Transcript for “Building Consensus on Climate Change” with Benji Backer
With extreme weather and deadly disasters dominating headlines, the issue of climate change is a vital issue in the 2024 election. The majority of Americans believe there is human-caused climate change affecting our lives and fear for future impacts. The issue raises a range of perspectives on how to tackle the problem among the candidates running for higher office. If the majority of us are united on this issue, how do we have better discourse to find productive solutions? In this interview, Benji Backer shares his experience building consensus among conservatives and liberals to make progress on climate change.
In this conversation, Benji highlights some of the bipartisan climate legislation that has passed in the United States in recent history. He talks about how the American Conservation Coalition and other partners have led the way to help lawmakers prioritize the environment and climate issues. Benji goes on to discuss where climate change ranks in importance for voters, where people can get useful information about climate politics, and he even talks about how artificial intelligence anxiety is supplanting climate change as a political issue.
Benji Backer is President and Founder of the American Conservation Coalition, the largest right-of-center environmental organization in the country. He has been awarded the Fortune 40 Under 40, Forbes 30 Under 30, GreenBiz 30 Under 30, and Grist 50 for his work with the ACC. He serves as a Board member for the Wisconsin Conservative Energy Forum and Mainstream Republicans of Washington. A frequent contributor to multiple national media outlets, Benji is one of the leading youth environmental voices in the country.
Thank you to Starts with Us for their collaboration on this series. Starts with Us is an organization committed to overcoming extreme political and cultural division. Check them out at startswith.us.
Benji Backer: I can guarantee you if you’re liberal and you ask your conservative uncle or grandpa why they’re skeptical of this issue, they’ll give you a pretty good reason. And if you ask them if they care about the environment, they’ll probably say yes. And if you’re that conservative uncle or grandpa, and you say those same questions to the liberal granddaughter or grandson, “Why do you care about this issue so much and why are you skeptical of the conservative approach?” I think that you’d get some really good answers. And then you can start to have a conversation about how do you alleviate both of those things.
Don MacPherson: That is Benji Backer, founder and executive chairman of the American Conservation Coalition. Benji joined 12 Geniuses to discuss the importance of climate change as an election issue and how his organization is creating cross-party political conversation about the environment.
My name is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. Heading into any election season can be divisive, that’s why 12 Geniuses has partnered with Starts With Us on this series to help you navigate the overall 2024 election.
Benji Backer is the author of The Conservative Environmentalist and an active political climate advocate. In our conversation, Benji and I discuss where climate change ranks in importance for voters, how conservatives and liberals are coming together to pass climate legislation where people can get useful information about climate politics, and we even discuss how artificial intelligence anxiety is supplanting climate change as a political issue.
Thank you to Starts With Us for their collaboration on this series. Starts With Us is an organization committed to overcoming extreme political and cultural division. Check them out at startswith.us.
Benji, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Benji: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Don: I’m excited to have this conversation. Let’s start out with your background. And how did you get interested in the topic of the environment?
Benji: Well, it’s a great question, and it goes back all the way to the 2008 presidential election. So, I’m 26 years old. If you do the math, I was pretty young when the 2008 presidential election was happening. And my parents had it on, in the background, a debate between John McCain and Barack Obama. And I became super fascinated by the political process, not because my parents were into it, in fact, they were using that debate as an opportunity to figure out who to vote for. But I was just fascinated by what was happening on TV and I wanted to be involved. The minute that that debate was over, I asked my parents to use their computer and I looked up what the different platforms were for both political sides and decided that I wanted to be active in conservative politics.
I was active in conservative politics from basically age 10 until, I mean, the conversation that we’re having now, so till today. And I really felt passionately about dedicating my time to the community and to the ideals that I believed in. But I also was a big environmentalist. My family was a big hiking family. We spent a lot of time in northern Wisconsin where I grew up on the lakes and in the forests, and we’d take trips to national parks. And so I had these two passions as a child of politics and the environment. And growing up in Wisconsin, I grew up in a time where it was a huge focus of the state was politics. We had a recall election for our governor that made national headlines. We had presidential elections that were constantly being dictated by whether or not Wisconsin was going in a specific direction.
So, it was a great time to be there. But then I had to go to college at the end of high school. It was the middle of the 2016 presidential election, and I was really dismayed by the divide that was starting to happen in politics, the visceral partisan divide. And, of course, I was right of center, but I was never like, oh, the left of center sucks or people who are liberal or horrible. And I hated being called horrible as a conservative by people on the left. And I just felt like things were changing in a really bad way. And so I was thinking about where I wanted to go to college, and instead of going to college in D.C., which is my original thought, politics really was making me upset. And I really was starting to get sick of the divide and everything going on. So I decided to shift the priority towards the environment, my other hobby that I was telling you about.
And so I decided to go to the University of Washington in Seattle because I wanted to be somewhere where I could hike and ski, not to be around politics. And that ended up being very much right decision because I had a lot of fun hiking and skiing while I was living there. But while I was there, I started ACC, which is now the largest right-of-center environmental organization in the country, which was focused, and still is focused, on basically building the political bridge by bringing conservatives back into environmental issues. So, alleviating my frustration of the partisan divide and also leaning into my passion of environmentalism. And now, fast forward seven years later, the ACC has 40,000 members. We have a big staff. We have really dedicated activists. And the movement is really starting to take shape. And I just finished my book called The Conservative Environmentalist for Penguin. So, a lot to unpack there, but that’s background.
Don: If I’m understanding correctly, the American Conservation Coalition is the largest right-of-center environmental organization in the country, is that correct?
Benji: That’s correct. Yeah.
Don: Well, congratulations. There are a few things that I wanted to ask you about that just to help our listeners with definitions. You use conservative, and I want you to distinguish between conservative and Republican in your eyes.
Benji: It’s a really good point. And I think Republican… Well, both words have been tainted now. And it does feel weird to call myself, admittedly, it feels weird to call myself a conservative because the automatic stereotypes that people have aren’t necessarily what I am or what I believe. So, even the word conservative has those stereotypes. But Republican is an ever-changing name for a political party that can or cannot hold certain beliefs. And those beliefs change over time. A Republican in the 1800s is very different than a Republican in the 2000s, just like a Democrat is very different then to now. And that will always be the case. Conservative principles and conservative beliefs are what I got inspired by.
But I also feel like that word has been hijacked too. But it still is the most closely aligned word to where I’m at, which is the belief that people and individuals and communities, in general, make better decisions than the government. And that the marketplace and the American spirit of ingenuity and competition is a better way to focus our time and energy than the government as well. And that individual liberty and freedom and the American spirit of freedom is something that is really to be cherished and that we have these values in America that are not perfect and they need to move towards greater things, but that they have brought so much prosperity and beauty to the world.
Those are, in my mind, traditional conservative principles, these ideas of populism and America being the only good country, and that we’re the only country that deserves any sort of support, and everyone else sucks, and that we just need to basically prop ourselves up and forget about everyone else. And these kind of weird twists on what I just said are not conservative, in my opinion, but I still identify as a conservative because I think it best identifies who I am, even though the word is starting to change.
Don: And I think it’s important for listeners to understand that conservation and conservative are not oxymorons. They have gone together in the past. And you write about this in your book, you talk about Teddy Roosevelt, and you talk about even Richard Nixon starting the EPA, and Ronald Reagan. And maybe you could just talk a little bit about the history of conservation and conservatives.
Benji: Yeah, I mean, it’s a rich, rich history. And again, it goes back to the fact that conservative principles, inherently, are about what I was just explaining, but they’re also about inherently conservation. It’s literally in the name of conservative, to be a conservationist. And you look back at history, and that’s true. And it’s not that long ago that things started to change. I mean, even in 2012 and 2008, John McCain and Mitt Romney were very much pro-conservation and pro-environment, and even pro-climate. So, it’s not like something changed back in the ’40s. This is something that’s very recent. And if you want to look that far back, you can look at Teddy Roosevelt who created basically the national park system as we know it today. You can look at Richard Nixon who created the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, who basically is the reason that Environmental Protection Agency is what it is today.
You can look at George H. W. Bush, who set aside more public land than any president in recent history, or you can look at George W. Bush, who signed the largest marine sanctuary of all time into law. I mean, these are common set. Ronald Reagan had a similar legacy. These people are actually who popularized American environmentalism as we know it today. So this used to be, not to say that the right has always had the right answers or that the right… but when the right was leading on this, they were actually working with Democrats. And anybody who’s older than me who saw those things happen can attest to that. I think that there’s this frustration in America, this underlying frustration from most Americans about this issue being partisan.
Don: I’m curious, when you went to the University of Washington if you felt some backlash because of your political beliefs. And you are an environmentalist, if some of your peers said, “Well, that doesn’t seem right. You can’t be both.”
Benji: I was expecting to feel that. And while there were little instances of it here and there, I actually was really inspired to see the response from people. The University of Washington is a very liberal campus. I was probably in the top 5% most conservative people there, and I’m about as independent as they come in terms of being center right, not just like a blatant right-wing person. So, it’s a very liberal campus, but people loved that a right-of-center person was engaging on the environment and climate. And it was further proof that this was an issue to build bridges on.
Don: You’ve been successful building consensus between conservatives and liberals. Can you talk about some of your successes here?
Benji: In 2019, Republicans and Democrats in Congress, America united around national parks. And there was this huge funding of this deficit of our national park backlog that passed with 90 plus percent support from both the Republican and Democrat representatives. Then in 2020, a clean energy bill passed called the Clean Energy Act of 2020 that Donald Trump signed. He also signed the National Park Bill, also massive bipartisan support. It was the biggest investment in clean energy in U.S. history. Then in 2021, it was the bipartisan infrastructure law, which was the biggest investment in clean infrastructure in American history, also bipartisan. We had the 2022 Growing Climate Solutions Act, which is an investment in sustainable agriculture and sustainable farmers, which passed 92 to eight. The word climate was in the bill, and it passed 92 to 8. We have seen massive progress.
Now, yes, the Inflation Reduction Act was very partisan, and the narrative around this issue has still continued to stay incredibly partisan. But we have seen some of the biggest investments in history in public lands, clean energy, infrastructure, all come with massive bipartisan support. That wouldn’t have happened 10 years ago, and it wouldn’t have happened without ACC, and it wouldn’t have happened without the activists that we have. So things are changing in a really positive way. And oh, by the way, we started a caucus, which is the Conservative Climate Caucus, just for conservatives who care about climate change. And there are almost a hundred members in the United States House alone. So, there’s a lot of progress happening. It’s just not being shattered from the rooftops, and it should be.
Don: The big question that I want to get to is how were you able to build this consensus? How were you able to achieve these successes?
Benji: The successes have largely come by meeting people where they’re at. And most Americans, and this means most politicians too, want a clean air, want a clean economy, they want clean water, and politicians are no different. So, how do you reach them when maybe they felt like it’s a liberal issue and that they don’t have a stake in this conversation? You have to meet them where they’re at. If you’re a representative from Florida, you care about the resiliency of your coasts, you care about the tourism industry, you care about national security, and you care about shipping, you care about the economy, you care about different things — all these issues have a tie to so many other issues, whether that is tourism or national security or the tourism industry. So, you can make the case for being pro-environment without just talking about this kind of kumbaya, we’re going to save the planet mentality.
You can talk about it in terms of taking it manufacturing and economic growth away from our adversaries by bringing manufacturing and energy production back home. You can talk about it in terms of economic growth and jobs in their districts. You can talk about it in terms of protecting their coastline or protecting their farming communities or protecting their local communities. These are all different arguments that maybe don’t always use climate or the environment as the first word, but you show how the positive implications of working on these things go far past what anyone has ever told them before. And so you’re meeting people where their needs are. And when you walk into a member of Congress’s office, the first thing you see is a picture of the natural beauty of their district or their state. They want to protect that.
So, if you can make the case that this helps protect their district and their local community, they are going to be invested. But if you say, “Oh, we’re going to save the polar bears, or we’re going to prevent sea-level rise,” but you’re talking to somebody from Nebraska, that’s not going to work. You have to meet people where they’re at. And it’s pretty easy to do if you just think about it for a little bit, and you think about, “Okay, what is this politician’s values? What do they value?” And if you go in there with a good intention and you don’t assume the worst, because that’s also a really big problem is that a lot of people assume that these people hate the environment, they have always bad intentions. If you assume the best, and you say, “What are their values? What do they want to accomplish for those values? And who are they trying to represent?”
Then you can say, “Okay, how do these issues of the environment and energy and climate intersect with those values, with those voters, with those people?” And if you can do that, it’s very easy to find common ground on this issue.
Don: We have a nationally election coming up in November of this year. It’s going to decide the presidency and a lot of congressional seats. The economy typically ranks high among important issues. Where does the environment and climate change rank coming into this election?
Benji: The vast majority of voters believe the environment is a top priority and believe that climate change is real. And so if you come out there and say the environment is not a top priority, or climate change isn’t real, it might be your 10th issue that you think of as most important. But it’s a litmus test of, okay, well, it might be my 10th most important issue, but if this person doesn’t believe in climate change, then I don’t know if I trust them on other things. Maybe I don’t trust them on my number one issue, for example. That’s where the breakdown happens. And especially once you look at the younger voters who put this in the top three for their constituency, if you have a litmus test and you have a politician who says they don’t believe that this is a top priority, you are going to lose young voters nearly every time.
Don: As I was prepping for this call, I was thinking this morning that the economy is the now and climate is the future, and that’s why the economy becomes a higher priority for us. But it seems to me that that future is shrinking and we are just…. Climate, it’s not a decade off, it’s not two decades off. It’s affecting us right now.
Benji: The problem with climate in terms of its solvability is that there is no, well, this is a good thing in essence in a way, but there’s no doomsday date. There’s no like date where we’re going to all feel the impacts of climate change all together in one day. It just feels like an anomaly or it feels like, “Oh, it’s just today. It’s just this heat wave that’s rolling through.” And so it’s not this pressing, “Oh my gosh, it’s so hot, I’m going to die.” And so you have this steady increase in temperature, steady increase in extreme weather events that is affecting us. Everyone’s noticing it. Everyone, even conservatives would say, “This winter’s been warmer,” or, “This weekend is unseasonably warm.” But it’s not so much that it changes behavior in the same way as if the stock market crashes tomorrow, right?
This slow steady change towards a warmer climate doesn’t instill the need for action in that same, oh my gosh, frantic, we need to change things now way, which is why you have all these climate activists trying to make that case because that immediate alarmist fear is what drives a lot of people to action when I wish our politicians could just make steady progress towards an issue that’s making a steady impact across party lines to start reining in the impacts. But instead, they’re bickering, allowing this continual small change to happen over many, many days and weeks and months and years. And then we look back, and we’re like, “Wow, it is five degrees warmer on average this year than it was five years ago. You don’t notice that on a day-to-day basis.” And so I think that that really prevents us from having the action that we need, especially in a world where we’re driven by fear and driven by immediate problems instead of, like you said, focusing on the future and focusing on what we can do to prevent these things from happening. It’s all kind of playing defense instead of playing offense.
Don: You’ve talked about how consensus has been built among politicians. The majority of Americans believe there is human-caused climate change. How do you recommend we have better discourse on the subject in our homes and within political institutions? And maybe just let’s focus on our homes right now.
Benji: What I would recommend for people in their homes is to talk about this in a very holistic way. And I think one of the reasons why the right is so adamant about this being a farce or being something that is a wolf’s in sheep’s clothing issue is because it’s got this narrow lens, this non-holistic lens of we need solar wind and EVs, and that’s it. And we just need to have the government mandate this and we can solve this problem overnight. And there’s a merit in the importance of those things. Just like there’s a merit in the conservative approach, which is saying we can’t get rid of oil and gas. We can’t exclude nuclear. We can’t continue to ship out all of our manufacturing of solar and wind turbines to China and Russia and other countries.
There’s truth on both sides of this argument. And so taking a holistic approach at the Thanksgiving dinner table or around the campfire at, your summer family reunion is the best way to talk about it. Because I can guarantee you if you’re liberal and you ask your conservative uncle or grandpa why they’re skeptical of this issue, they’ll give you a pretty good reason. And if you ask them if they care about the environment, they’ll probably say yes. And if you’re that conservative uncle or grandpa, and you say those same questions to the liberal granddaughter or grandson, “Why do you care about this issue so much? And why are you skeptical of the conservative approach?" I think that you’d get some really good answers. And then you can start to have a conversation about how do you alleviate both of those things. But if you come in guns-a-blazing, saying, “Oil and gas is the enemy, and I hate anything related to oil and gas,” or, “Solar wind and EVs are just a liberal way to take over the world.” Like, you’re not going to get anywhere. And I think that that’s, unfortunately, how most conversations have started on this.
Don: Yeah. I tend to think that we need to know less. And by 'know,' I mean believe our beliefs, and just shut up and listen. I think shut up and listen is probably some pretty good advice for enduring Thanksgiving or whatever family get-togethers that we’re having is like, “Well, just listen to their perspective and maybe you can learn something from it.”
Benji: Exactly.
Don: What advice do you have for voters as they think about the environment when voting?
Benji: Are your politicians that you’re voting for prioritizing this issue? Do they have an offensive approach rather than a defensive approach? If your politician only is going after the other side and only has an “anti” mindset, and that’s not an attack on the right. If you are voting for a Democrat and all they’re talking about is how they hate oil and gas and that we need to ban it and all this stuff, or you’re trying to vote for a Republican, and they just are going after every liberal agenda on the environment, that’s defense. They don’t have their own agenda, they don’t have their own ideas, they don’t have their own policies. That’s not worth voting for. If they have their own ideas, they could be completely wrong, they could be fine-tuned, they could be improved. If they have their own agenda, that’s worth paying attention to and probably worth voting for.
Unfortunately, most people are just anti, anti, anti, anti, and not for anything. And if you’re going to the ballot box, voting against something is not a vote for anything. I believe that on the environment, that’s a hundred percent true. And if you’re voting for somebody who doesn’t have something that they’re for, don’t be surprised that when they get elected, they’re not going to change that. They need to have that in writing before they ever step foot in their office. And unfortunately, most politicians don’t have their feet put to the fire on that. They don’t get asked the tough questions. And it’s much easier to show up to a TV interview or a debate and just play that anti-game, but don’t let them do that.
Don: You can talk about candidates at the local, state and federal levels. What advice do you have for them when it comes to talking about the environment?
Benji: I think more candidates need to get out and actually understand the environmental issues and energy issues firsthand. What I wish they would do is go visit local energy sites. Go visit local public lands and private lands. Go visit the local environment that they’re supposed to be protecting. Go understand, once they are elected, what other areas of the country are dealing with. Go tour everything that you can to understand the issue if you care about it; because that’s been the most impactful thing for me. I’ve been able to go visit coal facilities and solar facilities. I’ve been able to visit ocean restoration projects and timber companies as well as the folks going out and fighting the fires every summer in the forests. And if you actually go out and see these things firsthand, you get an understanding. That’s what politicians should be doing in the first place.
If you are going to represent a state or a district, you should probably know firsthand what the issues are, not just the talking points, but actually know the people on the ground and the stakeholders. And that sounds like some big lift, like, oh, you got to go tour all these things. I can guarantee you that a politician, especially running for Congress, which is obviously the second largest area of land that you could run for a federal office, a big area of land. You could tour all the different things that you need to in one or two days. I mean, it would not take very long for a politician to really understand these issues. And I think, as voters, we need to demand, like, “So what do you know about forest management, congressman? You represent a district where forests are under fire every summer, and what do you know about this?”
And then they answer, and you can tell it’s just a platitude. It doesn’t actually stand for anything. “When’s the last time you’ve gone and visited that forest? When have you gone and understood what is happening in the ground? When have you gone and talked to the farmer? When have you gone and toured with the… why are you so against clean energy? Have you talked to the workers in your district that are actually working on that, who their livelihoods that rely on that and they’re so proud and happy that that has come to your district?” We need to force politicians to actually understand what’s going on in the ground. And as voters, I think that’s the most important thing we can do. But also as politicians, that’s the best thing you can do to understand the scope and the depth of the issue.
Oh, and by the way, if you’re going on the campaign trail, it’s a pretty cool thing to talk about, as an anecdote, that you went there. It’s a very positive thing to do. So, it’s not just to prevent the negative, it’s also to really represent your community to the best of your ability.
Don: I wonder how, if at all, has the fear and anxiety over AI development shifted attention from environmental issues, climate change? Because there’s an anxiety about AI threat, and I see it similar to climate threat. A lot of people feel anxiety around a warming planet, and I just wonder if what’s happened over the last year or 18 months in terms of AI development and the story has shifted some attention away from climate. Do you see that?
Benji: I absolutely do. I think I was actually out at brunch the other day with a girl who is a little bit younger than me. I think she graduated high school a few years after me, and so she’s Gen Z. I’m on the Gen Z millennial edge, and she’s definitely Gen Z. And she was talking about how she was so scared of climate change, actually, but AI, the introduction of AI superseded that. So, it’s a great question that I think is exactly on point with a lot of where people are at. I would say the fears about both are valid, but the shutting down of your own belief systems and your own minds is actually the worst thing that could happen. Because if you’re fearful of something, the worst thing you can do is back away and run the other way.
Climate change is solvable. The problems around AI are solvable. I’m actually somewhat scared of AI myself. Could you use AI for good to help climate change? Could you use AI for amazing startup technologies and ideas to help automate some of the climate resiliency and adaptation techniques that we need to be deploying? Could you use AI to fly drones up into the air to monitor whether there’s a methane leak on an oil and gas well? Let’s use that for good. Now, yeah, there are definite problems with climate change and definite problems with AI, and I think young people are scared of both. And probably AI has taken a lot of attention away from climate, but let’s lean in, not lean back. And I would say that’s what most young people need to understand is that leaning into these things will help get us closer to where they want it to be rather than giving up because the fear is so large. Nothing is unsolvable until we make it unsolvable. And climate change and AI can be the same way.
Don: We have agency. I think that’s really important for people to understand is AI is a too and we can decide how to use it. And with climate, we have some amazing tools that have been created, and we will still create more amazing tools that will help us address it, but we have to apply these tools. I wonder what your message is to young people who understand the importance of the environment as a political issue but who are sitting on the sidelines and aren’t getting involved. And it may not be just related to young people, it could be anybody. What’s your advice to them?
Benji: I completely understand the dismay with politics, not only because it’s so nasty and visceral, but because things don’t seem to be changing, and the issues seem to be so big that it’s not worth it. And we might as well just live our lives and hope for the best. But at the same time that that’s understandable is the desire and the need and the absolute necessity for individual action to change the course of history. I would think, and this is maybe a bad analogy, but I would think Martin Luther King, when he saw the daunting task of solving racism in this country, could have shut down pretty easily and said, “That is way too daunting. I need to talk to every governor and every council person and every congress person and the culture and the stereotypes and all these things are wrong, and so I’m just going to back away.”
And no, he led a movement that changed the course of history towards what we have today, which is nowhere near perfect, but it is getting closer and closer every single day because of him and so many other people. Leaning in is the only way to change things. And again, nothing is unsolvable until we give up. It is only unsolvable if we give up. It’s only unsolvable if we don’t lean in. We need entrepreneurs, we need policymakers, we need good ideas, we need local leaders, we need volunteers, we need activists — We need all sorts of different people to be participating in whatever way is authentic to them.
Don: I want to talk about misinformation for a minute because we are in a generative-AI world where people can create videos that just aren’t true and create articles that just aren’t true. So, this is going to have a big influence on this upcoming election. Can you guide our listeners to a few reliable sources on the topic of the environment or climate change that you really value?
Benji: Well, I really think one of the best things that I always recommend for people is Google News for all news. Because what I love about Google News is that they filter every source and they put out different options for you, and they will suggest Fox News right next to Mother Jones. And I just think it’s great that you have that alternative viewpoint that you can click around for different issues. I think Google News is great in general, so not just about the environment, but about most things. I think something that I’m about to build through this book launch is a coalition of center left, center, and center right nonprofits in the environmental space who are putting out incredible, incredible reports and talking about amazing things.
There really isn’t a central hub for news on this that I feel like is worth going to. But I think there are some amazing organizations like Project Drawdown and the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Property Environmental Research Center, which stands for PERC — these are really good nonprofits that put out tons of good information. But in terms of news, it’s really hard because, on the right, they’re trying to make these issues look like they don’t exist. And on the left, they’re trying to make them look way worse than they actually are. And so it’s really, really hard. So, I guess that’s a long way of saying Google News in general and some really good nonprofits, and that I’m also working on something.
Don: Benji, what fills you with the sense of optimism?
Benji: My sense of optimism is always there because I believe that our brightest days are ahead if we want them to be because I see real human beings working on building a better future together all the time. And they don’t get the same media attention as the AOCs and Ted Cruzs do, but they’re right outside our windows every day, and they’re inside our homes every day. I’ve toured around the country and visited almost every state to understand what’s going on environmentally in these different places. And these people quietly working because they just want a better future, they want a better future for their families, they want a better future for their communities. They’re not doing it for some global phenomenon called climate change. They’re doing it because they think it’s the right thing to do. This is a movement that is going to take a lot of time to build, but there are millions and billions around the world of people who are dedicated to this.
I believe we are going to solve it because I’ve seen firsthand how inspiring every person who’s playing a role in building a cleaner future is. And it’s happening everywhere. It’s not just in liberal places. It’s happening in rural places, it’s happening in conservative places, it’s happening in poor places and rich places. And I have not seen anything that’s told me that I think that this is unsolvable.
Don: Can you paint a picture for your version of American environmentalism into the future?
Benji: I think it’s a return to the roots of American environmentalism — A love of the land, a love of nature, a love of wild spaces, and a desire to protect those places because we know how much we rely on them for our day-to-day lives, not just because of the beauty of it, which, of course, is a great part of it, but also because we rely on it for our day-to-day lives and. And a reigniting of the Teddy Roosevelt spirit of the Great American outdoors. And that means something different for someone in the Midwest as it does for someone in the West. It doesn’t need to be this huge national park that’s beautiful. It’s the prairies, it’s the farmlands, it’s the lakes, it’s the forest, it’s the trees, it’s the oceans, it’s everything. That’s what American environmentalism is going to be about.
Don: Your book is called The Conservative Environmentalist. I just wanted to mention one thing from the book because you end the book by talking about a chance meeting with John Lewis, the late congressman. And what has fascinated me about John Lewis in his career is that he was so young when he got involved. I think he was 20 years old, and he was in these meetings with these civil rights giants — Martin Luther King Jr. And Roy Wilkins, and all these giants. And he just never stopped. He just never stopped fighting until he was 80-years old. And so you met him. And I was thinking he was engaged in the fight of his generation, and I was thinking to myself as I read that, I’m going to be talking to this young man who’s engaged in the fight of his generation. And you’re so young. My advice to you or my hope for you is just keep going, keep fighting because it’s so important what you’re doing. And so thank you.
Benji: Well, thank you. I mean, it’s always amazing to hear that because I think for most young people who have been active in this, it can feel pretty daunting. Obviously, I was just talking about how this is all solvable. But daunting in terms of how much work there is to do and how young we are, and how much energy we need to put in. And being reminded that it’s worth it is always really helpful. That was a very inspiring interaction between John Lewis and I. And you look back at history, and most of the people who have been able to make the biggest difference, especially in the last a hundred years, were able to start at a really young age. And that’s continuing to be the case. And that’s my message to young people is that, you know, I’m not alone in this.
I mean, my CEO and president of my organization are all under 30, and our staff is under 30, and all the organizations we work with, a lot of their biggest leaders are under 30, and all of our top volunteers are under 30. This is our time. You’re not too young. You can be 15 and not be too young. There’s no really age barrier on this. And I think that young people have such an important role to play. And so people like you recognizing that and showcasing that and raising our voices up is always appreciated too. So thank you.
Don: Benji. I’ve loved this conversation. Thank you for your time, and thank you for being a genius.
Benji: I’ll be back anytime. Thank you so much.
Don: Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. In our next episode, I interview Layla Zaidane, President and CEO of Future Caucus, the largest non-partisan organization of young lawmakers in the U.S. America’s closing in on 250 years of existence. In our conversation, Layla and I talk about what it will take for the United States to survive and thrive for another 250 years. If you’re learning from and enjoying the podcast, please share it with others who might find value in it and please consider rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.