The Community Word

One of the memorable hallmarks of the Republican Convention this year was the chanting of “drill baby drill!” This mantra echoed during Sarah Palin’s address, and was apparently meant as a sound bite solution to our energy problems and rising fuel costs.

But there was an uncomfortable familiarity about it. Some of us still remember 1965 and the chanting of, “Burn Baby Burn,” as large portions of Los Angeles went up in flames. It seemed so out of place… as if people were celebrating the loss of their own homes, livelihoods, and stores.

Just as burning is not a solution to racial discrimination, so too drilling is not a solution to our growing energy crisis. Cheap oil is as much a curse as a blessing. It has gradually gotten us into this mess, and it’s gradually running out. Unlike many other nations, we haven’t developed alternative energy to any significant degree. The United States doesn’t have sufficient oil reserves to even begin to meet our needs. We send hundreds of billions of dollars to oil rich nations, many of whom are hostile to us, in order to feed our growing oil addiction. We haven’t formulated any sort of long term plan for either self sufficient or sustainable energy supplies. We continue to contribute carbon, billions of tons of it, into the atmosphere, exacerbating the ever growing and daunting dilemma of global warming.

Some of this carbon has been sequestered, in the form of coal and oil, in the Earth’s crust for hundreds of millions of years, and is being released in mere decades. The negative impacts on flora and fauna are being seen all over the world. The potential for destruction of Biblical proportions is very real. And against this backdrop, we hear, “drill baby drill!” The implied disregard for the threats to our homes, livelihoods, and agriculture… seems out of place, to say the least.

As Glacier National Park is quickly becoming ‘Glacierless National Park,’ we really do need to do something… and the answer is definitely not burning still more oil. We need a comprehensive diversified energy policy based around the concept of sustainability. And it needs to lead us away from oil dependency and the fouling of our air and water. In short… we need to change our ways.

James Speth, professor of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, has put forth a framework for change in his new book, “The Bridge at the Edge of the World.” According to Speth, “all we have to do to leave a ruined world to children is just keep doing what we’re doing today – the same emissions of pollutants, the same destruction of ecosystems, same toxification of the environment – and we’ll ruin the planet in the latter part of this century.” But the problem is that the world economy will double in 17 years, along with the accompanying rises in toxicity and consumption.

I grew up near the Fox River in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and couldn’t understand how all those paper mills could dump so much pollution into that incredible river. That was my river, and also everyone else’s who lived in the area. Plus it is used by countless critters. Trouble is, there’s more profit if corporations don’t have to pay the costs of environmental cleanup. But I never could understand how this could be considered “profit,” when it produces such a huge loss in habitat, water quality, and aesthetics. The river had been destroyed. As Speth points out, I may not have been a shareholder, but I was a stakeholder. And hence not on the corporate radar screen.

According to Speth, the trouble is capitalism, in its current form. It is all about growth. Even if we set about cleaning up the air and water with new laws… the sheer increase in the size of the economy makes environmental cleanup efforts futile. Overwhelmed. Doomed to fail. Because our current course is so self destructive, Speth calls for nothing less than the reinvention of modern capitalism.

This implies a huge paradigm shift. How huge? How about valuing sustainability over growth… and doing good over making a quick buck. Priority needs to be taken off of growth. It means finding a new set of laws for corporations, to change incentive structure from maximizing shareholder wealth.

Corporations are currently mandated to serve shareholders. Speth sees corporations shifting to serve all of the factors that help generate wealth… all of the stakeholders, as opposed to just shareholders. Success is measured by sustainability.

The needed transformation is rather significant. FIRST: Transformation in the market… a revolution in pricing. Things that are environmentally destructive would be almost out of reach, prohibitively expensive. SECOND: Transformation to a post-growth society. Produce programs and products in a targeted way to focus on need. For example: mental and physical health care; green collar industries; and high tech. THIRD: Transformation to a wider variety of ownership patterns in the private sector. For example: more co-ops; more employee owned enterprises; less rigid lines between profit and not for profit sectors.

Consumers need to commit to living more simply, so that others can simply live. But real change probably needs to start in the political realm. It will require the ambitious task of reasserting popular control over politics before it’s too late. The environmental community in particular needs to see political reform as central to its agenda, which according to Speth, it doesn’t currently.

The fundamental problem he sees is that unless we reconnect in a more profound way with ourselves, our communities, and the natural world, it’s unlikely we will be able to deal successfully with our problems. The model he puts forth is the Civil Rights Movement. It was grass roots work that changed the nation by changing politics.

Speth has served as advisor to two presidents, was an administrator at the U.N. and co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC.org), but he can still sound like a radical. “It’s time for a million – person march on Washington early in the new administration. We could really make the point that the climate issue has to be front and center in the first hundred days of the new administration. It’s amazing what can be accomplished if citizens are to march in the footsteps of Dr. King. It’s time to give the world a sense of hope again.”

Maybe Speth is onto something. Dr. King was a profoundly successful engine of change. Rather than Drill Baby Drill, or Burn Baby Burn… it’s: ‘Change Baby Change!’