On Courage . . . and Wrestling with Moral Codes

2006
Martin Melaver, CEO

In a compelling sidebar in his book An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore tells the story of his older sister Nancy. The pictures accompanying the vignette tell pretty much the whole story: a beautiful, independent spirited young girl who nurtures her younger brother, eventually dying of lung cancer. The irony is particularly poignant since the Gore fortune in part was built upon the cultivating and selling of tobacco. Gore makes the following comment around this irony:

"I also wish my family had extricated itself from growing tobacco sooner than it did after Nancy’s illness. Truthfully, we all were numb during the onslaught of the cancer and then our attention was focused on getting her well. The implications of continuing to grow a crop on my father’s farm that helped produce the cigarettes that had caused her fatal disease seemed a little abstract and a little remote at that point – in the same way that global warming seems remote to many right now. But conversations about shutting down tobacco growing on our farm had begun when she first got sick and not long after her death, my father decided he would stop growing tobacco altogether."

I wish Gore had taken more time to explore the dilemma and the decision-making process behind ceasing the growing of tobacco. Because in the story not told is a process of wrestling with two moral codes – one having to do with looking after the welfare of a family, the other having to do with addressing welfare on a more macro level – that I think goes to the very heart of creating a global sustainable land ethic.

My colleagues at work run up against this challenge of moral codes quite often: There’s the dilemma of our city leaders, trying hard to be fiscally conservative, wrestling with whether or not to institute a local recycling program; There’s the dilemma of a hospital CEO, or the head of an Economic Development Authority, or the headmaster of a school, all trying to determine whether to build new buildings as they have always been built – with fiscal attention to first-costs only – or to take a life-cycle approach and build them more sustainably; There’s even the head of a prestigious environmental organization, debating whether it should stay within its well-established brand and state-wide program offerings, or venture out into the larger issues facing the globe, such as energy and global warming.

Joseph Badaracco, eloqently addresses this dynamic in a recent book entitled Questions of Character, drawing on Chinua Achebe’s novel about an Ibo chief who’s leadership slowly diminshes as his own rigid moral code clashes with the new realities of his communal tribe, For Badaracco, a leader’s moral code must not only have deep, personal emotional roots, but those roots must be supple enough to adapt and grow as one’s social group evolves. A moral code has to be “more than a set of firm, personal convictions,” but “requires an ongoing, open engagement with the moral and practical life that surrounds a leader.”

Some of the people I most admire illustrate just such an open engagement. Ray Anderson and his story of facing up to his company’s lack of any environmental policy is one such example. Paul Hawken, confronting his company’s unsustainable ways at the very moment he was receiving the Environmental Stewardship Award by the Council on Economic Priorities, is another. And there are also many other stories writ small, like the efforts of bird breeder Carl Jones to nurture the last pair of kestrel hawks, found on Mauritius into a small colony of several hundred pairs. We need not only many more of such personal metamorphoses, but a charting out of the process by which this transition takes place, as well as a certain assurance that yes, indeed, this type of moral wrestling will keep us all OK. The road, as it were, from Gore’s personal narrative of his sister Nancy and the Gore tobacco farm, to changing our consumption patterns to revert global warming, goes directly through a story both critical and untold.

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