Transcript: Dr. JOHN FRANCIS on What Grows In Silence /202
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I will be speaking to Dr. John Francis. Dr. Francis is a National Geographic Explorer, environmental educator and a former United Nations Environment Program goodwill ambassador. He began his environmental work in 1971 when after witnessing an oil spill in San Francisco Bay, he stopped using motorized vehicles and took a vow of silence lasting 22, and 17 years, respectively.
Dr. John Francis From that place of silence comes the opportunity to be with — I want to say — with creation, with everything. And it's like, what can everything tell you? What can we learn from listening and feeling all that is being communicated to us?
Ayana Young Dr. Francis earned three degrees, including a doctorate in land resources from the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. During his walk across the US, he ended his silence on Earth Day 1990 telling the assembled crowd quote, "Environment is about how we treat each other," end quote. He served as project manager for the United States Coast Guard, Oil Pollution Act of 1990 staff, and later walked the length of South America. Dr. Francis authored Planet Walker: 17 Years of Silence, 22 Years of Walking and Ragged Edge of Silence: Finding Peace in a Noisy World, both published by National Geographic Books. He is a commissioner in West Cape May New Jersey, where he lives with his wife and two children. He is now running for the Democratic nomination for the US Congress in New Jersey, District Two.
Well. Dr. Francis, thank you so much for joining me today. In order to begin our conversation, I feel like I must ask you to tell your story in your own words. You are most notably known for the 22 years of your life you spent walking, abstaining from the use of any sort of motorized vehicle and the 17 years of your life you spent in silence, a time in which you walked across the country and earned three degrees, culminating in a PhD in Land Resources. So can you share with our listeners how this journey came to be and what was the catalyst?
Dr. John Francis Thanks for having me here today. Ayana, I'm really pleased to be here. This all started for me in San Francisco, Bay Area. I was living in Point Reyes, actually a little town called Inverness, which is in Northern California, not too far from where you live. I witnessed two tankers collide, or actually the aftermath of two Standard Oil tankers colliding near the Golden Gate Bridge, and that prompted me to want to do something. I had never seen such an environmental insult in my life. It was something that really affected me, and so I tried to think of something I could do that would mitigate that, that could help in some way. I mean, people were cleaning things up off the beach and cleaning oil up and trying to clean the birds and the seals that had been fouled with oil. I just wanted to do something, and I think I didn't know what to do, except the easiest thing I could do, the most immediate thing I could do. So if I would just give up riding in motorized vehicles because I saw the connection of the oil that I was using on the oil that was washing up on the beach.
Not long after that spill, I just… I gave up riding in cars, motorized vehicles, and prompted my friends and neighbors. Inverness was a small town and Point Reyes Station was the neighboring town, was very small, had about maybe 500 people total where I lived, and so everyone knew everyone. So when I started walking, it was big news. This is — “John Francis has given up riding in cars and not riding in a car in California.” It's kind of stepping out on the edge of society.
So when I did that, I soon found myself arguing with my friends and my neighbors about whether one person could make a difference in doing something like that. I realized I'd been arguing so much that I decided on my 27th birthday that I was just going to not speak for one day. And that not speaking, I learned that I hadn't been listening, and because I hadn't been listening, I decided I discovered actually that I hadn't been learning. I had given up learning because anything that I heard that was new or different than what I already believed, I just would refuse to hear it. I would start thinking about something to say back to the person telling me what they thought or what they felt, and I was just not listening to them. I was thinking what I was going to say back to them and how I was going to defend what I believe. And so realizing I had stopped learning, I decided that I might do this ‘not speaking’ for another day. And it turned out a week later that I decided maybe I should do it for a month. And then a month later, I was like, Maybe I should do this for a year. And every year, on my birthday, I would reassess the ‘not speaking.’ I went on for 17 years.
So walking across the United States, not speaking, I lived in the wilderness areas. I lived on the road. And as you say, I eventually walked across the whole United States, studied at different universities in different states, University of Oregon, Southern Oregon University, and ‘was Southern Oregon State College, I think, when I first went there, but they changed. And then I returned after graduating from Southern Oregon University to the Bay Area, and I treated myself with an apprentice[ship] at a boat building with a boat builder. Wooden boat building was one of my dreams. Is to build a wooden boat and sail around the world. Well, at least I got to the part about building the boat and learning how to build a boat. So I learned how to build a boat and instead of sailing around the world, I took off walking. And my hope was to walk as part of my education and the spirit and hope that I could benefit the world by what I learned. And I I didn't know what that meant, but I figured I would learn that along the way. And I continued walking across the United States and leaving California in 1983 and then taking seven years to walk across the United States to my native home of Philadelphia and to my adopted home in Cape May, New Jersey, where I live now, with my family.
Along the way, I stopped and went to school until I had received a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and was fortunate enough to be named a UN Goodwill Ambassador to the World's Grassroots Community, and was hired by the US Coast Guard to help write oil pollution regulations after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. I did sail to the Caribbean and walk the lake of South America, and now I am a commissioner here in West Cape May, and I am running for the United States Congress in District Two. So that's pretty much my story. I guess there's a lot more to that, but you can read my book, and you can listen to this podcast, and you'll probably learn some more.
Ayana Young Absolutely, we will learn more. This is just the beginning. Thank you for opening with a bit of your story in your book, Planet Walker, you write quote, "The silence is always with us, but we do not choose silence. Silence chooses us. If you are called to be silent on your journey, recognize the invitation as a great gift. It is a gift to be shared with others. Your relationship to silence is one thing that will define the uniqueness of your journey," end quote. Naturally, I'd like to ask you about those 17 years of silence as it is an experience that so very few of us have or will ever have. And I think about how for many, our lives are polluted by noise, both environmentally as well as socially, but we are bombarded with the news of the moment and commentary by all so perhaps I'd like to begin by asking you, what grows in silence and what is the relationship between silence and solitude?
Dr. John Francis Those are great questions. I imagine that the first thing that happened when I became silent or when I stopped talking because I'm not sure that I was silent right away, but I did stop talking, and I think we have to take a step in order to get to that place where we are living in silence. When I first stopped talking, my mind continued to race along with many conversations. I think for the first time I understood, I was with Paul Simon, who wrote about the dangling conversations. And there were all these conversations and arguments going on in my head that I had with people and conversations that I practiced or I wanted to have, or things that I wanted to say that I thought I should have said. And they were just going around and around, and they tended, I think, at one time when I had not given up speaking, they would have prompted me just to start speaking again, to blurt out and practice or say something. But because I had stopped speaking, they just kept going around and around and around, and I might have felt as though they were going to drive me crazy. Someone might say, my friends would call it though, "John, that's monkey brain." Not sure that we should put such things on a poor monkey. So you should say that it's monkey brain.
But it took several months of me not speaking before those conversations went away. And I don't think it was because I was so enlightened or I had practiced my meditation so diligently. I think it was because I just didn't speak because I didn't have those conversations. Eventually, they just went away. During my day, I didn't have arguments. I didn't have those conversations, and, so from that ‘not speaking,’ silence came. And silence came in a way that I don't even know if I recognized it right away that that was silence. It was something that when I wasn't silent, even when I wasn't speaking, you're not necessarily silent — even when you're not speaking because something is going on and that takes your mind from wherever you what you're doing, you have to pay attention to something. But at some point I would wonder, Oh my gosh, where have I been? Because I would realize that I was not in the world that I'm usually in. I was somewhere else, or I was with something else. And that's what I think silence is, and that's what grows from that, not speaking, is that silence. Now, from that place of silence comes the opportunity to be with, want to say, with creation, with everything. And it's like, what can everything tell you? What can we learn from listening and feeling all that is being communicated to us? Something's being communicated and it's like, well, we have to listen harder or harder or harder. And it's like, no, not really harder. You have to let go. You have to let go the wanting to understand. You have to let go wanting to possess the understanding and just be in that place. You just have to be there.
Ayana Young That was beautifully said, and what else is beckoning at us that we can't hear. And I'm thinking about how our anthropocentric understanding of language really limits us, and I wonder how we can cultivate non verbal communication by choosing conscious silence and not just non verbal communication, but also communicating with our more than human kin and experimenting with silence, what other forms of communication and earthly rhythms arise?
Dr. John Francis My first realization about communicating with our non-human family was when I tended beehives for a woman who lived on the mesa in Point Ray. She asked me, because I walked around and people got to know, to see me, and Francis Blair was her name. She asked me one day, says, "John, would you tend bees?" Because it seemed like something I would do. And it's so funny, because I always wanted to attend bees. I always wanted to be with bees, but at the same time, I was deathly afraid of them. I didn't like to be stung. And I don't know if any of your or how many of your listeners know about setting up a beehive? You order the bees. They come in the mail. And we had about, oh, I think maybe forty hives. And so we had to first prepare the hives, and that was like getting all the wooden frames and the foundations and so where the bees are going to live. And then we ordered the bees from a bee distributor. I'm not sure where they were, where they came from, but they came in the mail — a queen and some worker bees — and they were in a little package. Each hive had a queen and each little package had some worker bees and females and drones. And worker bees are females, and then there are the drones, which are the males, and they're all kind of maybe 50 bees in a little package, and that's one high. And we had forty of those, but they came in the US mail, and they were down at the post office in Point Reyes station. We had to go down and get them. Somebody had gone down and gotten them, and Francis has gotten a message to me that the bees were in her yard, under the grape arbor, and that I should come and begin setting up the hives. I've been reading about bees and reading about them, and because I had never, ever set up a hive before, so I kind of knew after reading these instructions.
And I went to the bees. I was still afraid. And as I approached the bees, they're all in the shade underneath this tarp. They just let out a horrendous hum. It was angry. They were angry. And I was like, Oh gosh. And I backed up, and they kind of calmed down. And I went, Oh God, I'm so afraid. I just don't know whether he's going to sting me. How am I going to let him out? And I went up to the bees again, same thing happened. Huge hum came down there. I sensed that they were really angry. And then I realized that it was really me that was afraid, that I was afraid of the bees, and somehow they sensed that.
So I said to myself, Look, the bees are all in these little cages. Now I'm going to go up there, and I'm just not going to be afraid because what can they do? They can't do anything. So I calmed myself, and I walked up to the bees and there was nothing. I backed up again. I said, That can't be true. I said, If I'm afraid, the bees are going to know that? I let myself work myself up to be afraid again. I walked up to the bees and the angry hum started again, just to realize that there was this connection that I had with these animals, these bees, and how I felt. And I calmed myself down again, and I just said, I'm just gonna have to be calm. I'm just gonna have to be calm and work with the bees. And that was a really amazing thing, because I felt that the bees probably sense, or maybe they smell the pheromones that we give off when we are anxious or angry or afraid, and those infinitesimal little bits of molecules that the bees can smell that we're not really aware of because our smell isn't that great. And most of us, maybe some of us, have that smell, that ability to smell.
But anyway, the bees were the first, first animals that I worked with that I realized that they could tell how I felt, and they responded to how I felt. And I'm sure beekeepers know that people who are around other animals know that animals do respond to the way that we feel. Our nonhuman cousins and brothers and sisters do respond to how we feel. The amazing thing about that is that what I discovered is that that's how we are. We're all like that. Maybe we do feel each other's pheromones or electronic or electric auras or whatever it is that we all feel something from each other because we are those kinds of beings. We are those kinds of beings. I think that's what came out of the silence which connected me to everything.
Ayana Young I definitely get that sense as well with our more than human relatives, and I strangely have a very good sense of smell, but I don't think it's as good as the bees. But I've been able to work on my olfactory power magic skills lately. But yeah, thank you for sharing that. That was such a beautiful experience that you shared, and it made me really want to get out with bees, and I'm actually setting up a beehive now so this was really perfect timing. And I want to bring up something you mentioned, I think, in your first response, and it reminded me that in silence, we learned to listen rather than waiting for our turn to speak. Which I truly believe is a skill that so few of us have played with, or really even bothered to consider how it might shape our lives. And I wonder if you can share both sides, the pleasure of being listened to and the pleasure of listening, and how might this be a skill that can especially aid us during troubling times?
Dr. John Francis I have lots of stories about listening and of course...I mean, I lived in Point Reyes and in Inverness for maybe, for about 10 years off and on before I started walking across the United States. So people got used to the fact that I didn't speak. And one of the things that my friends and my neighbors would do is that they would come to me to just talk to me about something that maybe they felt they couldn't talk to anyone else about because they felt that I would listen to them, which I would. This is my practice, and not have to respond, not have to say, "Oh, that's really… Yeah, that's…” or “That's crazy," or "Why did you do that?" But just to listen, and it's almost to witness. And so people would do that. They would come and tell me things that they would say, "Well, John, it's not PC," they might say, "but I know you'll listen to me, and I can't tell it to anyone else because they'll think something badly about me, but I know you won't. You'll just listen."
Well, just that someone would care or believe or feel that they could tell me anything that they couldn't tell or they felt uncomfortable sharing with someone else that made me feel needed in some way, that what I was doing was worthwhile, that my silence was worthwhile. I had friends come to me about dreams that they had. "Well, John, I had a dream about you, and we were sitting on my roof, and we were looking out," and they said, "you said something. You were talking to me about this (something)", and I would want to know what I said. I draw a question mark in the air and they'd look at me and they go, "Oh, what did you say? Oh, I don't know what you said, but you were talking. That's what was amazing," and that would always make me laugh. If I had anything to say, I guess I didn't have anything important to say yet, or that it didn't matter what I said, that it was that I was just speaking and I thought about that. That's an experience that I've taken with me, that sometimes it's just enough that we're speaking to each other. That it's not so important what we're saying, but that we are together, and that we're just kind of speaking with each other. And I think that it's like maybe the social being that we are, that we love this company, and we love this ability to, you know, talk about the weather.
And when I did start speaking, I wondered, What was I going to say? I was going to? Was I going to only say important things? What I thought was important? Maybe I was only going to sing. And I thought, God, no. That'd be terrible because I just couldn't sing at all. I'm just going to talk about it's… you know, the weather, or whatever it is. And so when I did start speaking — once I learned how to speak, again, because I had to practice speaking — I was going to speak about whatever. I was not going to, you know, just say important things.
I did start speaking on Earth Day because I wanted to remind myself that one of the things I would speak about and one of the most important things I would be speaking about was going to be environment because environment for me was why I started walking, why I had stopped speaking all those things. And now that I was coming out of the silence, I wanted to speak about environment because the biggest discovery to me was that, because we're all part of the environment, how we treat each other is like our first chance, our first opportunity, to treat the environment in a sustainable way, or even understand what we mean by sustainability. Environment was, "Oh yeah. It's about pollution. It's about climate change. It's about loss of species and habitat," and all those things. Yes, yes, yes. It's about that, but it's also about human rights and civil rights and gender equality and economic equity and education equity, and all the ways that we relate to each other. Environment is how we treat each other because how we treat one another will manifest in the physical environment around us, and it will look like what it looks like right now. It'll look like climate change. It'll look like loss of habitat. It'll look like coronavirus. It'll look like pandemic. It'll look like everything that is in our environment because we're it, we can't get away from it.
Ayana Young While in preparing for this interview, I came across a quote from Rebecca Solnit that I hold really close to my heart, and it reads, quote, "I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness," end quote. So I think about walking as pilgrimage and rite of passage, an act of creation that produces its own attitudes, reflections and behaviors. So I'm wondering, what sort of philosophy do you think develops from the act of walking, and how has your personal philosophy been informed by walking?
Dr. John Francis I think that Thoreau had a great idea. You know, this is nothing original. I'm just a follower. Walking is like...I realize that as I walked across the United States, for example, I'm so grateful, number one, that people had gone before me, because there were, like, trails. I mean, I had been walking in some places where you have to go across country, and I don't know if anyone has ever been there, but walking from the East Coast or the West Coast to the East Coast, and walking into villages and towns and going over bridges of great rivers. You know that someone was there before you it's like, that's how everybody got around. Everybody walks, but this is now. So we've walked and we've run, and now we're riding and we're driving and we're flying. I mean, so this is an incredible time. So walking, for me, is like stepping outside of what's going on, the culture, the society. It's like the ultimate journey that you can take is your own two feet. If you have two feet, and if you don't have two feet, there's other ways you can do this. Just like we're walking back across the United States. And someone, they didn't walk, they had a wheelchair — called themselves planet wheelers. "Well, we call ourselves planet walkers." They said, "Well, I'm a planet wheeler,” and they wield their wheelchair. It's that moving through space at that speed, that three miles an hour, that our minds are kind of set for. It's like we learn so much. We learn in a different way when we move through space connected to the planet. The planet changes as we change. Well, someone said, "Well, you're not going to change the world by doing what you're doing." And I mean, I think they're correct that I'm not going to change the world, and I'm not sure that I would want to change the world. But you do change yourself, and you do change a part of the world, and that's the part that you are. I would love to empower people to be that change, to be that change that you are, not that I am, but that you are. And as we walk, we're all changing. We're all making that journey together. It's like in more parts of the world, more people walk than they do anything else. So walking is “we're still connected to the Earth.”
Ayana Young I want to keep on this topic of personal change and preparing for this interview, I came across a time where you said, "As I drove my car over the Golden Gate Bridge, I felt some responsibility for the mess washing up on the shore. It was nearly a year afterwards, still feeling this responsibility that I gave up the use of motorized vehicles and started walking," end quote. And so I'd love to discuss personal responsibility with you when it comes to climate change or environmental degradation, this topic remains contentious, as many feel that it's impossible to weigh our personal actions and the impacts against that of major corporate polluters or industrial complexes. And rightly so, of course, but at the same time, I don't think this means that we get to absolve ourselves of personal responsibility. So can you speak to the importance of changing yourself, even if you can't change the world or want to?
Dr. John Francis Well, I mean, walking was my attempt to not only change myself, but I thought more about that if I started walking that people would see me walk, and they would say, "Yeah, let's do that. Let's walk." [laughter] Everyone would give up riding in their cars, and, you know, 1000s of people would start walking, and that was going to be a big change, and maybe that's happening, but it might be taking longer than I thought because when I started walking, people just kind of looked at me and said, "John, that's crazy. What do you expect is going to happen? What do you expect you're going to do?" And once I realized my mother would say that I was just hard headed or stubborn, that I would keep doing that, but I got to this place where I enjoyed it. I started walking and stopped riding in cars, and it was kind of, you know, different. So I could do it for a little while, and then it became obvious that everybody wasn't going to do this. I was going to be the only one in my community that would do this, and no one's going to change. And it was just up to me to keep doing it if I wanted.
And my mother would say it's my stubbornness that just kept me going. But I believe that as I continue to do it, something happened. Something happened to me because of being connected to the Earth again, to be moving at that three mile an hour pace, and I felt I was being healed, and that I needed healing because when I gave up riding in motorized vehicles, I must have been very angry. I felt that I had a chip on my shoulder and that if you didn't do what I did then there was something wrong with you. That's where the arguing came from.
And so I'm jumping ahead to not speaking — that's when I could start hearing what was going on. And when I walk somewhere, you know, someone says, "Well, John, you didn't ride in cars and didn't talk, and that's really a lot," and I was like, going,"Yeah." Inside I'd say, You know, that's true. I didn't ride in cars and I didn't talk, but other people rode in cars and other people talked and so when I got to a restaurant or a cafe and I pointed to the eggs or the potatoes or the milkshake that I wanted, they didn't say, "Well, John, these things were brought here by a car, you know that, but we've been going some potatoes outside that we're going to feed you with." No, I ate. These potatoes. I drank that milk that came in a milk truck and all those things. So no matter how much responsibility you think you're taking, you're still part of it and the thing that you need to remember is that we're all in it together no matter what you do, and no matter how you do it. And so at some point you have to let go that I'm doing better, or I'm doing more than that other person's doing. I think we can only do what we can do, and I think we're responsible to do what we can do and whatever that little bit is because even no matter what we do, we're still going to be part of the whole planet, the whole system, the whole everything. So I feel that someone says, "Well, I'm only going to be able to recycle." That's good recycle and maybe five years from now, they're going to say, "Hey, you know, we're recycling, and it's just being thrown into the dumps and the landfill." And then, well, what else can we do? Let's think of something else. Let's find something else. Well, let's use less. Let's use less of that material. And I mean, some people who try to get their packaging down to maybe a cubic foot of material. I mean, it sounds crazy that they're going to do.... Look we're only going to buy things in bulk. We're only going to buy things that are not in plastic packages and that's what they do. And people get to look at them and watch them and say, "Huh, I never thought of that." And so, other people maybe get inspired to do something else, but we're always looking at each other. We're always learning from each other. And so, however we express our responsibility, however small we think it is, it's really a step in the journey that we all have to take. So we can't all do everything all at once. This is a journey where we have to learn and teach each other.
Ayana Young That was so relieving and joyful to hear. And I sometimes or more than sometimes, wish we could do everything all at once and just fix it all. And I also know that's not possible, and these baby steps or just learning from one another, and that curiosity that sparks when we see people doing things that are against the status quo. I think it allows us to understand that there are other options. There's other ways of being. There's other ways of relating that maybe we never even considered before, and I think there's a lot of magic in that. I wonder, you know, so many of us entertain admiration, but true commitment is harder to come by. And in your journey, it seems like there were a few striking moments that catalyze change and you remained committed to these changes for as long as it felt liberatory. So I'd like to ask you about these moments and how you recognize them, but also where you sourced your unwavering commitment, and perhaps you could also share with us how you kept yourself accountable.
Dr. John Francis You know, there's many moments and you know, whether the moment is like a few seconds or a day or a year, that these moments are, I guess, events, and they're meant literally in the sense like how quickly this is passing. It was like there's a time, I think, which was one of the most important moments for me, and I wrote about it in my book. I call it Meeting Mr. Death. And that's when I started painting. It's before I even started my silence, I started painting watercolors everyday. And so it was a practice to be able to sit down and be somewhere and paint, to try to be in a place. And the paintings, the watercolors, I looked at as these were artifacts of a process of sitting. And I took this with me wherever I went. So everyday I would sit down and I would paint.
And one day I was walking in Northern California, and I was on my way back from Oregon walking, and I was off Hwy 1, and I was up on a little mountain road, Bridge Road, and I was walking down the road, and I could feel sort of like the bees that something was going on. I wasn't sure exactly what it was, but a truck came and drove past me one way, and then it turned around and it drove in front of me so that I would catch up to it as I walked. And as I passed the truck, I could sense something, and inside, two guys were sitting there, looking at me, and I kind of walked past, and he said, "Hey, hey, boy, come here." I was like, "Oh, this isn't going to be good, I could tell." So I turned around. I walked back to the truck. It was a little, small truck so I could put my arm on the cab and I had my banjo cradled in my arm and there were two guys in there. And they one had a crew cut, or they both had crew cuts. They were looking at me, and they said, “You know, you're making people pretty upset, you walking up here.” And I just, I knew who these guys were, but I couldn't place it. And finally they said, "Yeah, you know, because you know we don't like—" and they used this word to describe what they thought I was, and it began with an N, and it shocked me for a little bit, for a moment, and they said, "Yeah, we don't like them up here. You better get going." And before I got going, the guy next to me put a gun to my head, and he said, "That's right, we don't like your kind up here." And then he pulled the trigger, and I recognized who it was. All of a sudden, it became like this crystal clear and crystal clarity that this was Death, and the guy sitting next to him was his partner. So this was them, and no wonder I recognized him. I was like, Oh, that's who it is. And I was really upset, but really upset me because I said, "Darn, I did not do my painting for the day." And so the next thing I knew, they say, "Now, get going. Get—" and I started walking. And I said, Well, I'm just going to end up in the back of that truck. They're going to shoot me, and I'll be in the back of the truck. And lo and behold, they turned around and they drove off. I turned and looked, they were gone. As soon as I realized they were gone, I sat down and I took out my watercolors and I started doing the painting of Point Reyes. I could see it off in the distance. You know how when it gets really foggy down in the bottom of the valleys and you can just see the tops of the mountains. I could see Point Reyes off like that. I sat down, I started doing the painting. No sooner than I sat down and was doing this painting that someone else drove up, and he was wearing a white hat, and he had a deputy's badge. I said, Oh my God, here comes the good guys. He said (I showed him my painting), "I don't want to see that painting. You're making people upset out of here. You got to get out of here and if I come back and you're still here, you're going to be in some trouble." And he drove off again.
And I sat back down, and I finished my painting. I finished the painting, and I walked down into the fog, and I sat down by the side of the road in the fog, and up the road, Hwy 1 came some friends of mine. They were on their way to Ashland, Oregon. They said, "John, we heard you were walking back down. We're on our way to Ashland." And I thought, Wow, I could get in the car with them, and I could be safe. So here it was. I was thinking about getting in the car with them, and I decided, No, I'm just gonna go sit down here by the river, and I sat down by the river. It was the Russian River, and in the night there was a loon that's voice just kind of pierced the air, and it was kind, “Ooo-ooo-ooo.” Very, very spooky loons, and just feeling that, I just felt that it went through me and it just made me okay. And I said that, Of course, that was death. Of course, I recognized death because death is really part of who we are. If death isn't familiar to us, if death did not exist, if death was not something that we knew, life wouldn't mean anything. It has to be that way. And I said, Was I going to give up walking now and just start driving because it was too dangerous? And I thought about it, and I decided, no, I wasn't, and it was because that's gonna find me no matter what. In fact, I know that now. Death's gonna find me sooner or later, so I might as well live what I meant to live the way that I need to live in order to be me.
And so the next morning came and I walked all the way to Point Reyes and it was because I knew Mr. Death. I knew that death was always around us. Death was always going to happen. Death had to happen. Death had to be there. And that was the experience that let me go on to be where I am now because I don't think I could have walked across the United States if I feared dying. I don't think I could do the things that I've done if it was something that made me afraid of Oh, I better not do that's really dangerous. I dont' want— Well, but if that's who you are, you have to do that. If that's what's your call to do, you have to do that.
Ayana Young You're such an incredible storyteller. I was right with you on the Russian River. I felt like I was a fly on the wall reliving that story with you. I can't wait to re-listen again. Well, there's so many places to go from here. There's so many things I could ask you. I do want to focus on something regarding your work with the US Coast Guard, and if I understand this correctly, at the time of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, you were one of the only people in the US who had studied oil spills at a PhD level, and were ultimately asked by the US Coast Guard to develop oil spill regulation. And I know many of us assume regulation and policy to be boring and abstract, but it has dire consequences and highlights the importance of the legal and political realms. So what was your experience in contributing to these regulatory measures? And you know, especially as someone who took such an unconventional path to get there?
Dr. John Francis Yeah, that's a really good question. And I had no idea. I had no idea that this would happen, or that I would be on the other side of the United States with a PhD in land resources with a dissertation and oil spills in the marine environment. You know, the costs and the conventions of how we clean them up, what damage they pose and cause, and how we mitigate those things. And I can remember being in school and in Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and my major professor...I mean, you know, you have to realize that these institutions, as particularly the University of Wisconsin, had accepted me into their PhD program and I didn't speak. And I was walking from, I think, at the time I applied, I was in South Dakota, living, working as a printer in South Dakota, and that I wrote and said, "I'm looking at a PhD program." And they said, "Yeah, yeah, you should come because… and we think we can support you." That they said they think they could support me, meaning they were going to give me a fellowship. I couldn't believe that, so I showed my dad the letter to make sure that that's what they said because when he came out to visit me in South Dakota, he read this letter, and he said, “Looks like they're going to give you money,” and that he said that, I figured that was the truth because he was really kind of strict about Well, how are you going to pay for that? Or where are you going to get the money for that? And you know, What are you getting paid for to do in this?
And I got to the University of Wisconsin, and I had a major professor. His name was John Steinhardt, who passed away. He spent, I think, a whole semester with me, letting me figure out what I was going to write about. And one day I came to him after....just trying....I was going to write about the United Nations and the World Bank and everybody's like looking at me. And how I spoke with him was not with words, but he says, because I was drilling for oil or two tankers that collided. I pushed like two boats had smashed and the oil was rolling all over his desk, and then the floor. I was doing mime. And he says, "Oil spills, that's a good one, John, I think you should write about oil spills." And he would say, “I was wondering when that was going to come up, when you were going to think about that." And he had written a book called Blowout which is about the Santa Barbara oil spill, and the Santa Barbara oil spill, which happened in 1969 off of Santa Barbara. Was the oil spill that started the environmental movement. It was that oil spill. So I ended up studying oil spills. I mean, once I started, I realized, well, that's what I should be studying because it's why I was walking. It's why I started on this journey.
I was writing about oil spills. I was getting published already because people were finding out about me and the oil spill intelligence, or they were using my data to make graphs and things in their magazine that went out to the industry. And finally, the Coast Guard called because they heard about this guy who was at University of Wisconsin who was getting published, and they wanted me to come to Washington. They said, "What do you mean? He doesn't? We want to talk to him." And they said, "Well, you know, he doesn't talk." And it's like, "Oh, is there something wrong?" And he goes, "No, he just took a vow of silence. He doesn't speak." He said, "Well, we just wanted to come out to Washington—". "Well, you know, he walks everywhere." And I guess a resource man of Admiral says, "Is anybody normal at your school?" because when I was studying oil skills at Wisconsin, my friends would say to me, they said, "John, why are you studying oil spills? No one's really interested in them, and no one's going to give you a job." And because I had a fellowship, I was not thinking about, Well, I have to get a job that paid my school loans back. But then that was before Exxon Valdez happened in 1989 and then that's why they called because I was there already setting oil spills, and so I was one, or if not the only person studying oil spills at that time in the United States at a PhD level.
So when I got to the East Coast and started speaking, they got a hold of me again, the Coast Guard, and wanted me to come down. I was in Vermont at the time, they offered me a plane ticket, and because I was speaking, I could talk to them on the phone. I said, "No, I don't fly." They said, "Well, you can take a train, Dr. Francis, and we'll absolutely will reimburse you." And I said, you know, "I don't use trains either." And the guy says, "Well, Dr Francis, you don't drive in motorized vehicles either, do you?" I said, "No." Said, “We'll get back to you." And lo and behold, they did and asked me how I could get there, and I said, I could ride my bicycle. They said, "Well, we'll be waiting," and said, "How long will that take?" "Two months." Left them all laughing and showed up there in two months. And next thing I know, I'm working at the Coast Guard. I asked my boss, I said, "So how come you hired me?" Says, "Well, you know, you had a PhD." "You could have hired somebody else with a PhD, someone that is less eccentric or—" He said, "You know, the last time I looked, John, they weren't given these degrees away and we figured, you must know something because you got one." And his name is Norm Lindley. He was my boss. He said, "I just want you to be here and walk around, look at things, how we're doing things and if you have a crazy idea, come tell me what it is because we might be able to do it. For the way we're doing things in it, it's going to be different because we've been doing the same thing year after year after year after year, and look where we are. We're still having this problem. So it might look really outside of the box. Come and talk to me about it because we might be able to do that. Of course, then again, John, it may be just crazy and we won't be able to."
In the end, we did so many amazing things. We were holding conferences, environmental conferences, closed circuit with a black college satellite network, and we were looking at how environmental justice was really a part of what was going on in our environment and how it affected oil spills. We did regulatory negotiations where we brought all the interested parties together in front of a judge — meaning the environmental groups and the industry and everybody together. We had to hammer out what it is that we all wanted and what would work for everybody. And then we signed an agreement, and the judge would say, "Okay, now I don't want to see you guys in court." Which was something that some environmental groups might do, they would bring up a court case, which was just the easiest way to get back into the industry, but it would cost a lot of time, a lot of money, and it's best to figure this out in the beginning. And so these regulatory negotiations, I think, were like a gold standard for getting regulations to happen because we have to regulate this. You know, it has to be regulated because we're not doing it based on the open market, right, free market, where we're just about making profit. We have to look at the environment, too, and that's what we did. We did look at the environment, and we looked at economy of scale for small businesses and how to regulate large companies. So I was really happy about that.
Ayana Young Well I'm so happy that they were willing to be patient for you and were, yeah, willing to step outside the box. That's so rare. And I just love how you stuck with your journey and said, "Yeah, it'll take me two months by bike, but if you're willing, I'll be there." That's just so so good. I love that. And John, I could honestly listen to you for hours and totally get lost in your storytelling but — sadly, as this interview is coming to a close — I do want to take a moment and ask you about grief and anger. And I'm thinking about your journey, and I wonder if you ever felt anger or grief or despair, particularly in terms of witnessing the 1971 San Francisco Bay oil spill. And at this point, I think unfortunately, many of us can relate to an event like that and many might also admit to getting mired in paralyzing grief or even a sort of narcissistic anger, both of which prevent any sort of long term action. So I'm wondering if you could speak to the necessity of and your personal capacity for moving through anger and grief and service to something greater.
Dr. John Francis There's a lot of things to say about that. One, I just received an email from a friend who has type one diabetes. He was born with it. He's like writing a book, and he wants to keep moving, and I think it's On the Move with Type One. He read my book, and he said there's something that I said that really stuck with him about going through hardship and disaster and things like that. And, well, I had talked about when we have these things like disaster that we use it again. I'm a follower here, that many people say this and that we use that disaster, that moment, our grief, our despair, or to actually use that as an opportunity to change. And in doing so, you're going to survive that, but we're also going to come out of it even better than we were before. I think someone said, "That which does not kill me makes me stronger." Was that Heidegger? Wonderful. I believe that.
But also — which is more humorous to me — was sometimes people would say things about me, and my friends would say, "Did you hear what that person said?" Well, I just wouldn't hear it that way. I wouldn't hear it the way that they said that was an insult to me. It didn't happen. It's like my mind had changed and it had changed it to something else. I'm sure I can hear insults now, but I think when people said, "Well, John, you're crazy for doing what you're doing," or "You shouldn't do this," and they came up against and said, "We're diametrically opposed to what you're doing." And how can I be angry with them? I mean, I think there was a time when I would be angry, but then there became a time when I was just grateful for them to be who they were, so that I could defy who I was. So that it would help me say, "No, that is how I feel. I do feel like walking is a good way to know the planet.”
I do feel like kindness is really a way to be that's going to influence the environment. I think love is going to influence the environment. And ultimately, that's it. It's how we treat each other. It's like, well, we have to be kind. We have to be kind to each other. We have to respect each other. We have to love each other. Oh, my God. I mean, well, yeah, but that's so touchy feely. No, it's the truth. We have to love each other. We have to care for each other, and those people that seem to be against us, love them, because they help us define who we are. How can we know that we're moving forward? Okay? We know where we are. Well, then what's our next step to become who we are becoming? We have to be from somewhere, and so it's okay. I mean, you can love those people. You can love that situation. It's all part of our journey, and it's all important all these steps that we take.
Ayana Young Well, wow, this has been such an incredible conversation. You are just such a unique individual. I love your stories. So thank you so much, Dr Francis for taking this time with us and being so engaged and giving us so much to chew on and sit with so thank you.
Dr. John Francis Oh, you're welcome. Thank you.
For The Wild Thanks for listening to another episode of For The Wild podcast. The music you've heard today is from Rajna Swaminathan, Cooper Moore, and Carter Lou McElroy. For The Wild is created by host and founder Ayana Young and the production team, Aiden McRae, Andrew Storrs, Erica Ekrem, Eryn Wise, Carter Lou McElroy, Chris Hudson, Francesca, Glaspell, Hannah Wilton, Melanie Younger and Shae Carruthers.