April Third Movement
Lenny Siegel
May 2009
What Is It That I Have Done?
or Palling Around with Generals
I started working at the Pacific Studies Center, an offshoot of the April Third Movement, during the Cambodia Strike in 1970. I have never fully left. I have been fortunate to be able to create a unique career that is consistent with both my ideals and ideology, but which leads me often to work with strange bedfellows.
I moved to Mountain View in 1972, and PSC followed a few years later. I served on the Mountain View Environmental Planning Commission in the late 70s, and I ran unsuccessfully for City Council three times. In Mountain View I organized a successful campaign to limit condominium conversions and two unsuccessful campaigns for rent control. I helped form the first incarnation of Mountain View Voices for Peace in 1991, and I did the same again in 2003. See www.mvvp.org.
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, PSC adjusted its focus to study a wide range of issues related to the emergence of Silicon Valley—former Stanford Provost Fred Terman’s Community of Technical Scholars—as a global economic and technological powerhouse. We continued our research on the globalization of manufacturing and military electronics, but we also looked at environmental and worker health issues in high-tech industry, electronic surveillance, domestic workplace pay and conditions, and the impact of new technologies on manufacturing and the flow of information. In 1977 we organized a conference and published a booklet, Silicon Valley: Paradise or Paradox? This work culminated in the 1986 publication of The High Cost of High Tech, which I authored with John Markoff.
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In the early 1990s, I was working on three major projects: Research on high-tech employers for unions considering an industry-wide organizing drive in Silicon Valley; a report on the FBI’s proposed new computer system for Computer Professional for Social Responsibility; and a national report on the Defense Department’s legacy of environmental contamination. The unions scaled back their organizing goals; the FBI project ended; but the environmental work became my new career.
I actually wrote my first article about electronics industry toxics in 1979. In the early 1980s, those of us who had been warning that high-tech wasn’t as clean as it looked gained instant credibility when it was discovered that virtually every major company in Silicon Valley was contaminating groundwater with toxic substances and wastes. I helped Ted Smith and others form the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, but I only was active at the sites in Mountain View.
In 1989, the Navy, U.S. EPA, and state regulatory agencies released for public comment a Federal Facilities Agreement, to govern the cleanup of our local military base, Moffett Naval Air Station. Ted and I submitted comments, and in 1990 the base commander invited us to serve on his Technical Review Committee, just as the Navy proposed the base for closure. Meanwhile, Ted recommended me to the National Toxics Campaign Fund to write a national report on military toxics, so I started building a network of activists from other military bases—they are all contaminated with toxics, unexploded ordnance, or both—and interviewing Pentagon officials.
As a result, in 1991 I was invited to join what later became known as the Federal Facilities Environmental Restoration Dialogue Committee, an official federal advisory committee with participation from federal agencies, states, environmental groups, and others. At my first meeting, I openly called for federal agencies to report on how they worked with the public, while privately I complained that the Moffett Agreement contained a three-year gap of inaction. Soon after I returned back home, the Navy and regulatory agencies announced a new plan, filling that gap with significant deliverables.
This was a turning point in my life. Faced with the facts, for the first time in my life I said something positive about the U.S. military. At the next Dialogue Committee meeting, the Defense Department chose Moffett Field as its public involvement case study, and I felt compelled to say that indeed public involvement had worked for us. In fact, I startled federal officials by reporting that I had “leaked” to the local press the fact that the Navy had responded positively to community pressure.
Moffett’s Technical Review Committee became the national Dialogue Committee’s model for constructive public involvement. By the mid-90s, federal agencies had established hundreds of such advisory boards. Eventually, the concept spread globally, with thousands of local advisory boards modeled after our Moffett Field experiment.
For me, the advisory board concept answered a dilemma that had challenged me since my early days in Stanford SDS: How does one implement participatory democracy when faced with complex, technical issues? I was fortunate to have found a niche where I could pursue my New Left ideals in addressing local, regional, and national environmental issues.
Still, on the “payroll” at Pacific Studies Center, I remained on a Movement pay scale. I supplemented my income first as an apartment manager, and then writing users’ manuals on contract with Apple Computer and other Silicon Valley businesses.
I was first able to earn a real, professional salary in 1994. In 1993, the San Francisco Urban Institute, a branch of San Francisco State University, created CAREER/PRO, a project designed to address the economic and environmental challenges of military base closure. Congresswoman Pelosi promised federal funding, and Michael Nolan, one of the film-making team who had produced Fathers and Sons, was the project leader. He first brought me in as a consultant, and in 1994, partially because of my Dialogue Committee contacts with the Pentagon environmental bureaucracy, I was hired as Executive Director. Full-time on the San Francisco State payroll, I still managed PSC as an archive and as an institutional safety-valve, to which I could return if necessary.
Though we created an award-winning environmental job-training partnership in San Francisco, I shifted CAREER/PRO from its original focus on worker training to promoting direct democratic oversight of cleanup and reuse. We eventually changed our name to the Center for Public Environmental Oversight, and in 2001 we moved the project from San Francisco State to the non-profit Tides Center. In 2005 we transferred CPEO again, to PSC. CPEO, primarily funded by U.S. EPA, but occasionally receiving funds from the Defense Department and other entities, remains my source of income. Though there are dry spells between grants, government funding allows me to remain a “professional activist.”
My work since then has been to conduct research on, lead workshops for, and provide technical assistance to communities across the country facing contamination from both federal facilities and private companies. Because base closures were the first major instance in which government agencies sought to match cleanup plans to future use, EPA officials brought me into their Brownfields program, the cleanup and revitalization of former industrial properties. Today much of my work focuses on vapor intrusion, the migration of toxic compounds such as TCE and PCE from the subsurface into homes, schools, and businesses. TCE was the chemical that involved me in environmental cleanup in the early 1980s, and when vapor intrusion literally rose to the surface in Mountain View in 2002, I quickly became an expert.
While remaining a local activist and national environmental advocate, I have developed a reputation for honesty and independence. Many people in the Defense Department and at private polluters, developers, their banks, and law firms consider me a constructive critic. They invite me to speak at their conferences. I have testified before several Congressional Committees. I have served on numerous government advisory committees.
As a member of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Unexploded Ordnance in the late 1990s, I worked with several retired generals. As a member, I was routinely subject to a security investigation. After our committee issued our report, with no need to view classified information, a fellow from the Defense Investigative Service came to PSC and asked me a few questions about my past. At last, I had the opportunity to answer the question: “Do you advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence?” He was not amused when I chose “force.”
Even though I never received a college degree, I have served on a series of committees of the National Academies of Sciences. In fact, in 2004 I visited the Newport Chemical Depot in Indiana as part of an NAS committee overseeing the dismantling of the nerve-gas production plant there. This is the plant that Bill Hewlett, on March 11, 1969, said no longer belonged to FMC.
Thus, though I remain a peace activist, I work closely with the military industrial complex. In my more flippant moods, I call it trying to get the Defense Department to produce weapons of mass destruction in an environmentally sensitive way. When the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz Pentagon sought to weaken environmental laws that they claimed interfered with training and flight operations, I spoke out against those proposals. But I also proposed, on the Internet, in Congressional testimony, and at Defense Department conferences, that the military and environmental activists unite against a common enemy, urban sprawl. More recently, working with people inside and associated with the Defense Department, I have called upon the U.S. military to take a leadership role in the fight against climate change.
Through all this, I have devoted a great deal of time and energy to my family. Jan and I started seeing each other during the Laos Invasion of 1971, and we got married in 1976. Our daughter, Misha, is a graduate student in Forensic Psychology in New York City. Our son, Abe, is a Whittier College graduate who is leading his Blues Band, the Voodoo Fix, on tour. (Voodoo Fix recordings are available from all the standard on-line music stores.)
After our May 1-3, 2009 reunion, the Stanford Daily quoted me accurately: “I don’t agree with those guys who said ‘look at us, we’re over the hill,’” Siegel said, minutes before delivering a lighthearted speech and briskly leading the pack of several dozen people to Building 10. “I’m at the top of my game.”
Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental OversightPresident, Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope Street
Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650.961.8918 or 650.969.1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
www.cpeo.org