JOHN RENSENBRINK

Principal Maine Green Party founder and national Green Party co-founder John Rensenbrink of Topsham was born on his family’s dairy farm on Aug. 20, 1928 in Pease, Minnesota, where he worked until he was 18.

After college, he worked as a professor of Political Science at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Williams College and then for 35 years at Bowdoin College — except from 1962 to 1965 when he worked as Educational Advisor for the U.S. Agency for International Development to the governments of Kenya and Tanzania. Since 1998, he’s been Professor Emeritus, department of Government and Legal Studies at Bowdoin College.

In 1984-85 he was the principal founder of the Maine Green Party, later renamed Maine Green Independent Party, and at that time also helped co-found the U.S. Green Party. In 1999, he helped lead negotiations with John Wasileski, owner of the Highland Green retirement project, to form the Cathance River Preserve. This led to co-founding with Wasileski the Cathance River Educational Alliance in 2000. Rensenbrink spoke with The Times Record about the history of the Green Party and its future.

Times Record: What was the drive for you to earn a Ph. D. in political science and how has that directed your life’s work?

John Rensenbrink: With a BA from Calvin College in 1946, I had ambitions to go to Law School at the University of Michigan as a way of eventually working for a chance to become President of the United States. But I didn’t get a scholarship of sufficient amount and having no other money, my family being hard scrabble poor, I went instead to the University of Michigan’s Political Science Department in Ann Arbor which offered me a much bigger scholarship than the Law School offered. I liked political science, and this led to teaching college students. I thoroughly and deeply enjoyed the teaching, and I sought from the start to combine that with social and political activism. At some point I received a Scholar/Activist award from the American Political Science Association.

TR: How did you become involved in and succeed at creating the Green Party?

JR: I’d been trying for years in the 1960s and 1970s to spur a political movement that would reshape American politics and redirect it towards achieving Abraham Lincoln’s urgent call for “Government of the people, by the people and for the people.” By 1984, the times seemed ripe for this. The major parties were getting bogged down. The environment was virtually without a voice in politics. Social justice was lagging terribly. Democracy and equality seemed to be losing out. War was becoming the chief preoccupation of the “military Congressional industrial complex,” and top politicians of both parties followed suit. The country needed a political jolt, a shot in the arm. In American history that has usually been provided by a new party.

By 1984, Alan Philbrook, a maritime worker (now deceased) and I had worked together in campaigns to shut down Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. Together with a small group of 17, we met in Augusta, January 10 of that year, following a major snowstorm, and founded the Maine Green Party. Other groups around the country were moving in that direction and in August 1984 founded the U.S. Green Party. I threw myself into organizing and mobilizing for both state and national Green Parties and have been active for both since the founding. I ran for U.S. Senate in 1996 on behalf the Maine Green Party, later renamed the Maine Green Independent Party.

TR: As a founder of the Green Party, is it what you hoped it would be for the country and why or why not?

JR: Yes, on balance, the Green Party is what I hoped it would be for the country. The Green Party has demonstrated enough staying power and enough political muscle to justify my modest but steady optimism. Here’s why.

In the 1980s we pioneered putting a stop to plans for the wholesale burning of waste in our region of Maine. Stopping it gave a huge impetus to recycling instead of burning and to keeping our air free of pollutants; in the 1990s with Jonathan Carter, we dared to take on the out-of-state paper companies and their clearcutting practices that were destroying the forests; also in the 1990s we pushed hard for clean elections (in my Senate campaign) and for truly universal health care (Pat LaMarche’s two gubernatorial campaigns). We’ve also pushed hard for gay marriage — we’ve been a political party pioneer on the issue; likewise for legalizing marijuana; and we are mounting a strong campaign right now in Portland for a $15 minimum wage. We are now also pushing for renewable energy and local control throughout Maine, something we’ve also done to combat (former) Governor Baldacci’s ill-fated centralization and consolidation of schools and of education generally.

On the electoral front, we have had some success early in the last decade. John Eder of the Portland Green Party twice won election to the Maine House of Representatives. We’ve been stymied by the steady efforts of the major parties to keep new parties out and down. They erect draconian barriers to ballot access for new parties in most states. They perpetuate a “winner take all” system of counting votes which — in combination with clever gerrymandering (which the two parties together arrange) — results in permanently safe seats for one or the other party in most districts. They drag their feet to resist the rising ferment for clean elections, and try to undermine them in the few states like Maine who do have clean elections. These are just a few of the barriers.

Even so, we’ve come very close to electing state House and Senate seats, especially in Portland. We’ve also won many non-partisan races in Portland and have done well in that regard throughout the state. We are now the second political party in Portland after the Democrats. Our electoral efforts will eventually bear more and bigger fruit, but it’s a long hard struggle, longer and harder than I thought it would be when we began in 1984. This is the case across the country. The country badly needs a political revolution that gives the citizens real choice. Clean elections is a vital step; so is ballot access reform (for example, Instant Run-Off Voting, also called Ranked Choice voting), so is proportional representation, something as normal as apple pie in most countries. The Greens have stood for these things since day-one. The country also desperately needs a shake up of the presidential debates so that more than just Democrats and Republicans are permitted to participate. All these efforts at change are going on, all part of an ongoing ferment that chafes more and more at the business-as-usual outlook of the established parties. These things are happening under the radar screen of the big media, who don’t really get what is really going on in America — or don’t want to know.

TR: What do you think about the current state of politics in this state and country?

JR: In one word: It stinks. The big government in Washington is mired in competing bureaucracies and imperialist dreams sopping up most of our tax dollars. Money in gargantuan amounts from 25,000 lobbyists and super billionaires swirls like a virulent disease through the reaches of the government and the re-election coffers of the politicians. Only scraps of money and time are left over for serious issues that imperil our country, our fellow citizens, and the planet. Washington is an unqualified disaster.

Our Maine state government and all the other states as well suffer grievously from the sopping up of tax dollars by the irresponsible cozy corrupters in Washington. Basic needs go unmet for schools at all levels, for jobs, safe neighborhoods, housing, renewable energy, clean and available water, roads and bridges, clean air, small business support, prison reform etc. etc. We can’t go on like this. To top it off, we are saddled with a man in the office of governor who, let’s face it, is a disgrace. I certainly hope he is impeached and removed from office.

Yet, on the bright side, one sees Americans at the local level doing the work, pitching in for family and community, organizing local projects of all kinds (a present and brilliant example is the rising movement for community solar power) and generally being a beacon of hope and competence.

TR: Whether it is creating a new national political party or on a more local level working with a developer to turn land slated for development into a nature preserve, what is it about yourself that over the years has allowed you to make things happen or fight for them against all odds?

JR: This is a blockbuster of a question and hard to do it justice. I’ve always been blessed with a lot of energy. My Dutch heritage also runs strong, making me independent, proud and resolute (if not stubborn) in the face of challenges and barriers and settled opposition. Rank injustice has always burned my gut. Maine has improved me greatly, I feel, because I feel at home here and because I relish what I feel is the Maine spirit of “don’t tread on me” and (equally important) “live and let live.” My marriage to Carla has hugely helped me. Conversations with her over the years have taught me to listen and reach out to others. Being part of the Green Party and its Ten Key Values has given me hope, without which I think I would have sunk out of sight. I’ve also imbibed quite a bit of T.S. Eliot’s counsel “to care and not to care,” finding a continuing life-saving balance.

I fell in love early on in my days on the farm with a down-home belief in democracy, equality, liberty, and the common person. That’s what the spirit of the Republic meant to me and does even more now when it is gasping for breath and badly needs help. Its full recovery from the bottom up is the one thing we can all do to save ourselves, the nation, and the planet from what seems more and more a gathering storm of destruction.

dmoore@timesrecord.com