Changent Ocean Robbins

[Image source]

In the 70s, a child is born in a 1-room log cabin on a tiny island off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. His parents built that cabin themselves, grew most of their own food and lived on less than $500 per year. The child grew up with few material possessions but had clean air, clean water, time with my mom and dad and beautiful nature all around. He grew up with deep love for nature and the Earth. Then in the 1980s, his family moved to California. His dad’s book called Diet for a New America, one of the first books to show how our food choices affect not just our health and happiness but also the future of life on Earth, became a runaway success and brought the much needed financial security to his family. The little boy’s life could have been a very different story had his father not decided to work for the growth of compassion and healing in the world and walked away from the fame and fortune of the world’s largest ice cream company that his family owned. But then, this boy wouldn’t have recognised, at a young age of 15, that the planetary bio-system was deteriorating rapidly under the impact of human activities and that he had to do something about it. He wouldn’t have started a project to help young people make a difference in the world, that would later become YES!, and reach half a million students in high schools in more than 40 US states in the first half of the 1990’s.

I am talking about Ocean Robbins, co-founder of YES!, son of John Robbins, one of the first “food revolutionaries” in the US and grandson of the owner and founder of Baskin-Robbins or 31 flavours. Yes, I know it is quite an incredible story and that is exactly why I have decided to feature Ocean and YES! in my Changents post for this fortnight. Ocean’s upbringing had made him a very different human being which showed through his early entrepreneurial ventures like the ‘Ocean’s natural bakery’ that he started at the age of 10. By the age of 15 he was already facilitating summits on environmental concerns and writing for national magazines. And around this time he, along with friend Ryan Eliason, started a project to help young people make a difference in the world. They organized a national tour, speaking to school assemblies about the environment and what their peers could do to make a difference. Along the way more enthusiastic young people join them and with tens of thousands of dollars raised, YES! was launched as an organization. Over the years Ocean and YES! have experienced the realities and struggles of many different kinds of communities. And this has prompted them time and again to keep broadening their definition of the environment to include people as well as the planet.

It has also been an eye-opening journey for Ocean to see and experience firsthand the great divide between the haves and have-nots in our society that prevails even today. He says it made him rethink about his own place in the world. The lifestyle he had taken for granted as a white, heterosexual male with a US passport and financial sufficiency now looked like a privilege. Along with this inner struggle Ocean’s life has brought him challenges in various shapes and forms. But his positive attitude towards their purpose in his life only makes him stand out even more as compassionate human being. Taking care of the special developmental needs of his twin sons, River and Bodhi, acts for him as a reminder of the simple healing beauty of love, and of what really matters most in life. The rude and devastating first-hand encounter his family had with the economic meltdown in December 2008 made his family’s life savings disappear overnight in Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. This has meant a lot of rethinking and adjustment of lifestyle for Ocean and his family. It has lead him to the conclusion that perhaps life, is mostly about what we do with whatever is given to us. In Ocean’s own words,

“[...] sometimes it has seemed a heroic achievement just to make it through the day. Caring for my sons’ special needs while directing an organization and trying to help a generation respond to the madness and violence of our times… There is never enough time to do all the things I want to, so I get to practice doing the best I can with the time I have, and letting the rest go by.”

I am privileged to have come across such a compassionate and dynamic individual and decided to ask him to share with us what has been his greatest challenge or most valuable experience during his work with YES! This is what Ocean has shared with us.

We live in a world with profound gaps in access to resources, opportunities, and liberty. Ours is a world with deep divisions along lines like race, class, power, nationality and religion. Ours is a world where the use of people and the planet for short-term monetary gain have enabled massive wealth to concentrate in ever fewer hands, while hunger and malnutrition take the lives of thousands of children daily.
As a white American male, born into a loving and supportive family in which all of my basic material were met, I see the world in a manner that is influenced by the privileges I have known. As a bridgebuilder whose life and work are about building authentic partnerships across historic divides, I must see the world not only through my own lens, but also learn to identify with the problems, work and dreams of people from many different places and perspectives. Sometimes, that is hard.
When I started YES!, we called our organization Youth for Environmental Sanity, and we wanted to mobilize young people to take positive action on behalf of the future of life on Earth. So we organized a national tour, speaking to school assemblies about the environment. As we travelled the United States, I kept finding that the environment meant different things to different people. To some, the environment was trees and blue sky, but to others, the environment was gangs and concrete and trying to get home from school without getting shot.
So we kept having to broaden our definition of the environment, to include people as well as the planet. And I had to recognize that it is a privilege to think about the long term -- something that can be very hard for people who are on the edge of survival in the here and now. If your house is on fire, you don't think about saving water for the next drought. You do whatever you've got to do to increase your chances of survival. Issues like global warming, or a resource consumption overshoot, have a profound impact on the world we share. And yet they can feel removed to folks whose day to day needs are so urgent.
Whatever our context, however, I learned that to be an environmentalist is to cease being a victim of the problems around us, and to become an active participant in making things better. Some people take positive action by cleaning up trash or organizing carpooling ventures, and others by working for gang truces or green jobs in urban communities. It all matters, and it's all part of a broad and diverse movement that is changing the face of our world.
I have come to believe that there are more than six billion parts to play in the healing of our world. Whatever our background, whatever privileges we have know, and whatever traumas we have endured, we all have some vital and unique contribution to make. Our histories, and our destinies, are each unique. And they are each vital in enabling us to do what we are here to do.