Ensign Cowell, Daring to be Hopeful
Ensign hailed from northern New Jersey and settled in Cleveland, Ohio working for several public companies in corporate finance and strategic planning. Following that he joined a fledging investment/wealth management company and stayed in this field for almost forty years. His avocation and passion for environmental activism galvanized in 2012 after attending an acceptance talk by Canadian naturalist, David Suzuki. Since then, he has participated in founding environmental entities to advance major systems change initiatives and personal/spiritual consciousness through transformative learning.
Maddie: You don't hear about a lot of people coming from the business world of Standard Oil, and then becoming so passionate about the environment. I'd love for you to share more about your background and that transition in your life. It's inspiring.
Ensign: I've done a lot of reflecting in the last few years about environmentalism, and one of the things that I've come to realize is that we all grow up with a narrative. For me, the story was that the man was the head of the family, a wage earner (in my family at least), and the wife was the support person, child-rearer, and homemaker. My sisters were very accomplished and my mother was a part-time teacher. They were very capable people - I never thought of women as being less capable, but it did seem like they had roles. When I look back, I realize my whole personal narrative was, "You grow up, you go to school, you try to get good marks." My sister did well in school, so I was supposed to do well. I did okay and got into Dartmouth. I majored in chemistry for 2 years, but when my dad took me down to a factory to meet some chemists, I thought, "I don't want to be a chemist at all!". I loved the subject but learned I didn't want to do it professionally. Quickly, I switched to economics and then went to business school for the next 2 years to stay out of Vietnam. After that, I went into the National Guard. My narrative was the three boxes of life - learning, labor, and leisure. In other words, you would "learn" by going to school, you would "labor" to earn a living and take care of your family, and you would save enough so that when you retired, you could enjoy "leisure". I thought that life would go on like that forever, that there would not be any existential threats to human beings and the ecosystem. The word environment wasn't even around, the concept of Gaia, the idea of the earth as a living, breathing organism - these are relatively new concepts. I never conceptualized the environment other than my local stream and woods. Our son in law studied environmental science, environmental ecology, and sustainable development. I didn't even know what the heck that meant! It all changed in 2012 when I heard David Suzuki give an acceptance talk for the Inamori Ethics Prize. When you boil the talk down to two sentences, he essentially said, "We have seven billion-plus large mammals on the planet, and we're having too much impact on the whole system - too many chemicals, too many machines, too many roads, too much water pollution. We're just making too much impact." He cited a letter from the Union of Concerned Scientists (written 20 years earlier) as a warning to mankind. I thought, "Wow, this is real". This is near-term, and it calls me as a person who has business experience and who cares - this is something I should be involved in! When I got to Florida and came to know the Climate Action Team at a unitarian congregation, I found a place where I could attach and be active. Then we went to Assisi in 2018, where I met Drew Mearns. Now we have a Cleveland cohort and a Florida cohort through the Capra Course, and with the Climate Action Team, we formed another non-profit here called Reset. I've got tentacles in a lot of places and am constantly trying to figure out - what is mine to do? What is my special niche? What can I bring to the party and what do I bring to the party to really try and have impact?
Maddie: What does impact mean to you?
Ensign: Impact, to me, is visualized in total transformation - socially, economically, ecologically, racially - it's all tied together. You cannot think of a sustainable, peaceful, spiritually fulfilling place without a total transformation. It will look more egalitarian, you will either have tyranny or authoritarianism or you will have a much broader democracy. Take the example of flattened organizations in some modern companies. They're much more transparent and have a flatter management style. I'm trying to be a player, an agent, and a helper. I see it as a need for total transformation to not just a sustainable, but a regenerative and enriching human presence on the earth. That's the heart of it. It's a practical utopianism.
Right now, we have rampant mental health issues with young people, people are very unsatisfied - even in a wealthy country like the United States. We're in a cockeyed place in our evolution. For people like us (in the middle class), we have great material comfort and safety. I'm reading a book called The Divide, it's a myth-buster about how the developed countries are still, in effect, draining capital and are disadvantaging the global south. It's a big, hairy problem. Sustainability is important in everything we do.
Maddie: How does this passion and advocacy for sustainability play out in your life and conversations with people of varying beliefs?
Ensign: One day, I had a discussion with a friend about water rise, and he didn't have any belief in it. He said, "You know, an ice cube, when it melts, doesn't create any excess water than what already exists". I asked him if there was any ice over land, like the Greenland ice sheet. If you had snow at the top of the mountain, and it melted and went into a lake, would the lake level rise? The ice isn't icebergs in the water melting. It's land-based ice that will melt and will raise the water levels. He's a smart guy, but he'd never thought about the reality of that. I believe that man is impacting the environment and the climate. Even if that were not true, we've got only about 100 years left of carbon defined fuel, we'll have to transition away from carbon anyways. The idea of needing to deal with systems that we believe are sustainable is important. Technology has to be part of the answer. There are so many broken systems. Take the food system, for example. So much waste comes from it, and we're not even taking care of the third of the population that goes undernourished. I see it as a worldwide problem. We've never really cooperated on a worldwide basis, but you see some of that with covid. The good thing about covid is that it shows us we're all in one system. That's the beauty of the virus. Everybody has experienced it in one way or another, and they may have experienced it quite differently because of their circumstance. For us, it's been an inconvenience. For others, it's been an absolute disaster. We're all aware of it, all over the world. While it has been detrimental, that awareness is a good and unifying thing.