Kevin is the author of multiple books, including ‘Building the Green Economy’, co-founder of Global Exchange, a membership-based international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world and co-producer of the Green Festivals, a joint project of Global Exchange and Co-op America. Green Festivals bring together local and national socially responsible businesses, and environmental, social justice and community organizations. Hundreds of thousands of concerned individuals over the years have attended these “parties with a purpose” aimed at forging a just, sustainable, inclusive economy – a green economy. Our interview runs the gamut from the politics of academia to the politics of getting naked.
Leslie Berliant: I know that your background is in academia. How did you first come to develop Global Exchange?
Kevin Danaher: The time I spent in academia showed me that all talk and no action wasn’t working. I couldn’t stand all of the ass kissing and the petty politics. The truth is, it’s all because academia has no real power. Everything is symbolic. I saw these totally fratricidal fights over things like tenure. And honestly, when I was at American University I was mistreated by the administration. They would cancel my classes without telling me, classes that were full and making them money. In academia, you’re really just a worker with a PhD. So I got into doing human rights work and created Global Exchange in 1988.
LB: You talk about taking a holistic approach to developing change. What does that mean for you?
KD: It means being very inclusive. If we look at nature’s basic principle, it is the unity of diversity. We like to talk a lot about diversity, but if you have diverse people and they’re all fighting, it doesn’t work. In nature, all things are integrated. One organism’s waste is another organism’s lunch. There is no wastefulness in nature. The more we follow nature's model, the better off we will be. Human existence is being destroyed due to peak oil, peak soil, peak water, peak air. There are solid scientific reports saying Miami, parts of lower Manhattan and San Francisco are going to end up under water. We are talking about trillions of dollars in dikes and levies or massive insurance costs. We are at a tipping point where the challenges are bigger than ever, but our technical ability to link everyone on the planet is also bigger than ever. The gap between what is and what can be can be bridged. It makes me hopeful instead of depressed.
LB: Many people describe you as being anti-globalization. Is that accurate and what does that mean?
KD: It is typical media over simplification. We’re for people’s globalization, not corporate globalization. There’s elite globalization that is all about the money cycle and then there is bottom up people’s globalization that is about the life cycle. If we had a global vote on which should rule over the other, the money cycle, which is cutting down redwoods, killing fish, pouring chemicals into the soil, versus the life cycle, most people would agree that the life cycle should take precedence over money. That life should rule over money, not money ruling over life. Most would agree that the economy should be subordinate to life and human rights.
LB: How does the idea of global interconnectedness play out with issues like fair trade?
KD: I was a founding chairman of TransFair USA, the fair trade certifying agency for the U.S. When we started, we were playing off the fact that such huge inequality in the world creates an opportunity. Fair trade is, in essence, levying a self tax. A penny and a half per cup of coffee for instance. That’s not much, but that money when multiplied and concentrated to a farmer in the global south represents a 200 – 300 % increase in their income. Paul Rice, the CEO of TransFair, just got back from a coffee co-op in Ecuador where they now have an extra million dollars a year because of selling their crops at the fair trade price. A fair trade price means that farmers know that the minimum price they will get is set and equitable, in this case, over a dollar per pound. The conventional price, on the other hand, is now ten cents a pound. Some guy shows up in a truck in Kenya and says he will pay ten cents a pound and the farmer says he just heard on the radio that it’s 40 cents a pound and the guy on the truck says “sell it to the radio. I’m here now, take it or leave it.” The farmers are screwed because have to take what they are offered. Fair trade not only sets a fair price, but gives loans, technical expertise, organizes co-ops, builds schools and clinics. Our Reality Tours takes people to see fair trade and non fair trade farms and lets people decide for themselves where they would want to live. We have four stores where we sell fair trade goods and educate consumers on the global economy. We can create a bottom up alternative to the top down corporate model.
LB: I often grapple with decisions between buying local, fair trade or organic, what is your position on this?
KD: I would put local first. Local is first because economically, politically and environmentally it’s better, and if goods are produced locally there are less carbon emissions. You have flowers from Kenya going to Europe or from Latin America going to the U.S. so some guy who cheated on his wife can give her flowers, it’s environmentally costly and it’s stupid. Fair trade and organic tend to go together. 80 – 90 % of fair trade goods are organic. The ones that aren’t get assistance shifting to organic.
Politically, if you have a choice between Home Depot and Nancy’s Hardware, you should choose the local store every time because if she is doing something you don’t like, you can get at her and talk to her. I can talk to my local hardware store and they will respond. With Home Depot, Rainforest Action and Green Peace had a three year campaign to get them to stop cutting virgin forests. It shouldn’t take three years.
A corporation comes into your local economy to extract more wealth than it puts in. It’s a colonial model and it doesn’t work. And institutions like the IMF and World Bank say that countries have to bring in corporate investments in order to get loans, but corporations only invest if they think they will be able to take out more than they put in. It doesn’t make any sense. The local green economy is the opposite of the transnational corporate economy. Transnational companies have no patriotism to anywhere, they aren’t locally rooted and they aren’t green. Building the local green economy, and that economy as a movement, is a theme I hammer constantly.
LB: What have been some of the outcomes of your ‘Travel with Reality’ Tours?
KD: Consciousness raising based on going around and meeting people in places like Cuba and Venezuela. The participants meet people who love their government, hate their government and people who don’t care about their government and they get to make up their own minds, not about what those countries should do, but about what we should do about our policies toward those countries. Our embargo against Cuba prohibits Cuban children from getting medicine for a rare leukemia because the patent holder for the medication is an American company. Why? Because we don’t like the way they organize their economy.
Cuba, though, on a human development index measuring things like education, standard of living and health, far outranks Saudi Arabia. How did a poor country manage to do this? They focused on investing in their own people, in health care, education, preserving the environment. They are one of the few countries that have more trees now than they did 40 years ago. They recycle, use solar energy. No matter what a country's model, we are not saying they are a model for us, but they do have lessons that we can learn. The way they run medical clinics, have high school students integrated with farming so that they can learn about farm labor, these are lessons that we could incorporate into our own institutions.
We want to get Americans to think about our policy toward these countries, whether they are friends or enemies. Abraham Lincoln once said that the surest way to destroy an enemy is to make him your friend. Change the relationship and make the other your brother. Science tells us, hardcore biochemistry and brain science, that when you are kind to another person, it raises both of your serotonin levels and that of anyone who witnesses that act of kindness. We can actually do physical therapy by being nice.
LB: How did the green festivals come about?
KD: I was really backed into it. During the dot com boom, non-profits were being pushed out of buildings in San Francisco, so five of us got together and decided to buy a building. I really wanted a ground floor green-mart, a green alternative to Wal-Mart. I was thinking if we had a building with offices above the ground floor retail, those offices could help promote the address and drive people to the retail. That’s what happens with the Green Festivals, the participants promote it and it’s free marketing. So the idea for green festival was an intermediate step to get ready for the building. We figured if we can’t do a weekend event, how can we have a building centered around the green economy? So we created a temporary platform where the local green economy movement comes together at a conference and trade show. There are speakers, media and over 400 exhibits, too. We have live music, stuff for kids and workshops on hands-on stuff like solar and composting. There are also debates on tactical approaches, like whether we can buy our way out of environmental destruction.
LB: This year you were in Chicago, my home town, for the first time. What was the reception like?
KD: It was amazing. 31,000 people came. Mayor Daley came and got a standing ovation. He said it was the most diverse environmental event he has ever attended. In San Francisco, we expanded to 3 days and it has gotten so huge that we are renting the building next door. We had 36,000 people last year and expect around 40,000 next year. If we could get a bigger venue, we could double the size of the event. We really need to be at the Moscone Center, but so far, we can’t rent it because it’s a local event and nobody stays at hotels and the bond for the center is paid with a hotel tax so they won’t rent it to us.
LB: What can we look for with the Green Festivals next year?
KD: We are going to Seattle in April and we are working on a building in Second Life. We want to develop a global citizen center in Second Life to test our ideas and architectural strategies. We have it built but it’s not open to the public yet. It’s like a 3-D eco-mall. The avatars can walk around and see the products in 3-D, we can show movies, it’s like an online mall, but it’s not a bunch of separate websites, we are all in the same building.
LB: What is next for Global Exchange?
KD: One of the things we are talking about is the idea of launching a global campaign to unite the peace and green movement to advocate converting the 700 plus American military bases outside of the U.S. into eco-development centers. If we want people to like us and not hate us, we would do much better doing Permaculture training, organic agricultural training, green economy showcases. As of now, those bases are just targets for terrorism and don’t contribute to the security of the U.S. They went up during the cold war, but they are no longer needed to fight the Soviets.
LB: Your wife (Code Pink Founder Medea Benjamin) is also a well known activist. I imagine you have some pretty intense conversations. How do you keep from getting activist burn out in your household?
KD: Political activism is not a burden, it’s liberation. When we get bummed out about the latest bombing in Iraq, we need to channel positive energy into doing something about it. We’re constantly reading and studying about this stuff and just have to channel the energy in a positive direction. Activists are the social immune system. We take in toxicity and transform it into positive energy. It’s like Lincoln’s quote about turning an enemy into a friend. We have to redefine the negative energy. The destruction of the environment is also pushing capital into the green economy because companies can make profits healing the environment. The two greens, money and environment, coincide. We can bring the whole green economy into one location and people will love it.
As far as at home, the key ingredient for us is love and passion. If there is passion in the relationship, then all of the tactical disagreements around things like when to do an event and where and that kind of stuff are really just technical details. We were lucky. We had one date in 1984 and then moved in together. We really knew right away. And it’s better now than it was then. We have a simple rule; if we get in a fight, we get naked. You can’t really fight when you’re naked. We don’t hold back when we’re having an argument, we get it out. But we don’t call names or make over arching statements, we keep it clean and respectful, but we get it out. Maybe at the end we still disagree. And if we do, then we get naked.
The truth is that no matter what the question, love is the answer. Ghandi, Martin Luther King, they knew this. My favorite Dr. King quote is ‘what will win in the end is unarmed truth and unconditional love’.
