Lying to Ourselves: Lorna Salzman (#108)
Lorna Salzman has the chops to be an outspoken critic of many in the modern environmental movement. She played a key role in the early days of Friends of the Earth alongside David Brower (the first executive director of the Sierra Club), beginning a 40-year career as an environmental activist, writer, lecturer and organizer. A contender for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2004, Salzman is an iconoclast in every sense of the word.
In this interview we hear Lorna Salzman’s thoughts about climate change, consumerism, cheap energy, economics, lawyers and politics. She discusses “what went wrong with the environmental movement,” plus irrationality, denial, and outright lies we tell ourselves, and each other. Salzman doesn’t mince words when she sees something that needs fixing, and that gave us plenty to talk about when I visited Lorna at her summer cottage in 2010.
More about Lorna Salzman:
Lorna Salzman is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences. In 2000 she received the International Earth Day Award from the Earth Society Foundation. A collection of her essays can be found in the book, Politics as if Evolution Mattered.
This is the eighth in our series of podcasts and radio programs. We post a new podcast episode every Thursday. Be sure to subscribe! You can find us at iTunes, SoundCloud and Stitcher, or sign up to get an email every Thursday with the newest episode. If you like what you hear, please support this project with a tax-deductible donation. Your comments are invited below. Has the environmental movement gotten off track? What do you think?
