2024 Libby Lecture: American Democracy on the Brink: How We Got Here and the Implications for the Natural Environment

(Note: If you were unable to attend the lecture on September 26, you can find a link to the video of the presentation here.)

The College of Earth, Life, and Health Sciences and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences are thrilled to welcome author, journalist and environmentalist Colin Woodard to deliver the sixth Libby Lecture in Natural Resource Policy.

The lecture – titled American Democracy on the Brink: How We Got Here and the Implications for the Natural Environment – is scheduled to take place at 3:00 PM on September 26 in the Bangor Room of the Memorial Union on the University of Maine campus. This event is free and open to the public, with a reception and book signing to follow at 4:00 PM.

(Note: There will be a Zoom option for those unable to attend in person. The link can be found here.)

A New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist, Woodard has reported from more than 50 countries and seven continents, with extensive reporting on environment and climate issues. He won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his investigative work at the Portland Press Herald and received the Tides Foundation’s Jane Bagley Lehman Award for his coverage of the global crisis in the oceans. His six books — including American Nations, Lobster Coast, Ocean’s End and The Republic of Pirates — have been published in a dozen foreign languages and inspired a prime-time NBC television series and an Ubisoft video game. Currently, he is the director of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.

A native of Maine, Woodard is a graduate of Mt. Abram High School, Tufts University and the University of Chicago, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a former trustee of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences.

Mr. Woodard graciously agreed to answer a few questions ahead of his lecture. The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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What drew you, as an investigative journalist, to delve into environmental reporting?

I was on a study abroad program in Eastern Europe in 1989 when communism collapsed and the environmental problems were just stunning. Towns where the trees, houses, and people were stained black from industrial fallout. Tap water that couldn’t be used to clean many objects because it corroded metal. Rain so acidic Gothic statues and facades were melting away like candles. I moved back after graduation and lived in the region for most of the ‘90s (my twenties) and couldn’t help but cover it because it was such a huge front and center issue.

This resulted in my becoming a fellow at the Regional Environmental Center in Budapest, in covering the collapse of the Black Sea, and ultimately, when I moved back to the U.S., specializing in environmental coverage – especially climate change and ocean issues – around the world. My first book, Ocean’s End, was on the environmental collapse of the oceans and my second, Lobster Coast, dealt with coastal Mainer’s co-dependence on marine ecosystems. I’ve since been a Pulitzer Finalist for a Portland Press Herald series on the warming of the Gulf of Maine and a trustee of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Boothbay.

How did you come to lead the Nationhood Lab?

Also my time in Eastern Europe, including covering immediate postwar Bosnia. This was a region where nationalism, mythic stories of peoplehood, historical memory and forgetting, totalitarianism and big lies, demagoguery and atrocity were all playing out in a big way and I became a student of all of it, writing my master’s thesis on the topic and ultimately writing books about how it applies to North America. The ideas in these books –  American Nations, American Character, and Union – had all sorts of real world ramifications, so I founded Nationhood Lab, a think tank project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, to delve into them.

What are some of the fundamental themes you’ll be addressing with this lecture?

The U.S. remains on the verge of a collapse into authoritarianism. I’ll be showing why we’re vulnerable – and have always been vulnerable – to democratic backsliding and territorial disintegration – and what that will mean for environmental policies and conditions. Then I’ll share one important thing we can do about it, powered by our research at Nationhood Lab.

What prompted you to begin researching/writing about the overlap between political and environmental issues?

They’re clearly one and the same, whether in the Balkans, Soviet Russia, the Amazon or the United States. I guess my professional focus really shifted from the environment to U.S. politics in the early aughts, when it became clear the former couldn’t be effectively solved until the latter’s pathologies were better treated. I must be doing something wrong, though, as they’ve gotten progressively worse since then.

What are some of the ways in which these crises – democratic and climate – are interconnected?

In this country, failures and structural obstacles in our political system have hampered efforts to address climate change. When I started reporting on this issue 30 years ago it was already clear what we needed to do and there was still time to do it. Now a lot of bad outcomes are baked in and we’re trying to mitigate the scale of disruption. and that’s a failure of our democratic system. And if you look around the world, autocracies are not generally interested in environmental or climate issues because they’re by definition not particularly interested in what happens to most people living under their regime. In other parts of the world causality is largely reversed: climate disruptions will destabilize economies and societies, creating environments where demagogues and dictators can thrive.

Are there any specific takeaways you’re hoping to deliver to this audience?

If the republic falls, everything you care about is at risk, certainly to include the future climate on this planet. The good news is that most of us do not want any of that to happen – there’s a pro-democracy supermajority in U.S. – so it’s a matter of getting people woken up, aware of the stakes, and motivated to prevent the worst.

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For more, listen to this interview with Colin Woodard on Downtown with Rich Kimball.

This event is free and open to the public.