Those of us who were lucky to have worked with ILSR’s co-founder David Morris over many decades invite you to join us in celebrating his many accomplishments and his impact on us and in the fields that ILSR has worked in over these last 50 years. Organization co-founder, vice president, board member, researcher, program director, analyst, public speaker, author, activist, columnist, and mentor are some of the many hats that David wore over the years. We salute his many talents and accomplishments, and send him our love and best wishes as he enters into his new career of retirement!
— John Bailey, John Farrell, Christopher Mitchell, Stacy Mitchell, and Brenda Platt
Brenda Platt (and so many others)“Visionary, ahead of his time, wicked smart, excellent speaker and storyteller.”
It all started back in 1974 in a brownstone house in Washington D.C.’s Adams Morgan neighborhood where an energetic group of community activists including David Morris, Neil Seldman, and Gil Friend, decided to formally establish the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). The purpose of ILSR was outlined by David in the inaugural issue of ILSR’s Self-Reliance newsletter:
“The Institute for Local Self-Reliance was established to investigate the technical feasibility of community self-reliance in high density living areas and to examine the implications of such decentralization. The staff of the Institute is committed to urban life and to the resolution of some of the problems which face the 75% of Americans who do live in urban areas. We are also committed to exploring the potential for self-reliance, not of individuals or of nations, but of humanly-scaled cooperative communities, of neighborhoods and cities. It is on this level that people have the intellectual, financial, human and political resources to make significant advances in the direction of community self-sufficiency; and it is on this level, also, that organized groups of people can take control over their own lives and wealth and begin to affect a transition away from the concentration of political and economic power which characterizes American democracy.”
As David wrote in a tribute to co-founder Neil Seldman, in the early days, “ILSR developed a decentralist framework that could be applied to all sectors, but we wanted to drill down in a few sectors to get on-the-ground experience and discover the relationship between policy and practice, and learn what works and what doesn’t, and see how change can and often does come from the bottom up.”
Before helping to create ILSR, David received his undergraduate degree in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. He went on to get his Masters degree in Political Science/Latin American Studies from the University of Florida and spent some formative time in Chile, which led to Random House publishing his book, We Must Make Haste Slowly: The Process of Revolution in Chile. He also began work on his PhD in Public Policy, which he was awarded by Union Graduate School in 1976.
David’s initial work focused on decentralized energy policy and technologies, issues he continued working on throughout his 50-year tenure. Three of his earliest reports focused on the emergence of commercially available solar photovoltaics. One, the Dawning of Solar Cells was published shortly after the first solar cell manufacturing plant for terrestrial applications (Solarex) opened in suburban Washington, D.C. Another, Kilowatt Counter (co-written with Gil Friend), was a consumer-targeted primer on energy concepts and use motivated by the 1974 oil price shock. And in 1978, David was the project director of a research team that produced, Planning for Energy Self-Reliance: A Case Study of the District of Columbia, the first study to track the flow of energy-related dollars through an urban economy. They found that 85 cents of every energy dollar spent left the city and provided estimates of the economic impact that increased energy efficiency could have in the city.
With Ronald Reagan in the White House, the 1980s found David examining and promoting the broader concepts and application of local self-reliance. He published his third book, Self-Reliant Cities, providing the intellectual framework and practical examples of how cities’ could exercise their authority over their economy and environment. He wrote The New City States, where he explored the changing role of the municipal corporation and strategies that could spur sustainable and equitable economic development based on local self-reliance. Mayor George Latimer of Saint Paul, Minn., offered his thoughts on it, “For those of us who believe that cities are not mere passive places but are active agents for change…this book is a must… full of ideas and hope.”
David became ILSR’s first remote staffer and he found himself working closely with Mayor Latimer in Saint Paul. David’s resulting case study, The Homegrown Economy: A Prescription for Saint Paul’s Future, described resource flows within the city and provided a look at local enterprises that served as models of self-reliant economic development including the nation’s largest hot-water district-heating system. With state regulators and legislators based in the city along with Minnesota’s generally progressive stance on issues, David decided to hang around and see if Minnesota could become a laboratory for local self-reliance. For 14 years, David had a regular column in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press newspaper (distributed throughout North America by Knight Ridder News Service), which he used often to write about the concepts of local self-reliance (see a selection of his 1990s columns).
In 1983, after the Supreme Court upheld federal law requiring electric utilities to purchase power from independent producers, David wrote, Be Your Own Power Company, the first how-to book for small-scale power producers on negotiating a contract with a utility under the new law. In all of David’s energy work, the idea of creating the rules and pathways for energy consumers to become energy producers was central.
As ILSR’s Neil Seldman and Brenda Platt were fighting dozens if not hundreds of trash incinerators across the country, David saw the need for ILSR to document cities and counties with the highest recycling levels and share data on costs, systems, results, lessons learned, and tips for replication. David directed the work to do just that, and Brenda became the national expert on the best rural, urban, and suburban recycling programs, something that led to a series of reports over many years, each highlighting the accelerating growth of reuse and recycling in the U.S. These products benefited greatly from David’s probing questions and strategic thinking.
In the summer of 1992, David and John Bailey (now ILSR’s Development Director) were in David’s house strategizing how to make Minnesota a leader in distributed renewable energy and energy efficiency. John was given an impromptu job interview, and David hired him on the spot. This set them on the path of setting up ILSR’s new branch, an official Minnesota office near the University of Minnesota campus in a neighborhood called Dinkytown.
With the new office up and running, John and David started a fruitful collaboration on a wide range of energy and climate-related research and advocacy projects. In 1994, David played a key role in a statewide coalition and provided an economic analysis that helped persuade the Minnesota state legislature to mandate that Northern States Power Company (now Xcel Energy) acquire up to 825 megawatts of wind electricity and 125 MW of biomass electricity. It was the first significant renewable energy mandate in the nation, and the process put a spotlight on the high costs and inequities inherent in Minnesota’s nuclear power generation (see our recent podcast episode covering this history).
David also oversaw ILSR’s efforts to establish a revenue-neutral $1.3 billion tax shift at the state level which would have raised energy taxes and decreased other taxes (view the archive of research and legislative materials). While this effort to establish a state-level “ecological tax reform” was not enacted, the debate was robust, and it helped with another body of work at the MN Public Utilities Commission where, in 1997, Minnesota regulators established a set of “environmental externalities” including a price on carbon that the state’s utilities had to use in their resource planning process to determine the accurate full cost of new power generation. This put wind and solar on a more level playing field with fossil fuel power plants to meet the growing electricity demand in the state.
David’s 2001 book, Seeing the Light, argued that disruptive decentralizing technologies were about to confront an electricity system that over 100 years had developed rules that favored large scale and remote power generation. U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone noted, “For those who want to know what is wrong with our electricity system, and how to fix it, Seeing the Light is a must-read.”
In the mid-1990s into the late 2000s, David supervised a dramatic expansion of the ILSR staff in Minnesota by establishing two new program areas: The Carbohydrate Economy and The New Rules Project. His management style was largely one of popping into your workspace and saying things like, “Whatcha working on?”, or, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if” and “We should really look at x, y, z” and suddenly he’d be up at the chalkboard furiously writing and an hour later you’d have yourself a brand new to-do list and 10 to 20 weeks of new work.
David also instilled in many of us an important and useful understanding of where to find expertise. He used to say that Neil Seldman learned how the waste industry worked by riding alongside garbage workers on their routes. As young researchers, we would read academic literature, of course, but the main way we were taught by David to do our work was by calling people — business owners, workers, community leaders. ILSR is known for being way ahead of the curve on a lot of issues. That’s thanks to David, because he and now, we, have always prioritized frontline knowledge.
Many of us recall joining the staff and having to routinely demonstrate the soundness of our research skills. With David’s piercing blue eyes and those skeptical eyebrows, it sometimes felt like a trial by fire. With your pristine research memo in hand, and David’s copy marked up in red ink, you’d sit down, and then this really, really smart guy would start asking questions. There were a lot of questions. And they weren’t the kind whose answers lay in whatever you’d read on the topic. They required extrapolating, or identifying hidden risks, or understanding the underlying market structure, or calculating the true cost of something. We all learned an important lesson – if ILSR was going to write about or recommend policy solutions for an issue, it was important to know the details deeply enough to get it right. David’s probing, sometimes uncomfortable questions were part of an incredible mentorship that made all of us better at what we’ve been doing all these decades later. For that, we send David our deep gratitude.
The “Carbohydrate Economy” was a term coined by David to encompass a movement to drive technical and policy innovations that would move our oil-based economy toward one based on plant matter. Unlike other efforts going on to promote new uses of plant matter, ILSR’s project also focused on ownership issues — promoting business structures that would reward farmers and farming communities. As David wrote back in 2000, “One of the lessons learned from agricultural history is that the only way for the farmer to stay ahead is to move up the value-added ladder: that is, to gain some of the profits from processing the raw material into a higher-priced product.”
There are so many innovative reports, speeches, and other materials that David had a hand in, it would be a fool’s errand to try and cover them all here, but interested readers are encouraged to dive into ILSR’s Carbohydrate Economy archive. It was an incredible body of work and David was often traveling around the country giving speeches and conducting media interviews during this time.
In the 1990s, David launched a new initiative he called, The New Rules Project. As he wrote at the time, ”Why new rules? Because the old ones don’t work any longer. They undermine local economies, subvert democracy, weaken our sense of community, and ignore the costs of our decisions on the next generation.” Across nine sectors, from agriculture and governance to retail and taxation, David and his team identified hundreds of rules (e.g. legislation, ordinances, and regulations) that worked to build community by supporting humanly scaled politics and economics. After about a decade, a broad economic downturn led to the demise of the New Rules Project but it ultimately gave birth to ILSR’s enduring Community Broadband Networks, Energy Democracy, and Independent Business initiatives. See this January 2011 archive of the newrules.org web site for a peek at the broad scope of the project back in the day.
During his career, he gave countless presentations and seemed loath to say no to the many invitations he received. One memorable night in 2007, he interviewed The New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, in a wide ranging discussion about current events at a Minneapolis synagogue. You can get a sense of David’s engaging style in the introduction segment below (the complete event is here).
David was often tapped as a subject area expert by many local news outlets in Minneapolis and Saint Paul including Minnesota Public Radio, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Saint Paul Pioneer Press, and WCCO-TV. Below is a clip from WCCO’s Good Question and Project Energy segments which regularly enlisted David’s insights. This clip below also shows some of the infamous blackboards in ILSR’s Minnesota office covered with his musings.
In 2004, Morris wrangled about $70,000 in funding to create and launch American Voice 2004: A Pocket Guide to Issues and Allegations, a web resource to help voters truly understand critical policy issues of the day. American Voice 2004 explored issues in-depth (e.g. abortion, welfare, social security, military privatization, same-sex marriage, minimum wage, capital punishment, and more), presenting both sides with well-documented arguments. It was designed to cultivate good citizenship and fill the void left by the 20-second sound bites proliferating across traditional media. David felt that strong communities depend on an active and involved citizenry and that called for easy access to credible and pertinent information. The website also had a section where “Dr. Dave” answered public policy questions sent in from visitors. More than 30 public libraries, at least 14 university libraries, and many online publications linked to AmericanVoice2004 during that campaign season.
Towards the end of David’s ILSR career he stepped back from his formal leadership role as Co-Director and was focused on supporting the next generation of ILSR leaders, offering key strategic help to our initiative directors, and being the primary keeper of our institutional memory. A number of newly minted staff members appreciated David for his kindness and generosity with his time. Some recalled how he let them use his residence for months at a time while they looked for more permanent housing in the Twin Cities.
His last big work push was to launch ILSR’s “Public Good Initiative” which later morphed into the From the Desk of David Morris, a blog covering local self-reliance, equity, and democracy issues far and wide. On the launch of the Public Good, David wrote, “Today there is a wild imbalance between those who favor protecting public assets and those who do not, between those who believe the public should take priority over the private, and those who do not, between those who would emphasize the “we” over the “me” and those who would not. This initiative is a response to this imbalance.” An archived version of the site can be found here.
In December 2022, David had a “fireside chat” with our Building Local Power podcast team offering all of us a history lesson on the self-reliance framework that underpins ILSR’s work. He discussed how that framework evolved over five decades, the organization’s inherent aversion to bigness, and the successes and hardships of ILSR’s early years.
Podcast (buildinglocalpower): Play in new window | Download
For ILSR’s 50th birthday celebration this year, David gave his last big address to a full house at the Howard Theatre in Washington D.C., not too far from the site of ILSR’s first office location. It was a fitting location to hear his reflections on the accomplishments of the organization he co-founded and hear that he is confident that ILSR remains in good hands.
With that look back at an amazing career, we wish David well in his retirement and thank him profusely for all he has done to make the world a better place, for bringing us along for the ride, and inspiring us to take his vision into the future. We will certainly continue to lean on him for support as ILSR moves into its next half-century of impact.
Sending David our deep gratitude and admiration for all of his great work.
