33 Years of Impact
Longtime staffer Michael Kinsley retires. His influence carries on
Interviewed by Laurie Guevara-Stone, Writer/Editor at Rocky Mountain Institute.
When Michael Kinsley joined Rocky Mountain Institute in 1983, he didn’t foresee how his contributions would improve communities across the United States and around the world. He retired this summer as one of RMI’s longest-tenured team members. Michael’s work in the communities practice — which he led for 20 years — fostered sustainable local economic development and collaborative decision-making in many communities, and took him to 43 states across the U.S. and several foreign countries. Through strategic guidance and workshops, he helped several U.S. cities in their efforts to develop sustainability plans.
As a Pitkin County commissioner for 10 years, he helped put the Colorado county, which includes Aspen, on a sustainable path. He was also instrumental in helping plan RMI’s new Innovation Center facility, where visitors are greeted in the lobby by one of his paintings of nearby mountains.
Solutions Journal sat down with Michael to ask him about his years at RMI.
Solutions Journal: You have been with RMI pretty much since its founding in 1982. Why did you choose to join RMI?
Michael Kinsley: We chose one another. I was a county commissioner working on sustainability issues at the time Amory and Hunter Lovins were forming RMI. They wanted a community component. I attended some of their lectures, and we began talking. They actually helped me write about energy alternatives for a pamphlet I was putting together about the implications of oil shale, so we began to work together and they hired me to help create their Economic Renewal Program focused on sustainable communities.
The work I was doing as a county commissioner aligned perfectly with the work I was doing at RMI. When I became a county commissioner in 1975, I was attempting to take the county on a more sustainable path. We had no affordable housing, no public transportation, and high growth rates; it was clearly unsustainable. I realized that at RMI I could help a lot of other communities get on a sustainable path.
SJ: You have been involved in many different initiatives with RMI over the years, working with communities, corporations, and college campuses. What accomplishments are you most proud of?
MK: There are many, but I’ll give you three that first come to mind. The first was developing a message about sustainable communities that was attractive to people in very conservative communities — people who might not regard themselves as environmentalists.
When I went into a community, I asked people what they valued about their community, and I helped them make economic development decisions consistent with those values. Things people said they valued included community cohesiveness, clean air, good fishing, and other things without using “environmental” or “sustainable” terms. In contrast, people often make economic development decisions contrary to their values. We showed that economic development could happen, not only without compromising those values, but also in a way that supports many different points of view. And we did it without having to use the word “sustainable.”
Second was developing a collaborative strategic process for communities to develop sustainably. We first tested this approach in 1986 in Carbondale, Colorado. We knew we needed an unusual community to be the guinea pig for the project. We had to stop the process at one point, revise our method, and restart it. But they tolerated that experimentation and it worked, and helped put Carbondale on a sustainable path.
It’s hard to say how many other communities used our process, because we developed it to attribute success to the community, not to us. One of the ways Amory and I first aligned was our mutual esteem for verse 17 in the Tao Te Ching, which says that leaders are best if, when their work is done, the people say they did it themselves. From the beginning, Amory and I had the same view on leadership.
The third accomplishment was using what we learned in collaborative strategic planning in communities and adapting that for corporations, then designing and executing RMI workshops for companies.
I realized that, though quite different, corporations are akin to communities in a few important ways — for example, the unconscious belief in maximizing economic throughput, whatever the cost. Community leaders often endure the negative effects of certain kinds of development, such as sprawl, because they unwittingly believe that maximizing throughput is always good, even if it significantly compromises their values. Similarly, having found important ways to reduce cost and carbon, many corporate leaders reject such investment opportunities in favor of capital expenditures that increase output, even if the result is less profit — and more carbon.
SJ: What’s one of your most memorable moments at RMI?
MK: It’s hard to pick just one, but one that I’ll never forget is when I was introducing the concept of economic renewal in a town in Colorado. After the introductory presentation, a woman in the back stood up waving a piece of paper saying she had proof that RMI was a satanic organization. From my years of being a county commissioner I thought I was good at fielding aggressive attacks, but for that one I was left speechless.
“You don’t have to be an environmentalist to agree with RMI about energy investments. What RMI offers is the business case for reducing carbon.”
Fortunately, others quieted her and that town went on to adopt some of our ideas and is now thriving.
SJ: Along those lines, you have worked in many communities and with many companies that people might consider to be quite conservative. Why do you think RMI has been successful reaching so many different sectors?
MK: That’s one of the things I think is so magnificent about RMI. You don’t have to be an environmentalist to agree with RMI about energy investments. It’s how we work in communities, campuses, and corporations. Each organization has internal disputes between factions — one group pushing for carbon reductions, the other holding back. What RMI offers to those arguments is the business case for reducing carbon. RMI is pragmatic and nondoctrinaire. In effect, by developing the business case for energy efficiency and renewables, RMI helps the faction that cares about energy and climate prevail.
Climate change is a huge threat that can be frightening and debilitating. But one of the great things about working at RMI is seeing the wide range of extremely encouraging and large-scale signs of progress. And I am very proud to be part of that change.
WEB EXTRA
For more information on this topic visit: rmi.org/communities
