Carl Frankel is a writer, entrepreneur, and strategist specializing in sustainable development.  A longtime resident of uptown Kingston, he is known locally for holding regular community parties and discussions.  A former Princeton and Columbia universities-educated lawyer, Frankel founded Entelechy Corporation, a business research company specializing in emerging information technologies.  He continues to consult for a wide range of nonprofit and for-profit organizations in activist and corporate settings.  He has been published in Green Market Alert, which he founded and published; Tomorrow, Yes!  The Journal of Positive Futures, and Green@work, and is the author of In Earth's Company: Business, Environment and the Challenge of Sustainability (New Society, 1998).  Frankel's latest book, Out of the Labyrinth: Who We Are, Where We Go Wrong, and What We Can Do About It (Monkfish Book Publishing, 2004), has been acclaimed by ecological economist Hazel Henderson as a book that "raises the literature on sustainability to a new level and is destined to be a classic."  Out of the Labyrinth is also, in Frankel's own words, "a meditation on the subtle and complex relationship between self and society, on the conflicts that are tearing apart our institutions and our culture, and on how to go about addressing these challenges, both personally and collectively," providing a triad of personalities - the Strategist, the Seeker, and the Civilian - as a framework for cultural criticism.  The book is also autobiographical: Frankel tells the story of his embracing of sustainability, and considers his progressive values and theories alongside those of his late, liberal father, a Columbia University philosophy professor, who was murdered, along with Frankel's mother, in 1979.

SP: Why did you write Out of the Labyrinth?

CF: I decided I needed to write the book when the sheer volume of insights started to overwhelm me.  But it was an intellectual book at first, sort of the theory of the triad.  The story of my parents  murder was in there, but it was buried on page 378 or thereabouts.  I sent a muddy first draft out to readers, and one of them came back with: "You've buried the story about your father.  That's what this is really all about.  With that, I realized that I had to "show up" with my own personal story and not try to fob this off as a purely intellectual analysis.  This was an important step in the evolution of the book; what I have tried to do is create a book that is truly integral, that models the content in the form.  I have tried to write a book that is analytical and philosophical, and about our social responsibilities - our civic identity - and is personal and autobiographical as well.  "Ya gotta be the thing," as my friend Eric Booth says; otherwise, your credibility is cast in doubt.

SP: What does sustainability mean to you?

CF: The conventional view of sustainability is that it harmonizes the so-called "three E's" of environmental protection, economic growth, and social equity.  This is useful but limited.  It overlooks the interior dimension of sustainability.  By this I mean two things: First, we create the structures that we then blame for "causing" the crisis of unsustainability.  These structures are art forms reflecting intuitions about self that are projected out onto the world.  Second, we must wake up to the challenge of the current crisis and become engaged citizens in a manner appropriate to our time.  What do we have to learn?  How does our mental model or reality tunnel have to change?  What do we have to become?  This is another, interior dimension of sustainability.

SP: How does the cultural model you call "the triad" work?

CF: Each of us engages in three activities in life.  We try to solve problems, we participate in society and the natural world, and we look for meaning.  Certain subgroups of personalities with their own value systems coalesce around these activities.  I call these three value systems or personalities the Strategist, who is the problem solver; the Citizen, who is in relation with other people and the natural world; and the Seeker, who is looking for meaning.  We tend to identify to a greater or lesser degree with one of these personalities, so we kind of take sides and have these little culture wars - inside our bodies, inside our psyches, and within our interpersonal relationships.  This three-part model also extends out into our broader culture.  What happens is, to the extent that we're imbalanced, when the three subpersonalities aren't in harmony with each other, a neurosis and a dysfunctionality results at all levels, whether personal, interpersonal, organizational, or within the broader culture.  People are at their most positive and powerful when those three forces of civic commitment, spiritual seeking, and strategic cognitive processes - the Citizen, the Seeker and the Strategist - are integrated.

When there's a misalignment between commitment and behavior, it undermines commitment.  One of the things I see in the Green Movement is people who haven't worked out their inner issues.  Their behavior is actually counterproductive.  They get into competitions, they get fundamentalist in their values, and they don't stay open-minded or open-hearted.  That's one of my big concerns - people in the sustainability movement spend an awful lot of time eating their young.  That's one of the reasons I wrote this book.  One of the chapters I was going to call "Why I Am No Longer a Progressive."  And then I thought, okay, don't get too obnoxious about it, don't get too confrontational.  I am a progressive, but we've got to move beyond that whole way of thinking.

SP: How do you define progressive?

CF: I use the term somewhat differently from the old notion of a liberal.  In the context of the triad, liberals have objective-domain values, while progressives embrace depth-dimension values.  I see progressives as the species on the leftwing that subscribes not only to the notion that governmental policies and practices shift toward the left, but that a fundamentally new set of values, a fundamentally new reality tunnel, needs to take hold in the world.

Broadly speaking, I also see two categories of progressives.  There are the grounded ones, and then there are those who are stuck in their anger, who get fundamentalist in their biases.  The challenge these days is to be a progressive who's open-minded and humble about one's own views.  That's not easy when progressives are under such assault by people on the right who seem pathologically incapable of being emotionally or intellectually honest.

SP: Which of the triad's personalities dominates our culture?

CF: I think we're living in the Age of the Strategist.  Corporations are the ultimate in strategic, get-there-fast, end-oriented organizations.  If you look at popular cinema, which reflects the underbelly of the culture, there are endless movies about people turned into automatons, machines taking over, whether it's The Matrix or The Stepford Wives.

SP: What do you want readers to take from your book?

CF: For me, the model was an insight engine - it really got my neurons firing.  I hope some readers will react in the same way.  Some will be more interested in the insights it provides into the world around them.  For others, it will be a tool for introspection and self-learning.  Some might find that it engages their "civic muscle,"  so to speak.I guess I really just want the book to just energize people - get them thinking, get them engaged, and also get them hopeful.  As much as anything, this book is about a light at the end of the tunnel.  This light is what I call the "integral way."  These are dark and difficult times, and it's easy to feel hopeless.  This book says, "We have reason to hope.  But we have to understand what we must do.  We've got to set out on the way."

SP: Do you feel hopeful?

CF: A while back I wrote an essay called "The Despair Question."  If I were a pure rationalist, I would not be hopeful about the future.  There are too many negatives - we seem to be headed toward a perfect storm.  But I am not a pure rationalist - or rather, as a person who is committed to true rationalism, I have to acknowledge how much there is I don't know.  There are so many wild cards out there, so many variables!  We have moved into an era when the rate of change is such that our usual assumptions about cultural and political trajectories have no real meaning; the rate of change is a wild card.  There are technological wildcards as well - we might see pollution-free energy within a few decades, for example.  And then there is the wild card of massively networked communications.  It sounds corny, but global consciousness can change overnight - consider 9/11!  So I think we are moving into a time of extraordinary uncertainty and high risk, but I choose to view this as a high adventure, not that we are doomed.

And if we are doomed...well, about the profoundest comment I've heard on that subject comes from my friend Vicki Robin, who said to me: "I don't know if hope is the issue any longer; it's really more about faith."  In other words, if we are moving into apocalyptically bad times, our challenge is to be OK with that, to be grateful for all the wondrousness that has been.