Climate Lessons From a Master Mediator

I got to know Ted Kheel over the final decade of his remarkable life, which ended at age 96 on Sunday. To get a sense of the man and his accomplishments, including his mediation of tens of thousands of disputes (that’s not a typo), read The Times obituary and click on the brief “Last Word” discussion above, in which he discusses the core challenge of conflict resolution.

While he’s best known for his labor work, my interactions with Kheel mainly focused on his concern for the environment, which were centered, locally, around moving people from personal vehicles to public transportation and, at the global scale, building consideration for Earth’s ecosystems and climate into economic and social policies.

I often thought he could have played a great role in clarifying — if not necessarily resolving — the intense, longstanding disputes blocking action to achieve the 18-year-old goals of the ailing Framework Convention on Climate Change. In endless negotiations under this treaty, which will resume in Cancún, Mexico, at the end of the month, powerful subtexts have shaped public postures of rich countries, emerging powers and the world’s poorest nations. (Sometimes, of course, the subtexts are clear, as in Saudi Arabia’s approach to the climate talks.) Kheel’s skill lay in stripping issues to their essentials. “What do you want?” was his core question.

The real desires of parties in these talks, along with their domestic political constraints, are rarely revealed, and until they’re on the table, or at least acknowledged by all sides, don’t look for concrete progress.

Kheel also had a great way of dissecting a disagreement as a first step toward resolving it. Too often, he told me many times, parties in conflict clash over a tangle of overlapping rights and interests, when the route to resolving each kind of dispute is very different.

A right is something delineated under a contract or law — the kind of thing you can take before a judge, he’d say. An interest is a stake, delineated by a mix of power, history, negotiating skill, greed and other softer factors.

The climate challenge is particularly tough, even “beyond super wicked,” because it is the ultimate mashup, one in which variegated nations and blocs are weighing economic prosperity, available energy menus, environmental vulnerability and — most important for many — political realities on the home front.

I spoke with Kheel a couple of times about running a mock mediation effort, in which he’d face a table ringed with the main combatants in climate diplomacy. I regret not making that a higher priority. (Luckily, some environmental education programs are starting to do this by tying schools together in “climate talks.”)

In considering such an exercise with Kheel, it was clear that a vital voice would be missing — the voice of generations yet unborn, clamoring for consideration of their environmental and economic interests.

The proxy advocates for future generations these days are libertarians who insist that energy curbs now would limit future wealth and campaigners and scientists who say that a failure to promptly curb heat-trapping emissions threatens to irreversibly erase natural assets that belong to no individual generation.

For the moment, there is no “legal guardian of future generations.” There also isn’t a planet-scale Ted Kheel — a master mediator.

There’s just us.

Can we forge a path beyond the projected mid-century crest in human numbers and appetites that comes with the fewest regrets? Or are we stuck with “blah, blah, blah, bang?”

Kheel cut to this core tension in delineating the goal of his Nurture Nature Foundation long ago:

…[T]o help in resolving what is possibly the most serious challenge the world faces today: the intensifying conflict between the indispensable goals of environmental protection and economic development.

We must have both but they are frequently in conflict with each other, for reasons that are understandable but difficult to resolve.

No one would deliberately destroy the environment. But business organizations properly exist to make money. In the face of competition, they often resist environmental goals they see as threatening their ability to remain competitive and profitable.

We see development that is sustainable as the most workable solution to the conflict between environment and development. It promotes protection of the environment, while simultaneously encouraging economic development.

Kheel will be greatly missed by many. But through philanthropy and writing, he has ensured that his approach will live on.

A particularly useful book, whether negotiating a climate pact or confronting fights over who gets the big-screen TV tonight, is “The Keys to Conflict Resolution.” There’s an engaging online primer on mediation and negotiation, as well.

Among other philanthropic steps, Kheel gave $1 million to the Pace University Law School to create the Kheel Center on Resolution of Environmental Interest Disputes. (Full disclosure: as some of you know, I now teach and study at Pace.)

I’ve met a heap of students at Pace — particularly at a recent conference on sustainability law — and other schools who are clearly infused with Kheel’s zest for working things out on issues that matter.

I’d almost forgotten to mention Kheel’s zest.

That is a characteristic too often missing from discussions of the human predicament these days, amid so many shouts of “woe is me” and “shame on you.”

A more constructive approach would be to embrace this remarkable moment we’re lucky enough to be confronting in our lifetimes — the point when our species, after a long adolescent-style spree, is poised to “grow up.”

The question of my approach to this point in human history came up just yesterday on Twitter.

Brad Johnson, who writes the Wonk Room blog for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, challenged me to clarify my stance on things, pointing to a post by his colleague Joe Romm concluding that “human civilization is on the precipice” and asking if I agreed.

Here’s my reply, with Twit-speak slightly expanded into intelligible English:

Humanity has its foot on the gas with an unmapped curve ahead. We could scrape the guardrail or fly off the edge. Outcome to be decided.

Moving forward, I’ll keep trying to keep Kheel’s incisiveness in mind. That means a prime question for everyone is, “What do you want?”

Thanks, Ted, for helping chart one way to work things out.