Thought Leaders Thinking: Curt Spalding

We know that for the next year or two, we’ll be living under pandemic conditions. How can this nascent COVID economy dovetail into the real climate economy that will necessarily emerge, given our steadily accelerating environmental chaos? During our recent conversation with Brown University professor and former Environmental Protection Agency Regional Administrator Curt Spalding, a clear theme emerged: don’t bother looking back.

Mr. Spalding worked for the EPA for eight years, and as the Executive Director for Save the Bay, a non-profit dedicated to protecting Narragansett Bay, for eighteen years. As an advocate, policy analyst, and administrator, he has an exceptional track record of helping communities become more climate change resilient. He has also experienced the “ups and downs” of government work, as he learned about the limits of regulation-focused environmental protection work.

Now, nearing the possible end of Trump’s administration, Mr. Spalding asserts that we shouldn’t be eager to return to a narrow focus on regulation. Instead, he sees promise in collaboration with business, and empowering “everyday people” with data to manage their own regions. 

“In the early Obama years, it was all about enforcement. I was in the New England region, where it is much more collaborative between industry and government. But the EPA saw this as wrongheaded. My deputy’s thinking was: ‘We build these networks and partnerships to learn how the private sector is moving sustainability frameworks forward and you're going to just cut us off?’ And that's what they did.

“And then I invited a woman a movie Mindy Lubber from Ceres, a sustainability organization that works with Fortune 50 companies, to speak. She says, ‘I gotta tell you, you guys managed to piss off every Fortune 50 leader in the country. They saw an emerging relationship around how you could work on sustainability together and you told them to blow off and they’re mad.’ And of course, then the election happens in 2010 and we lose our majority in Congress. And then with Trump we were under siege. Well, some of that was because of red and blue polarization. But some of it was us just being stupid.”

So, what, in Mr. Spalding’s view, would be a less “stupid” tack to building a resilient climate economy? In particular, he is inspired by the potential for technologies like Internet of Things to empower people at the grassroots level.  

“I'm an advisor to a start-up run by kids who want to disrupt the whole world of environmental water monitoring with a sensor technology. This tech makes people less dependent on the government to know whether their water is healthy or not. Now, most people care about whether the ecology they’re connected to is healthy.”

Equipped with more data about the environments that directly sustain them, community members can work collaboratively to reduce negative impacts. It’s a tech-driven, bottom-up approach that’s a far cry from what Mr. Spalding calls “EPA writes the rule and everybody follows the rule.”

“There's going to be a whole explosion of this kind of digital technology that the COVID economy is accelerating. [It will empower] everyday people with information. That empowerment is right there. If somebody wants to nurture it and validate it and accelerate it, that's the opportunity and it was there before COVID.”