After an oil spill, he took a vow of silence. Today he preaches kindness

Before watching “Planetwalker,” a short documentary released this month by L.A. Times Studios and Bloomberg Green Docs, I had never heard of John Francis. When two oil tankers collided in San Francisco Bay in 1971, spilling 800,000 gallons of fossil fuels, Francis chose an unusual and provocative form of environmental protest.

He took a vow of silence that ultimately lasted 17 years. He also spent 22 years refusing to ride in motor vehicles.

During his years of not speaking, Francis earned a PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied oil spills. Then in 1989, after the Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, spilling nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil, the U.S. Coast Guard asked him to help write new pollution regulations.

“Fortunately, I had started talking, so I could answer the telephone,” Francis says in the documentary. “They said, ‘We’ll send you a plane ticket, and you can fly down here.’ I said, ‘You know, actually, I don’t fly in planes. I actually don’t ride in trains, either.’ They said, ‘Dr. Francis, you don’t ride in cars, either, do you?’”

The solution? Francis biked from Vermont to Washington, D.C. He helped write the regulations.

That’s one of many amazing stories featured in “Planetwalker,” which I hope you’ll watch. Now in his 70s, Francis discusses the long walks he still takes to draw attention to environmental issues, and the racism he’s experienced as a Black man — as well as the deep connections he sees between racial equity and environmental justice.

I was lucky enough to sit down with Francis for an interview at the L.A. Times office in El Segundo after watching the half-hour film. He sported a well-worn University of Wisconsin hat. He played his banjo. It was delightful.

The following transcript of our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What brought you from Philadelphia to California in the first place?

I think it was just the time, the ‘60s. It was the music and the culture. I wanted to be a hippie.

I traveled across the country to visit some friends who had also left Philadelphia. When I got to where they said they were living in Marin County, in Mill Valley, I was told they had moved to a place called Point Reyes. And so I hitched out with the friend I had traveled with. He and I got to the local store in Inverness Park, and we asked if anyone knew our friend. They said, “Oh, yeah, he lives up on Paradise Ranch Estates.”

We visited him, and I loved it.

How did California compare to what you expected?

It was beyond my expectations. I had never seen trees like the trees I saw on my first visit. And I think they were second-growth trees. I traveled through Samuel P. Taylor State Park, and the redwoods were enormous.

The San Francisco Bay oil spill in 1971 — why do you think you had such a strong reaction?

I think it has to do with my childhood, and my relationship with animals, and birds in particular, as a little boy.

Living in Philadelphia, we would take care of the robins and wrens that fell out of the trees, fell from their nests during the spring. We would feed them until they were able to fly again. So to see the destruction of the beaches and wildlife and particularly the birds in the oil spill probably touched a place that even I didn’t realize existed.

There have been so many oil spills since 1971 that it’s easy to become inured to them. It’s remarkable to me that you had the reaction you did. Are you surprised oil still plays such a dominant role in society?

If you just go back to 1969, there was the oil blowout off the coast Santa Barbara —

One of the moments that birthed the modern environmental movement.

That’s true. That spill — people with influence saw it. It got lots of coverage. Oil in the water has galvanized people’s perception of the environment. That kind of pollution, especially when people use the water for their recreation, when they use the water for their livelihood, for fishing — it affects them.

People come to California to go to the beach, and they say, “We can’t go to the beach because of an oil spill.” And it drives that home how involved we are with the marine environment, even if we don’t live on the seashore.

If oil spills are such a powerful motivator, why do you think it’s so hard for society to move beyond oil?

Well, I can’t say we’re not moving forward. Some of the regulations that I helped write for the Coast Guard have led to less oil in the marine environment. For example, we passed a double-hull regulation for oil tankers so that even if the first hull is breached in a low-speed impact, the second hull is not breached.

Also, when you’re loading oil into a tanker — before Exxon Valdez, workers just looked into the hull to see if oil was coming out. Sometimes it would come out and splash on the deck and run off into the marine environment beside the ship. We said, you have to have a device that sounds an alarm as the oil is coming up to the top.

So even though we still use a lot of oil today, you see reasons for hope. We’ve made progress.

Well, at some point I think we’re going to cut our oil use.

I hope so.

I believe that. I believe there’s other alternatives that are now becoming more viable, like solar and hydrogen and maybe even nuclear.

You say in the documentary that in college, fellow Black students weren’t sure what your activism had to do with the struggle for civil rights. They were confused why you were focused on the environment. What connections do you see between your activism and racial justice, especially today with climate change?

That’s an important question, and I don’t blame my fellow students for asking. Because it wasn’t so long ago that we felt the environment was something outside of ourselves. We were caretakers. But we weren’t part of it.

As I walked across the country, I could see people’s consciousness shift from us being outside of the environment to us being part of it. What I didn’t see was people making the next jump — if we’re part of the environment, then our first opportunity to treat the environment in a sustainable way is to look at how we treat each other.

I chose Earth Day to start speaking because I wanted to speak for the environment. And the environment had changed from just being about pollution, which I was focused on when I started my journey — pollution and loss of species and habitat and climate change — to being about how we treat each other. It was about human rights and civil rights and gender equality and economic equity, and all the ways we related to each other.

As someone who writes about climate change and energy, that makes perfect sense to me. Because if you look at who suffers the worst from air pollution, rising temperatures and other consequences of fossil fuel combustion and climate change, it’s usually people of color and low-income communities.

If we oppress one another — if we exploit each other — then that is going to manifest back in the physical environment. Because if we’re part of the environment, then how we treat each other really means something.

I love when you say in the film: “Kindness is the special sauce.” This idea that if we could all just be more empathetic to one another, we would solve some environmental problems — it rings true to me.

It reminds me of a story I wrote about research showing that in L.A., people commuting on freeways built through lower-income Black and Latino neighborhoods are more likely to be white and higher-income. The headline was: “How white and affluent drivers are polluting the air breathed by L.A.’s people of color.”

I got more hate mail about that story than anything I’d ever written. There were a lot of people who really didn’t want to hear those facts. It did made me think, yeah, we need more kindness, more empathy.

That’s a great observation. I have to say, I came up with this kindness thing while walking across America. And I mean all of America. I took seven years, stopping and working and going to school. I didn’t just zip across.

Especially as a Black man in the ‘80s, I relied on the kindness of strangers — people who happened to be walking down the road and saw me and offered me a place to stay. Kindness seemed to transcend all of the things we put around us, like race and politics and social standing. Kindness allowed people to say, “Do you need a place to stay tonight? Can I help you with a meal? I see you don’t have any money.”

Kindness is, I believe, more powerful than we might think. I think if we could all practice it more, it would become part of our culture. It already is part of our culture. People are kind. I think people want to be kind. The reason I’m here now, and I can smile, and I play the banjo, and I’m very happy — I think it’s because people are kind.

After 22 years, you started driving in motorized vehicles again. These days, when you get in a car or pump gasoline, do you ever feel a twinge of uncertainty or regret? Do you ever think, “I’m a part of this”?

Oh, I am a part of it. Even when I walked, I fully felt I was a part of everything. I didn’t say I was better or worse than anyone else. For example, when I would go to the post office, and I had a stamp and letter and put it in the mailbox, they didn’t say, “OK, it’s John Francis, get the horse, call the Pony Express.” We’re all part of the system. When I bought food, it didn’t get there by wagon. It came by cars and trucks.

I love that answer. And I ask the question because any time I write about the need to transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, I get a few angry comments from people telling me I have no right to suggest such a thing, because I use products and modes of transportation that, at least for now, require fossil fuels.

You have every right to say it, because you are part of it, because we are all part of it. Who else is there to say it, to speak for us, except us? We’re all the environment. And I think that’s where kindness comes in, and listening. I took 17 years to learn how to listen, and maybe hear things that I didn’t believe, or I didn’t know.

But that’s what learning is. In the listening, you want to be kind. In the speaking, you want to be kind. In how we relate to each other, it’s just the magic sauce that lets us be with each other and care for each other even though we don’t all agree or see the same way. It’s all part of who we are.

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Watch “Planetwalker” and spread the word. You won’t regret it.

ONE MORE THING

I’m not much for snowy hikes myself. But my L.A. Times colleague Jaclyn Cosgrove has some awesome-sounding recommendations in a recent edition of The Wild, a wonderful weekly newsletter about the great outdoors.

If you like hiking or wildlife, and you’re not already receiving The Wild, you can sign up here.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. Or open the newsletter in your web browser here.

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