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Crusader Chronicles
Kieran Suckling ’88
By Deirdre Gillin Ruttle ’02
Kieran Suckling ’88 is a nationally recognized leader in crusading for the environment. After graduating from Holy Cross, he immediately headed west and within two years established the Center for Biological Diversity, where he currently serves as its executive director.
Q. How did Holy Cross shape you for your career path?
A. The philosophy and literature departments — especially Clyde Pax, Jack Lynch, Joe Lawrence, Bob Cording and Jim Kee — fostered a sense of critical faith that led me toward an activist life and still informs my work. It’s an outlook that is deeply critical, even skeptical, of systems, models and sedimented language, but is ultimately rooted in worldly faith, rather than skepticism itself. Letting beings be — trusting them to come forth — it seems to me, is the motivating sensibility of radically progressive activism. It’s a question of faith — in the world, in polar bears, in sea turtles, in pygmy owls, in the authority of poetry and painting, in the rightness of ice that has cooled our planet for 800,000 years and is now coming apart.
I didn’t study environmental science or policy at Holy Cross, and wouldn’t call Pax or Cording “environmentalists” in the normal sense of that word, which is perhaps why I don’t believe in environmental ethics any more than I do in biomedical or automotive ethics. There is only one ethics (if “one” means anything in this context). It’s ontological and situates humans rather than coming from them. At Holy Cross, I encountered a community of thinkers trying to comprehend a post-humanist world. It was an easy, and, some would say, too literal, step from there to seeking to save monk seals and rattlesnakes from extinction. Perhaps that is what I learned most deeply at Holy Cross, that the twilight area where metaphor and reality penetrate each other so rapidly as to become serially indistinguishable is the most creative, most important, and truest aspect of life.
Q. Over 20 years later, you are still advocating for the earth and its creatures. What keeps you excited about your work?
A. I never tire of working with and learning about endangered plants and animals. The way they interact with and reflect the working of ecosystems at local and global scales is endlessly elegant, complex, and beautiful. And I’m always amazed at the depth of the human fascination with plants and animals. The Noah’s Ark story precedes the Old Testament by at least 1,600 years. It’s as old as western culture, probably as old as humanity itself. I’ve always had a sense that human culture and the natural world are aspects of a single “ecology” that seamlessly, obscurely, plays out in a vast interplay of symbols and mimicry. Biodiversity activism nourishes my philosophical and social interests by engaging grand questions of meaning while requiring immediate political action.
Q. In recent years, society, the media, and government have placed an increased focus on the environment. What progress do you see in the American attitude toward the earth?
A. Western culture’s attitude toward nature has steadily improved, become more sophisticated, more inclusive, since the fall of modernism in the late 19th century. The contemporary environmental movement, including broad interest in greener living, is one aspect of that trajectory. At the same time, however, we are destroying nature at an increasing pace due to rapid advances in technological power, the relentless speed of capitalism, the industrial outlook of more communist leaning societies, and a universal inability to address unsustainable human overpopulation. The world is in a race between rapidly expanding ecological consciousness and rapidly expanding, technologically powered population growth. It’s a race that will continue endlessly. If our ecological sensibility does not humble our technological-growth addiction soon, there will be no possibility of altering course. We have this, and maybe the next generation, to figure it out. If our grandkids are still debating sustainability, it will be game over.
Q. You’ve never been afraid to fight for what you believe is right. What influences formed your gutsy approach to life?
A. Long before I was called into the office of a certain Holy Cross dean (several times), I learned that controversy was not something to be afraid of, so I can’t say it was something I learned first on the Hill. My mother, an Irish immigrant who raised three kids in poverty within an upper middle class community, and my distant cousin, Owen O’Sullivan, an SMA Father who believed indigenous people should not be pushed to abandon their native religion, taught me that life is generally much more complex that it first appears; that the status quo is more fragile and fractured than it appears. Success in environmental battles had confirmed my belief that risk-taking and willingness to endure controversy are the best ways to change policy. Over the past 20 years, I’ve seen that clear-cutting and overfishing can be stopped, millions of acres can be saved from development, and thousands of species can be saved from extinction by fearless activists who stick to their beliefs and who have the audacity to believe that change should be immediate, permanent, and profound.
Q. Talk about your thoughts on the recently published book Eco Barons that features the struggles and successes of the Center for Biological Diversity
A. Though we’ve been profiled in many magazines (The New Yorker called us “the most important radical environmental group in the country,” but was not entirely sure this was a good thing), we’ve never been the subject of a book before, so I was very nervous about how it would come out. Humes ended up declaring the Center, “America’s most effective environmental law firm, consistently outwitting the best private, corporate, and government attorneys in the world to protect millions of acres of forest and wilderness.” We’ve also been the subject of a doctoral dissertation and book to come out next year, The Rebirth of Environmentalism: Grassroots Activism from the Spotted Owl to the Polar Bear, so maybe we’re part of the status quo now.
Q. What suggestions for action do you have for HC alums who want to be more environmentally aware?
A. Go to www.BiologicalDiversity.org, sign up for our weekly electronic newsletter (Endangered Earth), and become a member. Thanks to the Internet, it’s never been easier to find out what is happening from people on the ground and what needs to be done at a policy and personal level. Tune in, turn on, get involved.
Read Joe Romm’s global warming blog. There is no better place to find good scientific information, written for laypersons, and integrated deftly into current politics and communication battles.
Deirdre Gillin Ruttle ’02 is a member of the GAA Board of Directors Communications Committee