Jim Hightower: Speaking out for the environment with life-affirming humor
by Vicki Wolf, October 2011

It’s a crazy world, and no one expresses frustration with the shenanigans of the U.S. government, the evils of corporate power and the insanity of environmental degradation better than Jim Hightower. He’s not afraid to stand up and speak out on a wide range of environmental issues. His commentaries illuminate the facts about mountaintop removal, big oil, industrial farming and toxic chemicals. Hightower’s country humor relieves tension, provides entertainment and gets to the heart of the issues all at the same time.

Hightower describes himself as a populist who for three decades “has been battling the powers that be for the powers that ought to be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.” He is a New York Times best-selling author who has written seven books. His latest book is titled Swim Against the Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow. “The Hightower Lowdown,” is published monthly and has more than 135,000 subscribers. His daily radio commentaries are carried on more than 150 stations.

Growing up in Denison, Texas, a small town north of Dallas, Hightower says humor was a constant. His father had a Main Street newsstand and magazine wholesale business. “He was a very funny man,” Hightower recalls. “The salesmen would come in, drink a Coca-Cola, shoot the breeze and solve the world’s problems in a 15-minute span,” He remembers other relatives were good at getting a point across with humor. “Aunt Lula was given to sayings like, ‘he’s tighter than the bark on a tree,’ or ‘the water won’t clear up ‘till we get the hogs out of the creek.’”

In his first book, There’s Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos, Hightower wrote about his experience on his great-uncle Ben’s 30 acre farm near Weatherford, Texas. He explains what a “fool” his uncle was for farming without chemicals:

. . By the standards of modern agriculture, though, he was a fool of a farmer failing to make use of the full arsenal of petroleum-based inputs and chemical products today’s agribusiness employs to maximize profits. Still, this failure and fool did manage to make a crop, as did his neighbors, supplying the whole area with a terrific variety of succulent fruits, flavorful meats, fresh vegetables, practically bursting with nutrition and taste, rich milk and cheeses, hearty grains and . . . well, a cornucopia. God, the food was good!

Early in his career, Hightower had mentors who were populists and leaders in the environmental movement. After graduation from North Texas University, Hightower worked in Washington as a legislative aide for Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas who was a Civil Rights and farmworkers advocate. Hightower became an advocate of agricultural reform and co-founded and ran the the Agribusiness Accountability Project, a public interest project that focused on corporate power in the food economy. He also served as national campaign coordinator for the populist presidential candidate Fred Harris.

Hightower was in Washington for the first Earth Day and got to know Gaylord Nelson, U.S. senator from Wisconsin who started Earth Day for environmental awareness. “As I became involved with public policy, I knew the environment was important.”

Hightower served two terms as Texas Agriculture Commissioner from 1983 to 1991 and became well known as a leading Texas progressive voice. Under his direction, progress was made for the environment, protection for farmworkers, and marketing for Texas farm products. Hightower was responsible for Texas being the first state to set organic food standards.

He and his team at the Texas Department of Agriculture put a task force together that included Whole Foods, Kroger and a broad-based consumer group. Hightower says, “We worked with the local community to re-establish farmers’ markets in the state.” To market the state’s farm products, they created Taste of Texas. They also encouraged development of alternative crops such as wildflowers and berries for wine.

In his second term as agriculture commissioner, Hightower promulgated the most comprehensive pesticide regulations in the country. “This created a furor led by chemical lobbyists,” Hightower says. Karl Rove, political advisor, known for his influence as senior advisor to President George W. Bush, recruited Perry to run as a Republican against Hightower. “Rove ran ads of me with a flag burner in East Texas and me with Jesse Jackson.” Perry won the election. Hightower says these ads, run in the most conservative region of the state, are what beat him.

The changes that Hightower enacted while serving as agriculture commissioner remained in tact after he left the office. “I had established what I wanted to establish,” Hightower says. “So much of what we had done was entrenched in the private sector that they couldn’t undo what had been done.”

Hightower says he is “mad as hell about corporate power and what it has done to our country - forestalling the historic potential this country has as an innovative nation with untold natural resource at our disposal; leadership potential around the world - sullied with wars and climate change.”

But he also is hopeful. “Rachel Carson would be astonished to see how far we have come,” Hightower says. “Overwhelmingly the public is on our side. People want clean air, water, fuel and a balanced climate.”

According to Hightower, what this country really needs is leadership. “I don’t fear for the progressive movement; I fear we don’t have leaders,” he says. “The Occupy Wall Street kids may be our leaders.”

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