From Awkwardness to Epiphany

By Maurice Carter, Sustainable Newton Marketing & Communications Director

In his Ecocentrity Blog, Ray C. Anderson Foundation Executive Director John Lanier recently shared video of a speech by his grandfather, Ray Anderson, to illuminate a piece about our planet's crisis of biodiversity loss.  Like most recordings of Ray Anderson, this 2006 speech relating his 1997 "spear in the chest" moment after reading Paul Hawken's "The Ecology of Commerce" is profound. Everyone should watch the the entire seven minutes at the bottom of this page, but I found these words especially worthy of transcribing here.  Ray said:

"I had agreed reluctantly -- and I underline 'reluctantly' -- to speak to a newly assembled environmental task force of Interface people from around the world. I had been asked to offer an environmental vision. And I did not have an environmental vision. I did not want to answer this awkward question -- awkward for me because I could not get beyond: 'We obey the law, comply.' And I knew somehow that comply was not a vision."

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I'm struck by many things when I hear Ray Anderson speak.

​I understood for the first time that I was a plunderer of the Earth, stealing my grandchildren's future. And that's not the legacy one wants to leave behind.

• He was a good man in 1997, who had achieved great things, but even he had not considered how his business impacted life around him. Almost no one did in those days. As Ray says in this video:  "I surely did not get this in college at Georgia Tech in the 1950s."
• Ray was a humble man. So humble, he felt accountable to these employees from around the world -- HIS employees. He was not fixated on what they owed him, he was glaringly aware of what he owed them. An obligation he felt ill-equipped to meet.
• Though I never met Ray, I know he was a good man because of how he responded to this epiphany and the reality of  what he and other industrialists were doing to the planet. "I understood for the first time that I was a plunderer of the Earth, stealing my grandchildren's future. And that's not the legacy one wants to leave behind." He did not look away, He did not rationalize or excuse his role and the role of business in what was happening to the planet. Instead, Ray says, "I wept as I read."
• Ray knew "comply" was not a vision. And yet how many business and political leaders don't even believe in following the law if they can get away with it? Men and women like Ray Anderson don't come along that often, but I worry we are woefully short of the humble, compassionate, self-aware, accountable leaders necessary to fix a situation that has only gotten worse globally since Ray's "spear in the chest" moment.
• Scientists tell us, backed by multiple studies, that natural gas stoves are an indoor health hazard AND they leak methane that warms the planet 80 times more that CO2. Yet, the performance artists we accept for leaders these days turn that information into a culture war talking point.
• Decades before Ray Anderson confronted his own culpability and committed himself to changing business as we know it, Exxon executives were presented by their own scientist with the hard evidence that burning the fossil fuels they were were selling would warm the planet to the point it could not sustain human life. But rather than accepting the responsibility to avert that disaster, they embarked on a decades-long campaign, which continues to this day, disavowing the facts their own team had brought to them. And we have elected officials who do their bidding every day.
• Even though the environmental impacts of fossil fuels are well documented, industry trade groups are working across the country to block progress on transportation electrification and electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

I suppose I am mystified by that men and women so lacking in character or integrity can rise to such positions of power. I am dumbfounded our society continues to tolerate such immorality and destructive behavior.  We rationalize and normalize greed at our own peril.
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But I also marvel that a man like Ray Anderson also lived and left the legacy he did -- a legacy that lives on in the Ray C. Anderson Foundation and all of the great work they make possible. I give thanks for a powerful man, in the prime of his business career, who owned his responsibility and ability to do better.  To make the world better.  To lead by example.

We can bemoan the sad state of leadership we witness daily, but we also need to believe there are more Ray Andersons out there. And that, in our own imperfect and perfectly human ways, we can each be a little more like Ray.