Tellus Institute
These pages have recounted facets of my youthful experience as a red diaper baby, student radical, folk musician, theoretical physicist, and interdisciplinary educator. I wouldn’t trade these eventful years for the world, but they led me at age 33 to a professional impasse. Thoughts of turning back to a conventional academic life left me feeling defeated and depressed. But an alternative career direction that somehow combined my research proficiency, leadership skills, and social commitment was nowhere in sight. Then, such a path unexpectedly opened, and I didn’t look back.
The phone was ringing as I approached the house, the aforementioned colonial gem Pamela and I rented when I joined the faculty at SUNY Albany. I was returning from a trek around our sprawling acres of woods and farmland accompanied by our sprightly Puli. As Maggie scampered about, chasing creatures springing to life on that June morning in 1975, I was ruminating about my future. I was eager for reinvention, yet as my family’s breadwinner, I needed a job.
The dilemma weighed on me as I hurried inside to answer the phone. Rich Rosen, an acquaintance from graduate school days, was on the line hurling an idea out of deep left field. Back in 1969, Rich, a brash fellow physicist, and I had formed the NYC chapter of Science for the People. In that vein, he was now proposing that we create an independent research organization on resource and environmental policy. Skeptical but intrigued, I responded, “That’s the best fantasy I’ve heard in a long time.”
In the following weeks, the fantasy stuck with me, gradually morphing from ephemera to concrete business proposition. While I mulled it over, Rich accepted a position at Brookhaven National Laboratory doing energy systems research, a post that would later yield contracts that helped get us off the ground. Feeling stranded in Albany with another year of teaching ahead, I approached three Allen Center colleagues about joining our endeavor. Remarkably, they all jumped at the opportunity.
When Steve Bernow signed on to the venture, my confidence and enthusiasm soared. Steve and I had bonded on the very day I arrived at the Columbia physics department in 1964. The conversation we started that day went on for nearly 40 years, cut short when he succumbed to sepsis in an ill-equipped clinic in Croatia in 2003. Steve was an insatiable bon vivant and broad-spectrum intellectual who shared my passions for adventure, philosophy, politics, and foundations of physics. We were soulmates who studied, played, wrote, and campaigned together. I had brought Steve, an exemplary interdisciplinary scholar, to the Allen Center, and now we would again be comrades on a new undertaking.
John Stutz, a razor-sharp PhD mathematician from Princeton, also enlisted. In contrast to Steve, a freewheeling personality and big thinker, John was introverted and laser-focused on details. With one grasping the forest and the other the trees, they were an odd but complementary couple. But John’s obsession with order in the daylight hours gave way to anarchic nights hitting the bottle. The blackout drinking endangered both him and our nascent enterprise, so we intervened, making drying out a condition for remaining on our team. He joined AA and, after a few failed attempts, stayed sober for good.
Dave Nichols, a political scientist, brought a background in public policy and governmental processes into the mix. Lacking the technical chops of the rest of us, he concentrated on nuts-and-bolts legal, financial, and administrative aspects of our fledgling institute. Still, Dave remained a fish out of water in an organization that built its reputation on quantitative analyses and complex modeling. He made a valiant effort to find a niche, even applying our models to regulatory cases around the country. But feeling marginal seemed to magnify his rebelliousness and contrarianism. I found Dave’s idiosyncrasies to be mostly charming, albeit irritating at times, but for John they were grounds for justifiable homicide, and the feeling was mutual.
Still, we brought formidable resources—distinguished PhDs, analytic firepower, zealous commitment, esprit de corps—to the table. Also, Rich’s colossal self-confidence and take-no-prisoners pugnacity were critical assets initially (but later caused nonstop interpersonal conflict and staff discontent). These assets notwithstanding, our venture might have fallen flat, as predicted by our cheerless skeptics, without the essential ingredient of success: truckloads of luck. At a time when environmental awareness was rising and conventional wisdom was tanking, the stage was set for the arrival of a plucky group peddling innovative, rigorous policy analysis.
Following an intensive year of planning and preparation, Energy Systems Research Group (the original name of the Tellus institute) opened for business in September 1976. From our squalid ESRG office on State Street in downtown Albany, we developed project ideas, wrote proposals, and networked with scores of regulators, donors, and NGOs. For six dry months, we harvested nibbles but no hard cash. Several of us took day jobs to cover business costs and put food on the table; I took a half-time professorship at SUNY’s Empire State College. Our comradery sustained hope during that long, dispiriting winter, but just barely. A panicky Dave Nichols tried to persuade us, for our own good, to face reality and abandon an impossible dream. His heart was in the right place, but his timing was awful. A few days later, the dam broke.
We won our first contracts in March 1977. The initial trickle soon became a swelling stream of projects—3,500 over the next forty years. In those first hectic months, we rapidly staffed up with research assistants and administrators, and added a couple of senior researchers who were looking for a simpatico home for their funded projects. We relocated the expanding team to a more business-like office suite directly across the street from our shabby inaugural digs.
ESRG’s ballooning portfolio of projects addressed key issues of the day such as electric utility planning, new energy strategies, and environmental degradation. Our early slate of funding sources included state agencies throughout the country, the US EPA and Energy Department, NGOs, and foundations. Notably, our ascent in the world of energy and environment in the late 1970s coincided with the descent of nuclear power. Massive cost overruns and alarming safety concerns refuted the old hype that nukes were too-cheap-to-meter and risk-free. Skeptical regulators and protest groups needed independent studies that challenged industry whitewash, which gave ESRG a steady meal ticket. We were not anti-nuke, per se; we just never met one we liked.
In April 1977, I led a project challenging the need for the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island, the opening chapter in a twelve-year drama that culminated in a Brooklyn Courthouse (more on the Shoreham saga later). To make the case, we built a detailed model for forecasting electricity demand. The New York State Consumer Protection Board, impressed by the analysis, gave us a big contract to enhance the model and apply it to the whole state. Called FACE (Forecasting and Conservation Evaluation), the model painted a granular picture of electricity demand far more sophisticated than the industry standard. It became a bread-and-butter tool applied in scores of jurisdictions throughout the country.
In the spring of 1978 with ESRG flourishing, most of us were eager to pull up stakes and move the operation to a more compatible town. We founders were accidental Albanians brought there in our previous lives as academic nomads. Beyond our own lifestyle preferences, there was a strong business case for relocating ESRG to a cosmopolis offering an international airport, good networking opportunities, and deeper human resource pools for staff recruitment and collaboration.
Time to move, but where? Initially, New York City was the leading candidate, not least due to the loyal Gothamite Steve Bernow demanding the right to return. However, the calculus shifted abruptly when Pamela, all this time a graduate student in clinical psychology, landed an internship in Boston. So, in June 1978, staff and family, warm on Boston and cool on Albany, gleefully moved en masse to Beantown.
ESRG occupied the third floor at 120 Milk Street in downtown Boston. The address prompted our utility industry nemeses to dub us “The Milk Street Boys,” an epithet we wore proudly. As the projects rolled in with ever larger budgets, we expanded onto three more floors. In 1987, having outgrown the Milk Street building, we leased a huge penthouse space at 9 Broad Street with drop-dead views of the harbor and city where the staff swelled to 85. In 1992, we bought a beautiful double brownstone on Arlington Street in Boston’s Back Bay, directly across from the enchanting Public Garden. The elegant Old Boston digs were a perfect home for the institute for the next twenty-five years, and also a very smart, if inadvertent, investment.
As ESRG expanded and diversified, we evolved an internal structure built around semiautonomous thematic groups (“nonprofit centers”) and programs within these groups. The foci included water, climate, waste reduction, corporate responsibility, and our old standby, energy and the environment. We conducted policy studies on these topics throughout North America and every continent, wrote many papers and a few books, and gave talks at conferences and public forums.
I had two big jobs. Wearing my CEO hat, I was responsible for the design and implementation of our evolving organizational architecture, internal decision-making processes, and administrative systems. Wearing my research hat, I served as Director of our International Group, which conducted studies in scores of countries (I describe five colorful projects in the next section). Throughout the 1980s, my group worked closely with the Beijer Institute, a Swedish organization with a similar mandate. My connection to Beijer had come through Don Shakow, a brilliant Marxist economist at Clark University, who sought us out when we arrived in Boston. Don introduced me to his radical, globe-trotting colleague Phil O’Keefe, who would be leading a forthcoming multiyear Beijer project in Kenya.
Phil invited me to join him at a 1980 conference outside of Addis Ababa on Ethiopia’s energy future, where I would meet the charismatic Beijer Director, Gordon Goodman. A rotund Welchman, Gordon could light up rooms with scintillating wit and, as he might have put it, sing the birds out of the trees with spellbinding eloquence. I was instantly drawn to this scientist-poet and he to me, forming a professional and personal bond that would last until his death at 82 in 2008.
The venue of the conference was an isolated hotel 100 km northeast of Addis. The attendees were officials of the Ethiopian government, scientists from international think tanks, and representatives of Swedish, German, and Dutch aid agencies. We were escorted onto a bus that passed ancient marketplaces, sprawling shanty towns, and enormous posters of Marx, Engels, and Lenin erected following the recent overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie. Several hours later, we arrived at the hotel situated in a barren landscape pockmarked by deep gullies that had been deforested by desperate peasants and urban charcoal vendors. Incongruously, in that arid terrain, the internal courtyard was dominated by a swimming pool, where late that night inebriated Beijer colleagues marched fully clothed into the deep end. Later, awakened by cackling hyenas, I looked down from the balcony of my room at a phalanx of Ethiopian soldiers pointing their guns into the darkness where hostile Eritrean forces lurked.
My collaboration with Beijer began with Phil’s Kenya Fuelwood Project (described below) and continued for a decade in countries throughout Africa. ESRG was formally anointed a Beijer Institute Center, opening the floodgates of Swedish kronor. With Gordon and Phil as guides, I was learning how to build an international operation and gaining the nerve to pitch grandiose projects. In the process, I established solid connections with research institutes, UN bodies, and funding agencies. My outbound journey had reached the edge of the earth in the company of these global visionaries.
By 1990, ESRG had outgrown its name in two different ways. First, as the organization diversified, “energy systems,” the initial focus, had become one of several project themes. Second, “research group,” a phrase fit for a backroom consultancy, jarred with our new self-understanding that we had become a sustainability institute engaged in shaping the global future. In search of a new moniker, we held a naming contest, offering $100 to the winning submission but the prize money elicited only a handful of unsatisfactory suggestions (“Lorax Institute” was a favorite among younger
staff). But upping the reward to $1,000 in a second round triggered a flood of creative ideas. Following a remarkably passionate debate, ESRG was rechristened the Tellus Institute, a name that invoked the Roman earth goddess. Despite the appearance of nepotism, the prize money went fair and square to the highly literate Pamela Raskin.
In this period, Sweden, the “conscience of the world,” resolved to create a major international institute on environmental stewardship. The government’s visionary spirit was laudatory, but its initial mandate for the new body— technological assessment—was woefully narrow. Gordon Goodman went into action hoping to persuade Swedish higher-ups to charge the new institute with a far more ambitious remit. A truly consequential institute, we argued in a draft counterproposal, would link environmental issues to economic institutions, governance structures, and cultural values—akin to what we at the Beijer Institute were already doing.
Ultimately, the entire Beijer Institute was rebranded as the new Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and, with Gordon as Director, granted a lavish budget. For the next 17 years, the Tellus Institute’s International Group had a second identity as SEI-Boston. The affiliation brought my group a generous piece of SEI’s core funding and, as pseudo-Swedes, frictionless access to international sponsors and projects. The SEI connection provided me with a high-profile springboard to blue-ribbon panels, keynote addresses, and cutting-edge global change research. In the hectic 1990s, my team and I became known players on an international stage.
In 2001, Tellus marked its twenty-fifth anniversary with an organization-wide reflection on our hectic first quarter-century. We founders looked back with astonishment that the vague vision of 1976 had bred a respected institute with thousands of studies under its belt. Tellus had conducted projects in fifty states and fifty countries at enterprise, community, national, and global levels. Our sponsors included governments, foundations, the UN, NGOs, and a few big companies that backed our corporate responsibility work (we once had contracts with both Greenpeace and General Motors!).
These ruminations culminated in the publication of an anniversary volume, Halfway to the Future. The preface set the context: “The story of Tellus has unfolded in the context of staggering changes around it…The forces that are radically reshaping the world have also enlarged our vision…With the strong wind of global change at our backs, we come to the conviction that a major new era of world history has begun to take shape over recent decades.”
A new era of Tellus was beginning to take shape, as well. The most rewarding and consequential chapter of the story was still to come. Before telling it, here are five snapshots of noteworthy projects of mine, each with a dramatic denouement.
In the Sixties, my mere presence on campus seemed to spark revolt. When I appeared, Berkeley became the vanguard of the student movement—“Caltech dodged a bullet when I went elsewhere” was my old punchline. When I moved East for graduate school, sleepy Columbia metamorphosed into the epitome of militancy, and when I joined the faculty, City College of New York erupted. Curiously, the pattern continued in my post-academic adventures, as illustrated by my proximity to uprisings in the following cases.
Coup in Kenya
My first project in Africa—the Kenya Fuelwood Project (1980-1982)—was a blockbuster. Phil O’Keefe, the aforementioned dazzling raconteur and life-long friend, led the pathbreaking study of Kenya’s energy future. The core project team set up shop in a sprawling house on the outskirts of Nairobi (Kuni Castle). The place served as dormitory, office, and base camp for excursions throughout the country to gather data on energy demand and supply patterns, land cover, and deforestation. My job was to paint a coherent picture from this massive database as a point of departure for projecting trends and analyzing alternative policy scenarios. For that purpose, I created a flexible and detailed computer tool which I called the Long-range Energy and Planning System (LEAP has since been used by planners in 160 countries).
The project was to culminate in a conference planned for August 10-12, 1982, in Nairobi, where we would present our findings to Kenyan decision-makers and stakeholders, funders, and international experts. The President of Kenya, His Honourable Daniel arap Moi, would be opening the conference with a welcoming address. But on August 1, as senior project staff were at work in Boston finalizing our presentation, an urgent Telex arrived with the news that elements of the Kenya Air Force were staging a coup d’etat against President Moi. The mutiny was quickly suppressed, but the August conference was canceled.
Employing his abundant powers of persuasion, Phil quickly got all parties to sign off on revised dates of November 10-12 for the conference. We celebrated at a nearby Boston eatery, where, as we toasted Phil for saving the project, his face froze in terror. In the chaos, he realized, he had forgotten that November 12 was his long-planned wedding date. Fortunately, his exasperated bride was accommodating, the conference was a success, and shortly thereafter, Phil and Di tied the knot (and lived eventfully ever after).
Fraticide in Grenada
A tragic drama played out on the small Caribbean island of Grenada from 1979 to 1983. In the opening act, the New Jewel Movement led by Maurice Bishop overthrew the dictatorial government of Sir Eric Gairy in a bloodless revolution. The NJM suspended the constitution and announced the formation of a socialist People’s Revolutionary Government with Bishop prime minister. He appointed his close comrade and childhood friend, Bernard Coard, as finance minister (Coard later became deputy prime minister). As the regime’s socialist program gained wide popular support, Grenada became a third-world beacon of hope.
In early 1983, Phil O’Keefe and I realized that, building on the Kenya experience, we had something to offer Grenada: an integrated energy strategy for the island highlighting renewable resources. We quickly wrote a proposal and pitched it to the Grenada desk of the Swedish aid agency. The Swedes enthusiastically ran it by Bishop, who gave the project his imprimatur.
Over the next nine months, my team collected data, fired up our LEAP model, and showed how sunny Grenada could build its energy future on solar, wind, and bioenergy. We found a renewable resource strategy to be highly advantageous compared to the conventional reliance on fossil fuels and centralized electricity generation. By radically reducing energy imports, the strategy would husband scarce foreign exchange, while sparing the environment, creating jobs, and driving development.
We submitted our final report—”Island Energy Study: The Case of Grenada”— in September 1983. We looked forward to presenting the results and discussing next steps at a meeting in the capital city, Saint George’s. But before a date could be set, our client was executed. Tensions had been building within the government with Bishop’s humanist block on one side and Coard’s doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist faction on the other. On October 19, Coard and his mutineers put Maurice Bishop, his pregnant wife, and six loyalists before a firing squad at Fort Rupert. The motives remain hazy for this darkest of days for Grenada and movements inspired by the NJM.
Six days later, the US invaded the island. Coard and his co-conspirators were arrested, and mainstream politicians installed. The island was back on its pre-revolutionary trajectory. Eventually, we published our study in a scholarly journal, then filed it under “what could have been.”
Rebellion on Long Island
In 1988, I appeared in Brooklyn Federal Court as a key witness in a multibillion-dollar RICO trial. The plaintiffs in the case, Suffolk County and Long Island citizens groups, charged the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) with years of fraudulent misrepresentations pertaining to the construction costs of the company’s nuclear power plants. I took the stand to explain to the jury how I knew back in 1977 that LILCO, to justify raising customer rates, had wildly exaggerated its need for the nukes.
The story begins in March 1977 when the New York Consumer Protection Board asked me to review a rate hike request LILCO had filed before the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC). The company needed the increased revenues, it claimed, to finance the completion of its Shoreham nuclear plant, already years behind schedule and billions over budget. But LILCO’s rates were already the highest in the nation and ratepayers were growing restive. My job was to take a fresh look at the need for Shoreham, and all the other plants still on the company’s drawing board.
My review revealed a glaring fallacy in the company’s forecast of future generation requirements. Electricity demand on Long Island had shot up in the postwar years, driven by rapid suburbanization, a booming economy, and the explosion of electrical devices, such as large refrigerators, dryers, and office equipment. LILCO simply extrapolated the exponential growth in this period into the indefinite future. This is impossible in a finite world. As a reductio ad absurdum, I calculated that the weight of nuclear plants needed to meet exponential growth on Long Island would exceed the weight of the earth by 2040.
Having exposed the absurdity of extrapolating aggregate demand, the next step was to produce a more reliable forecast. To that end, I created a disaggregated “end-use” model for tracking the various components of electricity use. This detailed simulation robustly showed that total demand growth on Long Island would level off as anomalous post-war trends played out. Based on this analysis, I testified that Shoreham could and should be delayed, and, therefore, LILCO’s rate request should be denied. The argument was solid, but we lost the case when the industry-friendly PSC rubber stamped the rate hike. At least I had the satisfaction of watching Long Island electricity demand plummet in the following years in confirmation of my disregarded forecast and recommendations.
My Shoreham testimony got the attention of Tom Twomey, a founding partner of an established Long Island law firm (now Twomey Latham). At the time, Tom had been retained by a ratepayer group that was a party in another LILCO case before the PSC. In that one, the company was seeking approval to proceed with its next round of nuclear plants to be built near the village of Jamesport. Based on my just completed forecast showing the lack of need for Shoreham, I knew there was hardly any rush to break ground on more nukes. The Jamesport plants would not be needed for the foreseeable future. Working with Steve Latham, Tom’s young partner, I improved my demand forecasting model and submitted testimony in April 1977 explaining why Jamesport could be indefinitely delayed. I concluded that the company was imprudent (a legally laden word) in pursuing an unneeded project. LILCO fought back ferociously but offered no new evidence. Nevertheless, the biased PSC again approved the rate increase.
Flash forward from 1977 to 1988. In the intervening years, the anti-LILCO movement exploded. The Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents brought a life-and-death question to the fore: How would people escape a meltdown at Shoreham? LILCO’s emergency evacuation plan—residents would drive en masse toward New York City—was patently risible to anyone familiar with standstills on the Long Island Expressway during normal rush hours. In 1985, Hurricane Gloria overwhelmed LILCO’s response capacity, demolishing what remained of public confidence in the company.
Even Governor Mario Cuomo became an outspoken critic of the Shoreham project, and the state government subpoenaed the company’s back files seeking evidence of mismanagement. In a damning internal memo from 1977, LILCO’s CEO acknowledged that Raskin’s demand forecast was probably right, but the company’s external communications would continue to rely on its official forecast. When LILCO then stuffed monthly customer mailings with statements it knew to be inaccurate, it committed, in the view of plaintiffs, mail fraud under RICO.
Nearly a dozen years after I had testified that LILCO’s nuclear investments were “imprudent,” I took the witness stand to explain to a jury of ordinary citizens how I came to that conclusion in 1977. Looking back from the vantage point of 1988, it was crystal clear that I had been right, but my task was to show why the company should have known—or knew—what I knew. The technical arcana dumbfounded some of the jurors who stared at me with the blank faces of students in my physics classes.
But the jury got the gist of the argument and returned a verdict of guilty. Finally, we won a case—the big one. A settlement followed: New York State agreed to drop the huge RICO penalties and LILCO agreed to sell Shoreham to the state for $1. The plant was decontaminated and mothballed at great expense and left to stand idly on the North Shore, a monument to this day of hubristic folly.
Collapse of the USSR
From 1989 to 1991, I led a collaboration between the Tellus Institute and the Soviet Academy of Science on the Aral Sea, a disappearing saline lake in Central Asia. Once the fourth largest lake in the world by surface area, it had already shrunk by half at the time of the project. The desiccated Sea was the most visible manifestation of a massive human and environmental disaster unfolding across five Soviet republics: Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Kirgizstan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan.
The poster child of social-ecological breakdown, the region stands as a warning of the consequences of environmentally feckless development. Decades earlier, fateful planning decisions were made in Moscow that made high-input agriculture the foundation of Central Asian economic development. The emphasis on irrigated farming would seem counter-indicated in this barren region, but its two mighty rivers were a tempting source of water supply. The Amu Darya and the Syr Darya originate in the glaciers of mountain ranges to the east, run 600 miles across steppes and deserts, and discharge into the Aral Sea, providing the lake’s only input.
Soviet planners in the 1950s and 1960s knew that diverting river water for irrigation would sacrifice the Aral Sea, but thought it was worth it. According to their calculations, the economic benefits of the additional crops would exceed the economic costs of shrinking the sea. On that dubious basis, the government created vast irrigation fields and water distribution systems, including the 600-mile Karakum canal carrying water to far off deserts in Turkmenistan. Huge swaths of land were converted to crops, much for cotton monoculture and water-intensive rice cultivation.
Those old cost-benefit calculations were wildly, tragically erroneous. Estimates of economic costs, associated mainly with losses in the fishing industry, failed to consider the vast ecological disturbances triggered by the shrinking sea. The rosy planners even assumed that the former lakebed exposed by the receding shoreline would become arable land, registering the additional farmland as a benefit. Instead, the thousands of miles of new land became a hellscape of toxic chemicals. Windstorms carried the noxious residue across the region, impairing public health and salinizing the soil, which, in a vicious loop, required additional irrigation applications to flush the salt, thus accelerating the recession of the Sea.
When I attended a conference in Nukus, Uzbekistan, our hosts organized an air tour of the Aral Sea. We boarded a 1930s vintage canvass-winged biplane that cruised at an altitude of about 200 feet speed of 60 mph. We sat on crude benches observing the immense moonscape through an open door as fellow passengers lost their breakfast. We landed in Muynak, a former fishing town now 80 miles from the sea, where a huge vehicle drove us across the salt desert scattered with abandoned boats—a canal to the receding lake could not be built fast enough. Then we visited a cannery that once processed Aral Sea fish but was now operating with fish flown in from the Caspian Sea to preserve jobs in the doomed town.
Our study had the bold aim of formulating a strategy for reversing the desiccation of the Aral Sea. At the time, Moscow was considering a bizarre proposal: rerouting northern flowing Siberian rivers south to feed the Aral. The plan smacked of the mindset—ecologically insensitive technological gigantism—that had caused the problem in the first place. But in the 1980s, with the USSR roiled by Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, the river-reversing plan was met with popular resistance. It was this nascent environmental movement pushing for sustainable solutions that paved the way for our project.
We first modeled the region’s intertwined social, economic, hydrological, and environmental patterns. A Russian colleague and I traversed Moscow collecting data from government offices and research centers, and consulting with hydrologists, agronomists, engineers, and economists. Each told a part of the Aral story, but none had an integrated analysis. Hence, I built a computer tool called the Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) System, loaded it with a large database, and built a picture of what was going on in the region.
The model projected deepening calamity ahead if current trends were allowed to persist. I presented these initial findings at the Nukus conference before launching the project’s next phase: a comprehensive plan of action for saving the Aral and mitigating regional environmental and social degradation. At the strategic core of our scenario was action to restructure the regional economy to make it less water-intensive and reliant on irrigated agriculture. As an example, the development of a Central Asian textile industry would add value to the local economy rather than see cotton continue to be exported to the thriving textile industry in East Europe.
Alas, our visionary scenario exercise was aborted in August 1991 when the Soviet Union unraveled. My Soviet colleagues became personae non grata in the now openly rebellious Central Asian republics. In the pell-mell transition to independent countries, the Aral Sea problem was put on hold. When the political dust settled, coordinated action of the five contentious states became impossible, condemning the Sea to dwindle to the lifeless puddles you’ll find today. Our project and the vision of sustainability vanished in the toxic sands of time.
Intifada
We went on to apply the WEAP model in scores of water studies throughout the world. In a memorable project of 1999, we teamed up with Israeli and Palestinian experts to explore alternative schemes for equitably sharing water in that water-scarce region. Hope for a peaceful two-state solution was in the air, and water allocation to the two sides was among the vexing issues to be negotiated. Guaranteeing adequate Palestinian water rights is an essential element for a lasting peace. Since Palestinian per capita usage is far lower than Israeli’s (about one-fourth today), closing the gap without compromising the Israeli economy poses difficult challenges.
Our collaborative project aimed to open a solution-oriented dialogue among Palestinian and Israeli decision-makers. But first we had to build trust and consensus among scientific experts representing each side. Our integrated study looked at all resources and withdrawals, including the Jordan River shared by Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Syria. A major focus was the Mountain Aquifer, a vital water source lying under both Israel and the West Bank. The aquifer is replenished east of the Green Line, then gradually flows toward the Mediterranean, oblivious to political boundaries.
The role of my team was to fire up WEAP to replicate the current water supply and demand patterns, then simulate alternative scenarios devised by our mid-East colleagues. We succeeded in creating a baseline picture, a real accomplishment since the two sides contested the basic data. The next milestone was to be a weeklong workshop where Israeli and Palestinian government officials, academics, and stakeholders would play games together using WEAP to explore water futures. Such participatory exercises can help clarify the problem, challenge preconceptions, and promote mutual understanding.
The geopolitical and technical complexity of the analysis slowed our progress, but in the summer of 2000, we were ready to go. The international workshop was set for November 2-6 in Istanbul. It was not to be. Ariel Sharon entered the Temple Mount on September 28 with one thousand armed Israeli police. This audacious display sparked the Second Intifada, making continued collaboration among our team impossible. We suspended the project and postponed the conference, awaiting a more favorable political context. Still waiting.
From the start, Tellus had been attuned to emerging issues in a rapidly changing world. As an independent institute, we had the flexibility and inclination to redirect the organization’s program toward salient new challenges. In the early years, our projects focused on specific issues in specific places—an energy plan in Kenya, a water analysis in California, a nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, an environmental master plan in Beijing, a waste management scheme in New York City, and so on.
With time, a new suite of global problems gained prominence. Correspondingly, the Tellus work program enlarged to encompass such macro-issues as climate change, sustainability, alternative futures, and systemic transition, concepts that were not on the radar in 1976. We layered this global change research over our traditional activities, but we were becoming two institutes under one roof, one long-term and transformational, the other near-term and reformist.
To re-establish internal organizational coherence, Tellus transformed itself between 2003 and 2005. In announcing a new phase of the institute, we founders noted previous “vital moments of organizational renewal” that kept the Institute from becoming “either unviable or uninteresting, or both.” The incremental policy studies of the past would no longer be our priority. Going forward, we would seek projects that advanced a systemic transition to an ecological and equitable global civilization. In brief, Tellus would shift “from a Policy Reform institute to a Great Transition institute.”
To pursue this lofty mission, we needed to mobilize and focus the organization’s intellectual, administrative, and financial resources on cutting edge questions: the character of the historic crisis, the shape of the future, and efficacious forms of collective action. A leaner and meaner Tellus was relaunched in 2005 with the tagline for a Great Transition. Painfully, we eliminated long-thriving programs, declined new grants and contracts, and reduced our sprawling staff to a small core willing and able to contribute to the new mission. To departing staff, we bequeathed our clients, bread-and-butter programs, and golden geese computer models, thereby spinning off several new organizations that carried on our established lines of work. For the founders, the new Tellus was the fulfillment of our 1976 hope of creating a clear, strong voice for fundamental social change.