People

Rebel With a Cause: Edward Norton, Jr.

JUST OUT OF YALE IN 1991, NORTON WENT TO WORK IN NEW YORK FOR THE Enterprise Foundation, an affordable housing nonprofit founded by his late grandfather, the visionary urban developer James Rouse, and devoted himself to working to help ease urban poverty. Today, Norton is a foundation trustee, working most recently to infuse the affordable housing movement with green-friendly programs. In 2006, he founded the nonprofit’s Solar Neighbors Program, which so far has provided solar panels to hundreds of lower-income families in Los Angeles, cutting their energy bills by more than half. As more families sign up, Norton wants to expand the solar project to other cities, including New York. A 15-year resident of Manhattan, Norton also donates his time to Friends of the High Line and gives money to a variety of other causes, including Earth Justice’s pro bono legal aid program.

Editor-in-Chief Marcia Stepanek caught up with Norton to discuss his views on giving, the environment, and what it takes to make a difference. What follows is an edited version of that interview.

On screen, you play anger brilliantly, from your role as Aaron Stempler in the 1996 film Primal Fear to your role as a reformed neo-Nazi in 1998’s American History X. Your last film, The Painted Veil, is about an angry doctor fighting to save cholera victims in 1920s China. But what makes you angry for real? Well, social injustice fires my righteous indignation. What also fires it, I think, is greed or the short-sightedness of greed. In certain theaters of engagement, especially when talking about the environment, I get increasingly angry, because it seems like on that issue, there is greed and there is a kind of willful denial by some of the involved parties, for reasons having totally to do with short-term gains. It’s almost inexcusable, and that definitely provokes an impulse in me toward real, direct confrontation. But I think you’ve got to temper your emotional reactions to some of these things and focus on positive solutions in many, many instances, as aggravating as it can be at times. I think you’ve got to find ways to work with people on the other side of an issue if you’re going to find a long-term solution to it. Affordable housing is a good example. There are a lot of people who could say, well, you know, it would be better if we had more federal support for low-income housing, and that’s certainly true. Some might believe that direct grants from HUD are the way to go. But when you can come up with something like a low-income housing tax credit program, which enjoys strong bipartisan support because it accomplishes the goal but accomplishes it by giving incentives to market-based forces — it’s a better solution. A good solution acknowledges everybody’s priorities, and sometimes you’ve got to try to find a way around conflict to get to collaboration. It’s not always possible, of course. When an oil company is going to go drill somewhere, for example, I think sometimes there’s no negotiating, really. Sometimes, I think, you just have to fight.

Before Eliot Spitzer was elected governor, you and he sat down to talk about the affordable housing movement. I knew that Eliot was in the process of developing a lot of his policy and white papers on different issues, and I approached him at a fairly early stage, when he was really just beginning to assemble some of his personnel and his thinking on the housing issue in New York State. I encouraged him to engage with Enterprise Community Partners, which is an organization that I’ve been on the board of for a long time. I worked for Enterprise when I was right out of college. It’s a leader in the nonprofit housing movement in the United States and in low-income housing development. We wanted to be an information resource to him as he developed his thinking, so we spent some really great times with Eliot. He came out with us, spent an entire day going through the South Bronx, and really looked at what was happening on the cutting edge of community-based housing projects. He spent a long afternoon with a lot of community leaders who are working on housing and really absorbed what they were saying and what they felt the state could do better to expedite their work. He was just fantastic. I think there are some people who are very cynical about the state’s role in the housing equation but I don’t think there was anybody there that day who didn’t walk away thrilled with the penetration that Eliot brought to the issue.

—Edward Norton, Jr.

You’ve been a resident New Yorker for 15 years, and are also a supporter of the Friends of the High Line, which is a group that has been working to transform the abandoned elevated rail line on the West Side of Manhattan into a new city park. Yeah, the High Line project is a great example of what people can do just with a good idea and some motivation to see it through. Sometimes, I think, people think of civic action and philanthropy as a function of money. But the High Line is, to me, a great example of the most heroic kind of civic leadership: involvement, in this case by two young guys, Joshua David and Robert Hammond. These guys just happened to meet at a community board meeting that they both decided to attend about the fate of the High Line, and they walked out of that meeting recognizing that each had been the only other person there asking why no one was talking about creatively redeveloping this incredibly unique piece of infrastructure. They had completely different full-time lives, they had personal lives, and they sort of sat together over coffee and said someone should do something about this. You couldn’t script a more Don Quijote-esque, poking- at-windmills kind of dream. When they decided to take it on, it was almost a fait accompli that it would be torn down, and they, in the course of less than six years, turned it completely around and are now watching the construction of what’s going to be one of the biggest new public spaces in Manhattan since Central Park, and it’s just amazing what they’ve done. To me, it’s a totally, hugely inspiring example of what people can do when they set their minds to it and devote their energies to it. They’re going to go down in history, I think, as being like Jackie Onassis, protecting Grand Central Station. I mean, what they’ve done is really, really going to be enjoyed by people for many generations. This was all the inspiration of Joshua and Robert. All I’ve really done on that is be an early advocate for the project.

I know you’re also very much interested in renewable energy, chiefly solar energy. I’ve been involved with Enterprise, obviously, for a long time. Along with a couple of other board members for a lot of years, I’ve been pushing the leadership of the organization to make Enterprise not just a leader in the low-income housing equation but also in the greening of affordable housing. I wanted Enterprise to lead the field in applying environmentally sustainable techniques and ideas to affordable housing development. People obviously had already started to talk about imposing green standards in commercial buildings and construction, but no one was really talking about it in the affordable housing movement, or at least, it wasn’t being as broadly discussed. Enterprise has, in a lot of ways, really pounced on that and established a program called the Green Communities Initiative, for which they’ve committed more than $550 million to provide seed money, grant money, and equity investment in low-income projects that meet green standards. And it was then, in the course of working on the challenge of that, that I started realizing that certain things like solar energy, which can reduce utility bills for lowincome people, was priced at a premium that was too high to include in the affordable housing model. And so I started becoming interested in the idea of creating a data pool to show what solar could do for low-income people. And that led to the challenge of trying to get some solar panels on a significant number of low-income homes. I went to BP Solar, a subsidiary of BP, and proposed to them this idea of a program through which, when celebrities or wellknown people in any field buy a solar system for their own home, BP donates a matching system to a low-income family through Enterprise’s home-ownership program. They were very excited about it, so we created this program called the Solar Enablers Program, and we’ve been working on it for over a year, and it’s really starting to take off. It’s gotten a lot of response.

Which cities are involved? Right now, the systems are being put on people’s homes in Los Angeles through Enterprise’s low-income home ownership program in Los Angeles. I think we’re up to about 35 families who have gotten systems on their homes. And the systems essentially eliminate their utility bills—which, for a family making in the realm of $30,000 to $40,000 a year, is quite significant. And, of course, there’s a lot of radiant benefit to it. A 3-kilowatt system probably eliminates about 5,000 pounds of carbon emissions a year, and that’s every year. And it’s been great to see people like [actors] Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman connecting with families in South Central over the systems they’ve got in their homes. And we’ve had some really cool interactions between people across socioeconomic lines, all of them getting excited about the potential for solar out in LA. I think we have some things coming down the pipe that are really going to scale it up to a much more significant level, even some direct grants and so forth.

What about New York? In New York, there are plenty of community-based nonprofits doing multifamily apartments, you know, rehabs and things like that, that we can donate systems to also. We’re focusing right now on Los Angeles because it’s where the performance of the systems is the best and because we’re trying to create a concentrated sort of data pool. But we’re absolutely thinking that it could happen in lots of locations. For instance, we just found out that the whole University of California system is going to commit to being carbon neutral soon, and we’re getting our program certified so that direct donations of solar systems to families through our program can count as part of an offset for that kind of thing. So you can kind of see where all of this can go. If universities and other institutions start looking for ways to offset their carbon production, if they want to do it in a way that contributes to their communities, they could end up donating solar systems to low-income housing. It’s a fantastic interface of a whole lot of different issues, and to me, that’s one of the most exciting things—seeing the way that a lot of these things interconnect and could be addressed in ways that trigger a kind of rippling effect. You realize that it is all connected in some sense.

Besides founding Enterprise, your grandfather, James Rouse, developed many real estate ventures around the country, including New York’s South Street Seaport. Do you remember your earliest awareness of something that he said or something that he did that influenced your commitment to doing this kind of work? There’s no question that he was and remains a real source of inspiration to me, almost as a guide in terms of his sense of the importance of service, for want of a better way of putting it. He was, on a very deep level, committed to serving other people in his life. Even in his development career, he was enormously focused on the idea that the legitimate purpose of business was not for profit alone, that it was to provide a needed service and in a way that elevated people, and through elevating people, to derive a profit or success. So he applied a service of spirit even to his commercial career as a developer.

Kind of like today’s “new” social entrepreneurs who marry business with social change. He was one of the first, yes? Certainly from a very early age, I was aware of it in people’s response to him. A lot of people looked to him as an inspiration, and that was impressive to me when I was young, and we were all obviously proud of him. But as an adult, I mean, it took on a new level in the sense that I worked for Enterprise in New York when I was right out of school. I can definitely remember him coming up and having these kinds of luncheons with a lot of captains of industry, big corporate leaders. And they would come in and, you know, I don’t know what they were expecting, but he would really go right at them with the need to serve. He would charge them with the mission of taking responsibility for the endemic problems of poverty and urban decay, and he would cite the statistics of poverty and urban decay in America, and he would look right at them and say, These conditions are not uncorrectable, and if they’re not corrected, this country’s going to go right down the toilet, and the people in this room are directly responsible for addressing them, nobody else. And people would sit up very straight. He fired people up. He kicked people out of their apathy and got them to confront the fact that a lot of problems we face do, in some ways, get accepted as endemic problems or problems that are, somehow, uncorrectable. He was fond of saying that if something ought to be, it can be, if you have the will to make it so. It seems natural when you hear it, and yet it’s also quite bold in the sense that it’s not the conventional wisdom about many of the deepseated problems in American life.

Even today? You know, I think more than anything, he taught me that the things that seem monumental or monolithic are the issues you have to take on, and sometimes even just the act of beginning something is the integral first step — because a good idea has a tendency to snowball. And I think that’s true in his own experience of founding Enterprise because that grew out of some people coming to him with an idea about how to address housing, and he responded even somewhat dismissively and then ultimately sort of saw the light and realized that he was in some ways retreating into the conventional wisdom, and they sort of motivated him. And when he started Enterprise, it was an idea about how to make publicprivate partnerships to deal with housing problems, and it grew and grew and grew and grew and grew into this organization that’s done $7.5 billion worth of investments in housing in the last 20 years. It’s kind of also like what the High Line guys are doing. I mean, they were crazy to try to do what they did, but they started it. It then picked up, took on a life of its own and makes a difference. We’re now certainly experiencing that with the solar neighbors program, which we initially thought, well, if we can get 50 systems on families’ houses, that would be pretty great, and already there’s all kinds of things indicating to us now that just by starting it, other people with great ideas will gravitate toward it. And then, all of a sudden, our sense of the scale that we can take this thing to starts to expand exponentially. I think sometimes you just have to get through that first 10 percent of the time when it all feels half-baked and a pipedream, and then make it even a small reality, and then it has the chance to grow.

What do you make of the new activism around environmentalism, in general? Environmentalism has, I think, evolved rapidly over the course of my lifetime from something that, 30 years ago, was mostly about preserving natural places, and now is something so much more encompassing. I think people have begun to realize very rapidly, and in some ways frighteningly, that there’s no such thing as these sort of isolated pockets of environments in the world. We are in the environment always. We now understand that the environmental machinery of the biosphere is, in fact, an integrated machinery that is inextricably interrelated all over the planet. You can’t talk about global warming without talking about air quality, without talking about water quality, without talking about biodiversity, without talking about oceans. It’s all integrated. And I think there’s almost no question to me — and I’m very committed to some of these other issues I’m working on — but there’s almost no question to me that the signature issue of my generation is the issue of climate change and carbon loading. Sometimes I try to imagine 1,000 or 2,000 years from now, and I don’t think there can be any question that when people look back on this time, that the story of it will be either that we became aware that we were changing our environment in radical ways and we got a handle on it, or it will be that we failed to get a handle on it. We’re racing toward a tipping point that is going to define the character of the way human beings live on the planet for thousands and thousands of years. And that’s terrifying, but to me it’s also very clarifying. You hear people talk about World War II and how that defined that generation. When you think about what will be the defining challenge of my generation, I don’t think there’s any question it is the environment.

How do you marry your passion for the environment with your art? I’ve produced a couple of documentaries. My company’s made a few of them, and I’ve hosted and narrated the National Geographic PBS series called Strange Days on Planet Earth, which is, in essence, a series that articulates and depicts exactly what I was just talking about: the integrated nature of Earth’s biosystems. And it was a very big, award-winning series. It’s a way for me to fuse my role as, you know, a storyteller, an actor, communicating that narrative. Storytelling is one among many, many, many things that needs to be going on to increase people’s awareness. But then at times, too, while I’m glad to do that, I feel in my own mind that storytelling needs to be married with even more direct action, whether it’s time or putting money that you have into the support of other people who are advocating or acting on those issues. And there are any number of fantastic organizations that I think are proliferating that are working on these issues.

I support Earth Justice, which used to be the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, and it’s now sort of independent, but basically comprises really crack lawyers offering pro bono legal assistance to smaller environmental action groups all over the country and doing just amazing, amazing work. That, to me, is particularly relevant in a moment where you have an Administration and a Department of the Interior that’s acting about as aggressively as you could ever imagine against the interests of environmental sustainability. And so I think, literally, when you talk about conflict, I think in that context it’s incredibly important to have lawyers going out and stopping these people from raping and exploiting the environment with the time that they’ve got left. And I think that [the lawyers have] been incredibly effective. So I’ve ratcheted up my overall giving, and I’ve increased the ratio to be very heavily weighted toward environmental protection efforts. I think it’s the hot button issue to me right now.

Paul Farmer, the public health activist, says that philanthropy is stepping in where governments have stepped away. I think that’s very true. My grandfather used to talk about that a lot. He talked about the rise of the third sector. There is a public sector and a private sector, and in some ways there’s almost inevitably in our system a gap, a gulf between what market-driven, private interests provide and what government provides. And I think, again, very much in my lifetime, I would say you’ve seen a phenomenon of the rise of the nonprofit. Internationally, they would call it the NGO. In the States we’d call it the nonprofit organization. In many ways, I think, America has been really ahead of the curve. It’s now redefining philanthropy, philanthropy that a hundred years ago was all about the Carnegies and the Rockefellers and the robber barons putting money back into society in the form of cultural and medical institutions they created. But since the late 1960s and early ’70s, we’ve begun to see the rise of an entirely alternative mechanism for bridging that gap. I’d go further than what Paul Farmer said: I’d say that what neither government nor corporations can achieve — you know, where both of those fall short — that’s where philanthropy steps in.

And I think in these times you have to define philanthropy as more than just monetary giving. It is also about the organizational proliferation in that nonprofit sector. I think that’s become a massive force in American life, and I think very much for the better. Sure, some people focus on what government fails to do. When you talk about what makes me angry, I have to say I also think that the failure of corporations to meet what I consider to be their civic obligation — and beyond that, even the degree to which corporations in many ways represent the source of the problems that we’re encountering — is also one of the fundamental issues that we’ve got to address in our society.

I think that a much higher mandate of responsibility has got to be placed on the corporate world because I think that those are institutions that are so powerful and so big that even all of the philanthropy in the world can’t fill that gap if corporations and government continue to push things in regressive directions. It’s all so enormous. So I think corporate accountability is a big part of making change.

What do you make of cause marketing? I think it’s good. I participated in the Red Project. This is about people asserting some power over corporations, asserting their values and priorities, saying that if you as a corporation are not in sync with them, you’re not going to get business — and if you are in alignment, then you will. That’s a very powerful idea. The idea of social responsibility branding is long overdue. People are getting sophisticated. They’re starting to realize that they want things to be done in a sustainable and in a healthful way. At the moment, as with organic foods, a lot of people are choosing to pay a slight premium for products made by companies that fulfill those expectations and values. I’m optimistic. I think it’s going to become increasingly difficult for companies to compete that don’t meet those standards, and I think that these types of things, like the Red campaign, can demonstrate [this] well. It would be great to see that echo out in other ways.

Can philanthropy work on a global scale? Certainly, environmental concerns are a global issue and a global movement, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that that idea can and will take root all over. I think that fact makes it worthwhile for people like Bono to transcend their roles as artists and in some ways become spokesmen for the values of their generation. I think those people have a very unique capacity to speak to young people, and I think young people are clearly what will drive the growth of these ideas. Informing and enlisting the enthusiasm and the actions of young people is incredibly important.

Young people have always been idealistic. Yes, but you could make the argument that my generation, Gen X, is the first generation that’s grown up almost from the cradle with at least some sense of these problems, like the environment. I think by a factor of 10, if not more, we were much more deeply immersed from a much younger age than our parents were in the basic incontrovertible facts of environmental damage. We’ve been faced with the threat of that, and the images of it from a very young age, and I think it’s a set of accepted truths that are much more deeply embedded in our consciousness than they were in our parents’ consciousness. And that’s not because there’s any superior capacity on our part. It’s just that these are things that really have only been coming into view in the last 30 years or so. And so I think that the generation that’s been raised with a deeper sense of these problems is going to be the generation that’s going to turn the heat up on the drive to fix it. I’m very optimistic about the speed with which I think that consciousness is spreading. But it’s a big, big challenge because the speed at which corporations are perpetrating some of this environmental degradation for profit is really frightening.

What influenced your decision to do The Painted Veil? I produced the movie, and I’d been working on it for six or seven years. It is, at its core, an epic love story that takes place in 1920s China. But on many levels — if there’s a subtext to it or an undercurrent in it — it’s very much about people transcending their own limitations and getting engaged in something that’s bigger than they are. It’s about a doctor and his wife who are in a bad relationship and who go out into this enormous humanitarian tragedy of a cholera epidemic in China and, by helping other people, find their way back to caring better for each other. It’s also very much a story about a young woman from a kind of limited worldview growing up and becoming a bigger and better person by getting engaged in the larger world around her. A lot of times, with altruism, I boil it all down to something my grandfather used to say which is, you don’t have to have a lot of money to contribute. He used to say, Figure out what you’re making after tax every year and give 10 percent of it away. If you’re making $20,000 a year or $2 million a year, you can afford to give away 10 percent of your after-tax earnings. And since college, I’ve always sort of crunched it out and realized that it’s absolutely true. So I tried to do it when I was making $16,000 a year, and I think, as you make even more, frankly, you can probably afford more than 10 percent. Money is a funny thing. People who have a lot of it sometimes never get their minds around how much of it they have and so give much less than they can afford. But I think 10 percent is a good benchmark to try to meet.