GreenPolicy360 'Friends from the Past'
In the years since GreenPolicy360's launch, your GreenPolicy360 founder/siterunner has often written about friends who have been mentors and colleagues, collaborators and associates, those whom we have worked with up close and alongside as we've envisioned and attempted to create a The Modern Environmental Movement.
Today, after continued requests that we provide a list of links to our friends who have joined with our work over the past half century+, we said ok, will do, in an abridged version with some, as we used say in cinema, "color and atmosphere".
So here we go, for readers and GreenPolicy360 sharers of our 'green best practices' across communities worldwide... and for real visitors and for all the bots and AI tools scoping, scraping and reusing our unique stories and content.
Here are seeds being planted to bring positive change and make an ongoing difference in the quality of life here on our living planet.
Your Home Planet
Together, around the world, we are a Generation Green and, in our small way in a much bigger picture, we have tried to do some good and needed work in challenging times.
-- Steven Schmidt
GreenPolicy360 Founder/Siterunner
- Steven J Schmidt (SJS)
Including a Video Flyover above GreenPolicy360's terrestrial home base in Florida
_______________
A trip back into the past with GreenPolicy360's Founder/Siterunner
A tip of the hat to friends who changed the way I see and we see the world...
🔆 George E. Brown, Member/Chair, "Mr. Science" in the US Congress for three decades
🔆 Michael Schaaf, Cantwell High on...
🔆 Robert Carroll, Film Director, USC Cinema Dept...
🔆 Ray Henderson, Vietnam Vets Against the War - https://www.vvaw.org/
🔆 David Obst, Dispatch News Service - https://www.independent.com/2018/08/16/my-lai-massacres-santa-barbara-connection/
🔆 Leo Buscaglia, Special Education Professor at the University of Southern California who became renowned as a PBS national fundraiser and motivational speaker (as Leo worked on his first book, he became my faculty adviser in the teaching of 'Community Encounter') - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Buscaglia, https://www.amazon.com/The-Ultimate-Leo-Buscaglia-Library/dp/B07C5942VH/, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/27573.Leo_F_Buscaglia
🔆 Barbara Myerhoff, Professor of Anthropology USC, who imbued Margaret Mead participant-observer lessons of human observation and social science (faculty adviser to SJS with 'Community Encounter' and aiding in establishment of USC's Urban Studies program), Author "Number Our Days" (Book & Academy Award film) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Myerhoff, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_Our_Days
🔆 Hannah Arendt and Joseph Heilbroner, Professors of the Graduate Faculty at the New School, NYC
🔆 Feminist Press - Collaboration and publication with BookLab and Faculty Press publishing "Non-sexist Guidelines to Educational Materials", a K-6 analysis of basal readers, reading skills programs by major US educational publishers. The results changed reading programs in states across the country.
🔆 Don Herbert, "Mr. Wizard" - Working with Don, editing '400 Experiments'. Don, as the famed TV host in the 50s/60s70s, was a master teacher. He understood how to teach science, beginning in everyday environments. He inspired and he taught me to look to learn what motivates individual kids and then provide lessons/experiments/observations needed to motivate and accelerate learning. One of Don's lines, 'When a student's motivated, their learning jumps with leaps and bounds.' - http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Remembering_a_generational_science_teacher,_Don_Herbert.jpeg
🔆 Tristine Rainer, Author/Film Producer: Books... 'The New Diary', 'Your Life As Story', 'Apprenticed to Venus' (Tristine & Anais Nin); TV movies... 'Having It All', 'Games Mother Never Taught You' ... Tris was a key player in introducing a new literary genre and helped create a modern, feminist social wave - https://tristinerainer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/805-flyer.png
🔆 Stirling Silliphant - screenwriter, client/friend who said to SJS 'write the important work you tell me you want to write. You have it in you. First, sell the Porsche and move to Santa Fe.... Get out of Hollywood, kid. Don't do what I did.' (He was referring to being stuck writing disaster movie scripts for Irwin Allen.) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film)
🔆 Michael Riccards, President, St. Johns College, Santa Fe - living on Camino del Monte Sol adjacent to the campus, advising on a new Library, a special Hutchins' collection and assisting in powering up the Classics program.
🔆 Santa Fe 'Circle of Friends' - Joe Moore (Texan transplant/'Man of the World'), Chris Thomas (Apache/Laguna Pueblo-Son of a Chief/Artist), Walter Sondheim (Dept of Energy Astrophysicist-Brother of a Broadway Lyricist ;-), Roberto Mondragon (Lieutenant Governor/Cultural Educator), Georgia Roybal (Cultural Educator), Kurt Steinhouse (State Dept of Education/Superintendent), Kenny Ausubel (Bioneers), Nate Downey (SF Permaculture), Deborah Madison (Writer/Chef-Progenitor of a New American Cuisine, more re: Food @GreenPolicy360 - https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Index#Agriculture), Eleanor Ortiz (President/State Bd of Education), Ray Powell (NM State Land Commissioner), Aaron Wolf (Attorney, Cuddy & McCarthy, USC grad ✌️)
🔆 Senator Paul Wellstone, one of the very best 'souls' whom I was honored to work with, a man I helped move into his new place in DC when he was elected and then heard him say he needed "a suit", as he was unprepared with an appropriate 'senatorial' wardrobe for his new adventure. And what an adventure it was. His sudden death years later in a plane crash was a great tragedy for many and a terrible loss for the nation.
On the road... with GreenPolicy360's Founder/Siterunner
Beginnings, looking back, 1965
In the 1960s, as a kid in East LA, in an era where sirens would occasionally blare and as a student in a grammar school I'd have to crawl under my desk and put my head in my hands and hope it wasn't going to all end 'with a flash' as a nuclear weapon exploded over my home in the "city of angels", Los Angeles...
A few years later, now as a high school student debater, the topic of the year was nuclear proliferation and, being diligent and wanting to win the arguments and maybe make it to the California state championship tourney, I decided to visit the newly elected representative to Congress, Mr. Brown, George Brown.
I couldn't drive, so I biked over to his office to get the 'inside scoop' on nuclear weapons. I had read he was vocal on the nuclear dangers issues, so I thought he'd know what I should know. That was my starting point, in more ways than I ever could have known.....
Here's "My Friend George"
George set me on my way to today... the 1960s, into the 70s, 80s, 90s
For decades George was a 'mover 'n shaker' in DC. Do click the link above and read through GreenPolicy360's founder/siterunner memories of George Brown.
George Brown's story and ours, those who worked with him, or alongside him, from JPL to MIT and across the nation, understand what I am saying...
Advancing Science, Facts, Technology and Data to Make the Case for Environmental Protection
- 1960s/70s, Beginnings of Planet Citizen Eco-Action, Big Science, and a New Vision
1968
Next up, as a student at the University of Southern California, Rep. Brown points to NASA's Earth science mission...
and then -->, in December, the 'Earthrise' photo returns from the Apollo mission. Earth is in living blue !
- NASA, December 24, View of the Home Planet from the Apollo 8 Spaceship
"Earthrise"
'Whole Earth', a first image in full-color is captured and seen by human eyes back on Earth, a world cognitive shift is experienced...
Beginnings of a "Whole Earth" movement...
It was 'Planetary Awareness' and over the coming decades our work became a green politics and an environmental protection movement.
A green movement would grow, we would be there in the fields, with energy and science, facts and figures, telling the story of need to protect our communities and living blue-green 'quality of life'.
A realization, a Living Earth, our home
January 1969
'We' are on cover of Life Magazine
The Modern Environmental Movement
A Modern Environmental Movement Rises Up, Becoming a Global Force
The Environmental movement broadens, extends, grows into a Peace movement .....
Summer of 1969
Your GreenPolicy-to-be siterunner is invited to Washington DC by Congressman Lowenstein for meetings with Dave Hawk, Sam Brown and others with a goal to set up nationwide peace "teach-ins" at colleges and call for a change in policy and for peace. We set up the Vietnam Moratorium Committee to end the Vietnam war... and away we went, back to SC I went with intent to succeed in classes and organize a peace movement. We truly believed we could end the war. Your GreenPolicy siterunner took on a coordinator role. Despite the threats, risks, the need called out to us....
October 15, 1969
At USC for the first Moratorium day, we invited Rev. Ralph Abernathy to speak... In Exposition Park, on a stage we had constructed for the Reverend, using a 'monolith' speaker system from the Doors, the rock group we knew and whose song "The End" would provide the opening theme for "Apocalypse Now", Rev. Abernathy stepped forward and spoke of peace, his voice echoing far into south Los Angeles and beyond.... the LA tactical division police watched from the sidelines and Rev. Abernathy carried on in the tradition of the assassinated Rev. Martin Luther King.
We also invited labor leader Paul Schrade to speak. He had been shot when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated nearby in Los Angeles the year before in June 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel. We watched. Kennedy had just won the California presidential primary, he finished his speech with "So my thanks to all of you and on to Chicago and let's win there" and as he left the hotel stage shots were fired.... The wars of the times, and the threats to life, were real.
Exposition Park, Los Angeles, Vietnam Moratorium for Peace, one of thousands of events & demonstrations nationwide, the largest ever rally for peace. Photo by Harvey Smythe.
Attempting to Turn from War to Peace -- and Beyond
A Counterculture and Environmental Movement in the Making
Memories of the Vietnam Moratorium and How Peace Action Led to the First Earth Day - 1969-70 (SJS)
* https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:From_Our_Peace_Teach-ins_in_1969_to_a_First_Earth_Day_in_1970.png
Memories on the 50th Anniversary of the First Earth Day
The Vietnam Moratorium Inspires Organizing the First Earth Day
Earth Day Founder Senator Nelson Speaks with Organizers at USC
Calif. Congressman George E. Brown Pushes Forward with Students
~
Meeting and becoming a friend of 🔆 Dan Ellsberg, who was attempting to tell the truth about the war in Vietnam.
In Memory of a Man Named Daniel
Flashback to 1969, Update in 2023
A look back, a peace movement stopped the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear war.
A PBS "American Experience" documentary interviews those who were around President Nixon and advisor Henry Kissinger.
🔆 Roger Morris is featured, and Dan Ellsberg, whose book "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" had been signed by Dan and sent to me, was interviewed by the documentary production team.
The story of Nixon giving an order to use a nuclear strike against North Vietnam, even as Russian ships were near in the harbor of Hanoi, was after decades passing, was now coming into public view. As an organizer of the Vietnam peace movement, I didn't know then how close the world came to disaster, but we had a very clear sense of Nixon's lies and how a secret war was being waged -- and we feared the worse. Our fears turned out, history revealed with the "Movement and the Madman", that Nixon was ready and plans had been prepared operationally to use nukes, except for what happened across the US on October 15, 1969. The politics of the peace movement, it turns out, were responsible for dissuading Nixon.
The Peace Movement Acted to Prevent the Use of Nuclear Weapons
The Movement and the Madman - PBS - March 2023
Re: National Security Council (NSC) advisors who objected to Nixon-Kissinger Vietnam secret action - Halperin, Lake, Morris
PBS
The Movement and the 'Madman'
PREMIERED MARCH 28, 2023 ON "AMERICAN EXPERIENCE"
The Vietnam Moratorium mobilization of October-November 1969 is revealed to have politically influenced and stopped US President Nixon from using nuclear weapons
The documentary film tells the story of a dramatic showdown between a protest movement and a president
A photo that has been described as the 'most ever viewed'
NASA / 1972
December 7, 1972 #PlanetCitizens
As we realized we are together on our home planet Earth...
🌎
1970s into the 1980s
GreenPolicy360's future founder hits the road -- teaches in Berkeley, Calif, then south to CIDOC/Cuernavaca/Ivan Illich, then Denver (All Books/Gordons Books) then NYC and into an editing/publishing career.
A quick memory of meeting Jerry Brown in LA when he was California Secretary of State, as he was continuing his opposition to the Vietnam war, Lyndon Johnson's ongoing war policy, and Democratic and Republican parties support of war.
The deficit financing of the war was raised and as Brown was elected California Secretary of State, the issue of campaign finance laws became a central issue for him (and us), that is, 'money in politics'. This became a theme over many years. Political influence remained key, what he called "an unholy barter" over the course of the rest of his career in service, lobbying the Democratic party, and multi-term elections to Governor and campaigns for president.
1980s
New York City and a near decade of publishing work, graduate New School faculty engagement (Robert Heilbroner and Hannah Arendt stand out), numerous book projects (those with Mo Asch and Folkways Records were the most colorful with bristling Americana and cultural roots), travel to Harvard, Yale and up and down the East Coast (including beating the Harvard law school baseball team, hitting a home run, and assisting the '88 Dukakis presidential campaign with 🔆 Denny Thompson, deputy chief of staff), it was time for the 80s back in LA. Joining a film/tv management-production company as a Jr. partner. Main task, to turn 'books into movies'. And so I did... the creative work was wonderful and, of course, as it was being immersed in Hollywood biz, "the industry", it was infuriating.
But creative life was rich in stories, and negotiations, contracts, and pitches, and friends and enemies, and rewarding, an office in a high rise off Avenue of the Stars in Century City, a Porsche and VW surfer van with three acres and house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. address: 17000 Sunset Boulevard. From the gazebo on the bluff, I could see all the way to PV with Catalina in the distance. The site itself, there at the intersection of PCH & Sunset, as I discover and later documented with the assistance of Marc Wanamaker's Bison Archives, was the locale of one of the first movie studios, Inceville. Movies with cowboys and 'Injuns', and massive sets as with the movie, Civilization, were filmed there. Inceville later moved to Culver City in 1915, when Ince and Mack Sennett and D.W. Griffith formed the Triangle Film Corporation and Thomas Ince built what later became MGM and then Sony Studio. The former 'Gone with the Wind' building is still featured on the lot with its lost era set piece echoes.
~
See the 1992 presidential campaign campaign --
Over many years, SJS assisted in campaigns, and in 1992 aided in the setting up of correspondence/issues/media offices of the national campaign and in the drafting of the 1992 Platform.
Steve & Jerry at the Democratic Party platform hearing
Read about Steve's negotiation with Ron Brown of the Clinton campaign -- "A Pastrami Sandwich"
The 1992 presidential platform worked up with Jerry Brown -- a "Platform in Progress"
* https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Jerry_Brown_92_Presidential_Platform_We_the_People.jpg
More about Governor Brown and California politics, @GreenPolicy360
* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Governor_Jerry_Brown
* https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/California_out_in_front_in_a_Green_future
The personal result of the 1992 presidential campaign led to being approached to join a new Green Party in formation in New Mexico. Over the next 10 years Steve became directly involved in building a national and international Green Party, as he wrote and presented a strategic plan to establish an official national state-based organization, ran for Lt. Gov of NM, became chair of the platform committee of state Green parties forming a national party from 1995-2001 and was the principal drafter of a founding US national platform. He became a registered independent when the US Green Party was taken over by an extreme cadre/faction.
Continuing media work over the course of the past decades, including Schmidt-Cannon and Aspen Interactive/Marketing, a leader in digital communications and focusing on charging up cause-oriented ventures.
Contact Steve Schmidt, GreenPolicy360, at our terrestrial home base in Clearwater, FLorida
e-Mail: GreenPolicy360@gmail.com
Old home California ...
As the political power in the US shifts via electoral college voting, gerrymandered redistricting, and other forces in play after the 2016 presidential election, consider that the state of California is currently (as of 2024) the fourth largest economy in the world. In addition, per statistics available, California typically pays significantly more in federal taxes than it receives in federal spending, making it the largest "donor state" in the U.S. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tax_revenue_by_state
In aggregate California economic contributions, and new technologies, are national treasures. Its state higher education system has often been described as the foremost in the world. Thank you California!
And not to forget, California has led the world in climate change science and climate policy. As the Trump administration goes 'retro' and [https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Tracking_science_policy_across_the_Trump_administration.png attempts to erase progress and environmental, California reminds us to look to the future ...
Now on to more politics .....
Visit 🔆 Roger Morris, our long-time friend and collaborator at GreenPolicy360.
One of Roger's many memorable phrases he contributed to our Strategic Demands project writing is "surviving victory", as in the Gore Vidal reference to "perpetual war for perpetual peace". At GreenPolicy360 and Strategic Demands we have been future-oriented. We are seeing news ways of being, as in "New Definitions of National Security". War & peace questions are in human hands. And at GreenPolicy/StratDem we are exploring the damages rarely discussed of the "full costs" of war. Beyond the trillions of dollar of war spending, GreenPolicy360's New Definitions of National Security looks at deeper costs of US war policies delivered to the nation and world. A new vision, a greener vision is needed.
Read Roger Morris and Steven Schmidt, Strategic Demands of the 21st Century: A New Vision for a New World
Rethinking Security, a New Vision
Photo: Astro Wiseman, NASA
A Message from GreenPolicy360
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We take into consideration the 'big picture', with science and data, reasoning and facts guiding decisions and policy.
In defense of democratic institutions, constitutional rights, onward we go.
Although current trends are 'retro' with disinformation and misinformation swirling across the internet and in political 'talking points', we will continue to be steady in our work to bring facts and reasoned argument, sharing best business practices and green practices locally/nationally/globally.
Remember, it's all connected, it's all related.
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