Ted Nace


Ted Nace is an American writer, publisher, and environmentalist notable for his critique of corporate personhood and his anti-coal activism. He co-founded Peachpit Press from his house and grew it into a substantive publisher of computer-related books; it grew quickly, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle. In 2008 he became active in efforts to block the development and use of coal power plants in the United States which promotes protests such as sit–ins at coal mines and banks. He was described in the Huffington Post as "one of the amazing brains and strategists behind the anti-coal movement." In 2008 he co-founded the wiki , a San Francisco-based website to share information similar to Wikipedia and Citizendium but focusing on anti-coal advocacy. He is also a free-lance writer living in San Francisco and has written essays which have appeared in publications such as Orion Magazine.

Early life

Ted Nace grew up in California and North Dakota in his hometown of Dickinson. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover and graduated with the school's first co-educational class in 1974. He graduated from Stanford University. While in graduate school at Berkeley, he worked for the Environmental Defense Fund and helped develop computer simulations that analyzed replacing coal–fired power plants with alternative energy programs. Nace worked for the Dakota Resource Council, a citizens' group connected with the Energy Action Coalition concerned about the impacts of energy development on agriculture and rural communities.

Computer publishing

Nace worked as an editor for the computer magazine PC World and as a columnist for Publish! and Computer Currents magazine. He founded Peachpit Press with Michael Gardner in 1985, initially working out of his apartment in the Bay Area of San Francisco. He wrote numerous how–to books on computer–related subjects. Computer writer Elaine Weinmann described how Nace let authors typeset and illustrate their own books and described his publishing approach as user-friendly and innovative. The company grew in size and sales, and had a publishing orientation towards books relating to Apple computers, and was described as a leader in books about digital graphics. The firm published the MacBible series, the Real World series, the Visual QuickStart series, and most of the titles by writer Robin Williams such as The Mac is not a typewriter and the Little Mac Book. He sold Peachpit in 1994 and left the company in 1996.

Activism

Mr. Nace explored the relation between corporations and democracy in America. In 2003, his book Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy argued his case for the deleterious effects of corporations on society and the economy and the specious character of their quasi-legal enablements and suggested that corporations were undermining American democracy:
Nace wrote about how earlier in his life he had created a corporation with Peachpit Press.
In his book, Nace tried to explore how corporations got what he viewed as "too much power" and how the institution developed in America. In an interview, Nace explained that the modern corporation was a structure that "gelled about a century ago", and that it is a "sort of life form" which has "persistence, metabolism, reproduction, adaptation". Nace criticized corporations for being driven by profit. He suggested the 1886 Supreme Court decision of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad was the "most well known" of a string of mistaken decisions which, in his view, gave corporations the same rights as humans.
Nace argued that corporations such as General Motors helped engineer the eclipse of America's streetcar system in the 1930s and 1940s. Nace argued that Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell was a pro-business advocate. Nace criticized the role that business plays in shaping political policy in the last few decades.
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In the mid 2000s, Nace turned his focus to a specific area of environmentalism, namely anti-coal activism. He founded CoalSwarm in 2007. He was quoted about his thinking about the need to reduce coal:
Nace argued that coal usage is creating a "clear planetary crisis" but that implementing a solution is being blocked by "well-financed lobbying and PR sponsored by the coal and utility companies."

Reactions by critics

Environmental journalist Tina Gerhardt described Nace's book Climate Hope as a first-person narrative about a personal journey as well as a chronicle of the anti–coal movement and described Nace's climate agenda as "do-able". "Nace's volume Climate Hope: On the Front Lines of the Fight against Coal," she wrote, "is at once a first-person narrative about a personal journey from concern to growing curiosity to the front lines but also a chronicle of the growing anti-coal movement, particularly between 2007 and 2009."
A New York Times critic found Nace's Gangs of America to be well-researched and made a compelling case that corporations have too much political power, but the writer faulted Nace for ignoring the benefit to American shareholders and for slighting "the contributions the corporate form has made to average Americans' prosperity." Critic Alan T. Saracevic in the San Francisco Chronicle said that Gangs of America makes a case that corporations have evolved to an "abusive state of being."

Publications