How can railroads reduce political polarization—and facilitate a renewable energy revolution? Reconnect America is the new podcast from Solutionary Rail that presents a creative yet common sense vision for U.S. railroads. It weaves together the genius of community and technical experts, workers and policymakers, advocates and scholars. Reconnect America culminates a decade of research, writing, and advocacy aimed at illuminating the ways in which the U.S. rail system can overcome its woes and address 21st century problems.
Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future.
This project is 56% funded. Please help us reach our goal without paywalls or ads by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.
Meet the Host: I’m Bill Moyer, your host for the Reconnect America podcast. For the last decade, I’ve been interviewing and learning about rail transportation, electrification and transmission from all sorts of angles and all sorts of folks from across the US and beyond. It has been - and continues to be - a fascinating journey and an honor to learn from these intelligent and generous people.
I came to this subject somewhat by mistake. As an activist, I had a conversation with a railroad worker, Mike Elliott, who was on the other side of a fight to establish a coal export facility in the Puget Sound. Mike challenged me to “green” a 2008 white paper on modernizing the Northern Transcon (the rail corridor from Chicago to Puget Sound). For years, as an activist I had worked to apply the lessons of Col. John R. Boyd’s work on grand strategy, via his protege and my friend and mentor Chuck Spinney. As a person who is interested in how regular people can come together to take on mightier foes, I took Mike’s challenge seriously. I put together a small team and three years later, we published the Solutionary Rail book.
Understanding grand strategy is essential if we are to manifest visions for a better life and a world that reflects our deepest aspirations and values. What’s crystal clear to me is that victories do not come from isolation, but through our connections with others. I hope that someday, people will look back and consider Solutionary Rail to be a case study in grand strategy, an example of a movement that transcended real and perceived differences to overcome the divide and conquer strategies of the rich and powerful. In this way, we can make a material difference in people’s lives by delivering an infrastructure for a more resilient, connected and prosperous society.
Sign up to help out or donate to support this work at SolutionaryRail.org
Reconnect America: Trailer