one hand. […] The question is, how do you take a creative vision and then implement it? And I think that’s part of the reason, the obvious reason, that we’re seeing the extinction rebellion and the school strikes and sunrise movement in the United States. And I assume you probably have an equivalent in Canada. All these groups are finally emerging to say enough is enough.”

“I was happy and proud to be one of three people who went to our county government two years ago next month, actually, and got them to pass the first climate emergency resolution in the United States. It was only the second in the world after a small community in Australia. It was December 5th, 2017. And now there are 1100 communities – I just checked this morning, covering tens and tens of millions of people all over the world that have declared climate emergencies, including many, of course, in Canada. And that’s really gratifying. It’s still just two words, climate emergency. It’s action, obviously, that matters.”

[23:03] “We’ve never had an issue that’s created so many different kinds of conflicts. […] There’s so many cleavages that are so different and so unique to climate, and so vexing. And obviously if that wasn’t the case, we’d have made a lot more progress. And by we, I mean countries all over the world. There is hardly a country in the world that’s meeting its Paris commitments, for example, and those are, as everybody knows who follows this, utterly inadequate. We have to have a certain amount of humility about this rather than simply say, Well, we just need to X, Y, and Z.”

[24:34] Herb discusses the religious dimension of climate: “Among fundamental religions, whether it’s Christianity or I suspect Islam, or Judaism, my religion, there’s much less support for climate action than there is among the more mainstream or progressive forms of those religion. I think it’s in part because it’s very disorienting because if you believe in a benevolent God or even a malevolent God, but an all-powerful God, you figure either – and I’m oversimplifying, of course, there’s thousands of religious sects out there with different subtle differences, but – well either this is what God wants for us, you know, this is the end times, the beginning of the end times, and who are we to interfere with that, or, if all these changes are occurring, it can’t be because of God, because if it was bad, God wouldn’t allow it to happen. So it’s got to be good. And those are some of the most intractable conflicts […] Is there anything that’s held more deeply among so many people than their religious beliefs?”

[26:26] “Gord: One of things you mentioned was humility, so maybe that’s one of the things you’re advocating, right? As a leadership stance in responding to some of these…”

Herb agrees and says that part of the reason is because “the science, for example is changing.” “I follow 10 different newsletters that report the latest climate news every morning or so from all over the world. And I don’t go by more than a day or two without reading a study or headline of a study that says, now that the scientists have learned something new that they did not know before, and almost 90% of the time it’s bad news: this is happening faster, this is more severe, etcetera, etcetera. And so, it’s really humbling in terms of figuring out how to act as a leader because we’re constantly getting new information. […] I wrote a book called A Climate Vocabulary in the Future, with five or six hundred new terms. One of the terms I came up with is what I call the carbon maze: that every time we think that we’ve got an answer – not every time but many of the times, we then learned that we’ve hit a dead end in the maze and we have to sort of go back to scratch again.”

Gord: “So humility would be one thing. And anything else you could suggest to someone in a leadership position, in terms of dealing with these particular types of cleavages?”

[29:09] Herb talks about open-mindedness and single-mindedness regarding the environment, and says “…we are in an existential emergency. I mean this is something that will end life as we know it one way or the other in the next couple of decades, and either we collectively start to try to figure out how to do it, however long the odds are, in a way that preserves a modicum of life and livability or, you know in a catastrophic way.”

[29:50] Herb: “There was a British scientist, a very eminent British scientist, Sir David King, who is an adviser to four prime ministers who said not long ago – I happened to see him speak in London – he said, ‘What we do in the next ten years will impact the next ten thousand years or so.’ So if you’re a leader, that’s got to be in your head and in your heart every moment of the day.” 

“You need to have this set of qualities, to be open to new ideas but never, ever to, not just give up or forget the urgent need for action, but to continually find new ways to convey that to the public.”

Herb talks about approaches taken by Churchill and FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and says “We remember them and we read them because they apparently really did have an impact on us back then to mobilize them for the hard times ahead.” “You need humility on the one hand […] and also being focused and determined.”

[32:00] Herb: “Another paradox, I think, is about negotiation and open-mindedness, with people listening to all sorts of views and coming to an agreement. Yet we don’t have time to listen to everybody’s views if we’re going to act effectively on climate change. So there has to be a kind of authoritarian dimension. I hate that word – there’s got to be a better word than that. […] But you know, almost a kind of ruthlessness. And I say this with hesitation, but I really believe it.”

“We have this responsibility for a thousand generations of people in the future that literally may not exist unless we do the right thing. So I guess what I would say is get enough input to allow you to get support from people, but not so much that you don’t have time to take the proactive action to get the results you have to get.”

[33:05] Julia: “Herb, you’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and again this is the individual theme, I think, individual leadership – how do you maintain any sense of the vision or the determination part? Because I know for me, and I’ve spoken about this actually on the podcast before as well, certainly with Elizabeth May, there’s a part of me that really goes to collapse. I mean, I know about The Sixth Extinction, and there’s an element of, you know, I know what conflict looks like at its worst, and it’s not pretty. I know it from my work, but I think, as I also mentioned off-air, I also know it from my mother’s experiences with the war. So there’s a part of me that’s quite dark about all these changes. Dark, and a sense of helplessness. So that’s what I’m curious about. I’m sure I’m not the only one. You spoke about the need for people’s mental and emotional well-being, the more that the realities are going to sink into everybody, regardless as to whether you quote unquote believe it or not, it’s happening. We turn on the TV and it’s got to affect people to see fires from outside of the Earth’s orbit. It’s that kind of direction I’d be curious about from your own experiences. How would you speak to our listeners, a listener about what’s required in the here and now?”

[34:39] Herb: “Each question you ask is more challenging than the previous one, which is what I had expected!” Herb discusses a group he’s involved in called the Climate Mobilization, and how in his local chapter, “We have basically a one-on-one conversation. People pair off into twos or threes, depending upon the numbers, and just for three minutes or five minutes, each speak uninterrupted about what’s on their mind or what’s in their hearts, as a way both of ideally loosening or diminishing their emotional burden or sharing something positive, but also as a way to connect us with each other. So we see and feel, we’re dimensions of the people that we interact with. So if an hour later in the meeting there is a conflict about, you know, Should we do civil disobedience? Should we decarbonize our cars before we decarbonize our building?, or a thousand other things like that. Hopefully, we have I guess what you might call a more robust shock absorber built into our small little collective system. And so I think practices like that – and there may be lots of different variations of that; some people are more or less comfortable with those things – could be really valuable, particularly in the kind of atomized world that many of us live in, in our boxes or little houses here and there, where we don’t see our neighbors and our relatives aren’t living upstairs, they’re living a thousand miles away, etcetera, etcetera. So that’s one small piece, I think, and that’s you could also put that under the rubric of resilience.”

[36:45] Julia: “Yes, yeah, I love that. […] What’s required of each of us individuals to step up to our leadership? What’s required of each of us?”

[37:36] Herb: “It’s so obvious, but find some reliable sources of information and inform yourself as much as you can, because there’s so much – as with almost everything, unfortunately and tragically – so much what I call synthetic information rather than natural information. Information that’s manufactured to serve the interests of people manufacturing that information and not the people getting it. So learn all you can about the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis and continue learning. It’s not just Well, now I’ve learned it. I can act. But don’t make any major or significant decisions […] until you’ve learned a little bit. Or join a group or a conversation with people to learn. When you reach a point where you feel you have some sense of the contours, whether it’s local, national, international, then you’ll be in a better position to make your own decisions. […] Until you have enough of a background to distill that information you’re hearing, it’s hard to know how to act effectively.”

[39:35] Julia: “So a piece of the inner leadership that’s required is to continually educate, to be a continuous learner. […] For me, I’m looking for the helplessness. There’s a part of me that just wants to give up, because it’s too big.”

[39:52] Herb: “Well, it’s interesting because I think you’ve hit upon something really important. Part of the reason I’m involved with this [group] in particular […], the Climate Mobilization […] one of the first principles – and again, it sounds so obvious – is learn and tell the truth. And if the truth is that you, Julia, are feeling despair, say it! Write it! By extension, it’s hard. It takes courage. We’re not taught to do that. There’s been, I think, a terrible misapprehension about the downside of acknowledging and feeling despair, helplessness, and for years, I think most climate communicators have basically said, We can’t scare people. We have to give people hope.”

[41:08} Herb discusses an article by Derrick Jensen, “a very passionate environmental writer,” about how Derrick basically doesn’t believe in hope and finds it very disempowering. When he’s asked to write an article for a magazine and he writes about despair, the editor will say I want you to end with some hope! And yes, you can, and you should, if that’s the truth! Herb says “I think it’s a very profound observation. Let’s not treat at least adults as kids, you know, and I can feel despair for a day or a minute or an hour or maybe even a month or two and then snap out of it and then act, and then maybe go back to despair because that’s the kind of world we were all gonna be – if we allow our feelings to come out and acknowledge them, we’re going be in those kinds of different states. And that’s okay!”

[42:12] Julia: “Yeah, and Herb, […] you’ve kind of given me my antidote in a way because I think, as you say, speaking one’s truth and being received emotionally, being acknowledged that where one is is okay, has an ameliorating effect, has a dissolving effect, and its cycles back to something Gord spoke about earlier I think, with the two of you and your component, where Gord said, there’s this piece about a value around connection, human connection. And I actually for the first time just glimpsed something positive, which is, perhaps this crisis and this mayhem will give us more opportunity to reconnect, human to human to human, because we are going to need each other more than we certainly ever have in a very, very, very long time.”

[43:00] Herb: “That’s right, and I think that’s a great segue into the question about leadership. One of the dimensions is to say that the kind of effective leader we need now, and that has to emerge, are leaders that encourage and support connection.”

[43:20] Gord: “You spoke about the group you’re in and having those few minutes to talk about what you were experiencing and feeling two people in the group. But what we also want to try to do is create those kind of connections with people who think and feel very differently than us, right? So that’s the other thing. We want to try and build that kind of connection with people on the other side of the divide, right? And how do we do that?”

[43:52] Herb: “We’ve self-sorted ourselves out geographically in the United States, where basically the people on the left are living with the people on the left, whether it’s within a neighborhood of a city or a state or region or whatever. And so our kids don’t go to school with the kids of different thoughts and beliefs. […] In the United States they have a simplistic but I think accurate analysis: you could tell so much about a community whether it has a Whole Foods versus a Cracker Barrel.”

[45:25] Herb: “If you want to sort of begin dialogue, start with the people who are most like you but may not be as, quite where you are at this point. […] Don’t try to convince people who deny climate change exists. Try to convince people who do accept climate change to act!”

[47:59] Herb talks about his efforts in Montgomery County and how in the two years since they passed the emergency climate resolution, they’ve done very little and have been butting heads. Herb wonders “Maybe what we need to do is take our time and talk to the people in the allied professions, occupations, our churches, our schools, as a way of bringing about climate change.” Herb mentions that he just read a recent “editorial in the Lancet, the British medical journal, one of the preeminent medical journals in the world, that said that health care folks more or less have an obligation to do civil disobedience! It’s reaching that point! […] It really opened my eyes. The good news and the bad news about climate is that it affects everything. So that’s the bad news. But the good news is that there’s almost no individual or group that couldn’t easily see a dimension where they can act because of the connection between climate and what they do and who they are.”

[50:01] Gord asks Herb to speak about his new book, A Climate Vocabulary of the Future. Herb says “What I realized a couple of years ago was because climate effects everything, it would be really useful to think about what a new vocabulary that encompassed all these different dimensions of climate might look like. And so I was silly enough, or crazy enough, to actually try to do that. I came up with a few hundred different words and terms to describe various dimensions of climate: the economic and political and the social and psychological one, and physical and scientific and so forth. And I think I think it’s always hard for an author to talk about his or her book objectively, but a lot of people who read it actually learned a lot, and they laughed a lot. I consciously or unconsciously put some humour in there. As I write in my preface, actually helped me write the book because it helped deflate some of the despair that I felt writing the book, and I could sort of put a little distance by making a joke about something or coming up with a silly term, you know, like the Kardashian Climate Index, for example: it’s the ratio of the number of times that people search for the Kardashians on the Internet versus climate change.”

[52:30] Julia asks Herb if he has any advice for listeners. Herb says, “I guess my advice is given with hesitation because I usually find that when it’s label as advice, people don’t want to hear it. [All three laugh.] I think I could say a lot of different things, and the one that comes to mind is maybe the most grandiose, which is, notwithstanding all the horrors that are starting to occur, will occur, we largely as a people still have the future of our lives and our communities and our nations and our world in our hands. And moments of despair, as we talked earlier, moments of helplessness, as you said: acknowledge them. Don’t feel guilty about it. Don’t feel embarrassed about it, or try not to anyway. But then recognize that you’ll come out that, to some degree or other, and maybe this idea of our own empowerment can help us as individuals and as groups of people, to both come out of our despair and also then to take the kind of vigorous action that, at the very least, will reduce the amount of harm that’s done in the world, to us, to our neighbors, to our communities, to our families, and may actually turn around things now because we just don’t know.”

Herb finishes by talking about an experience he recently had at a retreat in Greece with a participant from Oregon, Dean Spillane Walker, who said “something like, You know, this is the most important work in the world right now, and that may sound a little grandiose, but I think there’s a lot more than a kernel of truth in the kinds of conversations that we’re having right now, here and elsewhere, so what more can you ask for than, at the very least, to be alive at this amazing time when all this stuff is happening, and we could be not just an observer, but a participant in it.”