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This post comes from Green America’s latest newspaper editorial, a shortened version of an earlier article in which they outline 7 fixes for the economy.
Solutions from the Green Economy
January 15, 2008
Everyone now understands that the economy is broken.
While many name the mortgage and credit-default-swap crises as culprits, they are only the most recent indicators of an economy with fatal design flaws. Our economy has long been based on what economist Herman Daly calls “uneconomic growth” where increases in the GDP come at an expense in resources and well-being that is worth more than the goods and services provided. When GNP growth exacerbates social and environmental problems—from sweatshop labor to manufacturing toxic chemicals—every dollar of GNP growth reduces well-being for people and the planet, and we’re all worse off.
Our fatally flawed economy creates economic injustice, poverty, and environmental crises. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can create a green economy: one that serves people and the planet and offers antidotes to the current breakdown.
Here are six green-economy solutions to today’s economic mess.
1. Green Energy—Green Jobs
A crucial starting place to rejuvenate our economy is to focus on energy. It’s time to call in the superheroes of the green energy revolution—energy efficiency, solar and wind power, and plug-in hybrids—and put their synergies to work with rapid, large-scale deployment. This is a powerful way to jumpstart the economy, spur job creation (with jobs that can’t be outsourced), declare energy independence, and claim victory over the climate crisis.
2. Clean Energy Victory Bonds
How are we going to pay for this green energy revolution? We at Green America propose Clean Energy Victory Bonds. Modeled after victory bonds in World War II, Americans would buy these bonds from the federal government to invest in large-scale deployment of green energy projects, with particular emphasis in low-income communities hardest hit by the broken economy. These would be long-term bonds, paying an annual interest rate, based in part on the energy and energy savings that the bonds generate. During WWII, 85 million Americans bought over $185 billion in bonds—that would be almost $2 trillion in today’s dollars.
3. Reduce, Reuse, Rethink
Living lightly on the Earth, saving resources and money, and sharing (jobs, property, ideas, and opportunities) are crucial principles for restructuring our economy. This economic breakdown is, in part, due to living beyond our means—as a nation and as individuals. With the enormous national and consumer debt weighing us down, we won’t be able to spend our way out of this economic problem. Ultimately, we need an economy that’s not dependent on unsustainable growth and consumerism. So it’s time to rethink our over-consumptive lifestyles, and turn to the principles of elegant simplicity, such as planting gardens, conserving energy, and working cooperatively with our neighbors to share resources and build resilient communities.
4. Go Green and Local
When we do buy, it is essential that those purchases benefit the green and local economy—so that every dollar helps solve social and environmental problems, not create them. Our spending choices matter. We can support our local communities by moving dollars away from conventional agribusiness and big-box stores and toward supporting local workers, businesses, and organic farmers.
5. Community Investing
All over the country, community investing banks, credit unions, and loan funds that serve hard-hit communities are strong, while the biggest banks required bailouts. The basic principles of community investing keep such institutions strong: Lenders and borrowers know each other. Lenders invest in the success of their borrowers—with training and technical assistance along with loans. And the people who provide the capital to the lenders expect reasonable, not speculative, returns. If all banks followed these principles, the economy wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in today.
6. Shareowner Activism
When you own stock, you have the right and responsibility to advise management to clean up its act. Had GM listened to shareholders warning that relying on SUVs would be its downfall, it would have invested in greener technologies, and would not have needed a bailout. Had CitiGroup listened to its shareowners, it would have avoided the faulty mortgage practices that brought it to its knees. Engaged shareholders are key to reforming conventional companies for the transition to this new economy – the green economy that we are building together.
It’s time to move from greed to green.
–Alisa Gravitz
This is a wonderful project, and one that I would love to join at some point:
http://www.serveyourcountryfood.net/ via http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009025.html
On my ride into work this morning, I was surprised to see what appeared to be a small park located in a parking spot on Milwaukee Ave. After a bit of poking around on the internet, I learned that today is PARK(ing) Day, a day when all around the world, “artists, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spots into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public parks.” The project is a wonderful visual reminder of the need for more green public spaces, and even beyond that goal the project offers a small view at what a more car-free lifestyle could look like.
Industrialized societies throughout the world offer a tremendous amount of space for the use of the automobile – so much so that many no longer view this still relatively new infrastructure as a privileged transportation option, but as a necessity that must be a driving force (no pun intended) in all areas of development and city planning. Meanwhile, the increase of public transportation and the walkability of a community are forced to take a backseat to the free flow of automobile traffic despite the inefficiency of that means of transportation and the suffering sense of community that comes from such an individualized system.
What PARK(ing) Day points out to me is that there is huge potential in the vast spaces currently devoted to automobile culture to be transformed into something that would benefit communities not only through decreased air and noise pollution and city beautification, but through safer and more plentiful shared community areas in which more food could be grown and distributed locally, and which would increase the viability of local businesses as more people take the time to walk along their parkways to find local restaurant and retail alternatives for the chains to which they were previously driving.
Take a walk today and think about how areas currently devoted to individualization might be better used to foster community in your area. Slow down and be a part of the place you inhabit.
K and I rounded out our August Challenge this past Labor Day Weekend just spending time here and there reading in the park, heading to the beach with friends, and simply thoroughly enjoying the perfect weather the weekend afforded.
If you haven’t read about it already, the August Challenge was a challenge K and I put to ourselves to spend August Saturdays outside in an effort to get out of the climate controlled boxes of the workweek and to experience what is actually happening in the world around us. While our expectations of the challenge were varied, it became clear through writing about the experience that the challenge to get outside led to an exploration of place.
In going to Humbolt Park, a few different stretches of beach along Lake Michigan, and a suburban farm last month, I noticed differences in how people choose to interact with the natural environment of a place. In Humbolt Park, the designers attentively preserved patches of prairie and designed structures to interact with the natural scenery; on the stretch of beach in western Michigan where I was raised, the ecosystem underwent changes despite human interference to stabilize the landscape; in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, industry flanked 15 miles of ‘protected’ lakeshore despite the impact that industry might have on the surrounding environment; and surrounding a suburban farm we visited was a homogenized design and lifestyle that did nothing to take into account how the design/lifestyle would interact with the landscape.
In every action we take, we make a decision about how we will interact with the people and the place around us. We can choose to take nothing into account about our surroundings like the developers swallowing up all types of land for the same purpose, or we can take a thoughtful look at our surroundings and then slowly move with constant reflection of the both the positive and negative impacts of our involvement with our surroundings.
Per K and my August Challenge we spent some time again this past Saturday enjoying the outdoors. We were in Muskegon for the weekend so our outdoors time was a bit short to accommodate for time spent with family, but we did head down to the beach to inhabit a different ecosystem than the Chicago prairie.
I grew up on Lake Michigan, exploring the beach and water each summer with my sisters and friends. Since I can rememer, though, our beach has changed many times with the significant rise and fall of the water-level. The first beach I remember is one with “sea walls” that were installed by the previous property owners as an attempt to keep the water from pulling sand out into the lake to curb the erosion of the bluff. These proved futile over the years as the water-level rose beyond them and at one point eroded the bluff to the extent that a new set of stairs had to be built because the old set had fallen into the lake during a storm. The rise of the water and the constant erosion threatened to topple the house into the lake as well for a few years, until over the next summers the water-level rapidly fell. Sand was re-deposited on the beach, first returning it to the state that I remembered as a child, then slowly rising even more to cover the sea walls that were once nearly impassable, and finally, for the first time since I have known the beach, creating a mini-dune with beach grass providing a steady anchor. It was the beach with this maturing dune with which K and I spent time on Saturday.
I find it immensely interesting to examine the changes that can occur in an ecosystem over the course of a mere 20 years. An area that was once unable to support plant-life is now thriving with a diverse array of grasses; that grass now provides food and shelter for insects and animals that would not have found any on our small stretch of beach before; and should the dune continue to grow, a completely different ecosystem will begin to form in the area between the dune and the bluff.
Via Treehugger.com, I read an interesting article today from the upcoming edition of The New Republic called “Trading Places: The demographic inversion of the American city.” The article outlines the growing trend among US cities toward a more affluent population within city centers with affordable housing options inverting toward the city’s outskirts. Treehugger points out the reasons for this “demographic inversion” – a term that author Alan Ehrenhalt uses to distinguish the trend from gentrification – as the deindustrialization of city centers, a disillusionment with cars and traffic, and a younger generation “expressing different values, habits, and living preferences than their parents.”
What interested me about this article is the identification of a seeming shift toward a higher-valued sustainability within city design in the US. Ehrenhalt points out that many European cities have long followed a structure of city centers being a central hotspot for arts and entertainment; with US cities moving toward a similar model and with residents living closer to the recreation they value, both inefficient transportation methods and the land-waste of urban sprawl are reduced. Walking, biking and public transportation become more viable options for those who bypass suburban life for the concentrated efficiency of a well-designed city, reducing traffic congestion from polluting cars and increasing the healthfulness of more active residents.
With increasing value in downtown living, however, those who cannot afford the increasing housing prices are pushed to the outskirts of cities where car-free transportation does not seem as practical an option, and where – if one follows the model of many European cities – the poor risk being “walled-off” from the inner-city and largely ignored. Ehrenhalt points out, however, that the affluent who are choosing downtown living do so in part in dissent of the separatist mentality of previous generations of affluent suburbanites, and that in some cases the inversion to affordable housing existing in the outskirts of a city would mean closer proximity to the service and industrial jobs that are also moving into the suburbs. Whether this will be the case remains to be seen, but let us hope that the American city’s demographic inversion will mark a time of increased community and sustainability rather than simply a new landscape of an unbalanced and unsustainable class-division.
I’ve been thinking that a monthly challenge for K and I to change and reflect upon some aspect of our lifestyle might prove a gainful experience, so for the month of August we’re challenging ourselves to spend our Saturdays outdoors. We’ll get up, get ready, gather our things, then turn off the computer and TV and head out for a day-long outdoors adventure.
The ideas behind this challenge are to get us out of the climate-controlled boxes we sit in all week at work, to actually experience what’s going on outside, and to just enjoy the rest of summer while we can. I’m sure we’ll find some great festivals to go to, or we can just read or play games in the park near us. I’ll write updates as to how the challenge is going, and I encourage you to join us with your own outdoor plans on Saturdays this month!
The US Senate this week failed to move forward the Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008 (H.R.6049), a bill that would provide renewable energy incentives and carbon mitigation provisions. Introduced to and passed by the House in May of this year, the bill has since been at a standstill in the Senate despite majority support, with a third vote on Tuesday falling just 9 votes short what would have been needed to to move forward with legislation. Fortunately, the bill can again be brought to a vote, though not before a month-long August recess beginning tomorrow.
With more voices coming forward in support of the clean and efficient energy use that this and other stalled bills would promote (Al Gore’s voice as one of them, calling for 100% renewable energy in the US by the year 2018), and with evidence rising that our current energy practices are unsustainable, I sincerely hope that come September working on solutions for these issues will take higher priority within Congress, and that conscientious voters will make their voices heard in November that we want new leadership that will take environmental stewardship seriously and work with us to find solutions to our unsustainable practices.
Meanwhile, some groups are taking action based on the call for emissions-free energy, such as the proposed 909 MW Shepherd’s Flat Wind Farm of north-central Oregon and the proposed 2,000 MW TransWest Express Project wind farm in Wyoming. Co-op America has issued a call for the generation of 10% of the total US energy from solar power by 2025, a goal that their research indicates is very realistic, and grist explains the booming job market in the wind power industry.
With Congress at a standstill, however, and renewable energy generation dependent on investors, what can individuals do in their everyday lives to jump-start our energy future? I won’t pretend to have the answer to this, and I’d love to hear your thoughts, but I will propose two things:
(1) Even with more renewable energy generation from wind, solar and other innovative ideas, most people in the US are using more energy than sustainably available. Lifestyle changes will need to coincide with the generation of more renewable energy, and those changes can start now with CFL and LED light bulbs, energy-efficient appliances, turning off and unplugging electronics when not in use, challenging yourself along with friends and family to go one day a month “unplugged” from the grid and from that challenge finding a way to permanently remove some of your unnecessary energy consumption.
(2) Make your voice heard: Talk to friends and family about reducing energy consumption; tell your congresspersons that you support bills such as the Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008; contact your utility company to see what steps they’re taking to invest in renewable energy for the future; think about what you support and what you want in your life and make purchases based on those ideals to make your money speak to corporations.
From the Chicago Reader this past weekend was an article entitled “The Recyclable House” about house “deconstructionists” (as opposed to “demolitionists”) who carefully take apart structures so that most of the materials can be salvaged and reused instead of simply demolishing and sending the whole heap to a landfill. I found the practice to be exactly the type of cradle-to-cradle forward-thinking of which society needs much more in order to sustain our existence on the planet. You can read the article here, or just move on to my further discussion:
When a house or other building is demolished, the life of the materials that were used to build that structure often end, as they are trucked away to a landfill where the structural integrity of the materials is ruined. A correlation might be drawn between demolition and throwing away a piece of paper instead of turning it over for re-use and then finally recycling it. People like Ken Ortiz, however, see that the materials used in the construction (like the used paper) still have life left in them, even if the original intent of the material does not (take a vacant building that has gone into disrepair, for example). Taking this into consideration, then, the building is deconstructed and the materials re-used for other purposes. The procedure might be initially more time-consuming and costly, but the sale of the salvaged materials often makes up for the added cost, and the invisible benefit of keeping trees growing and other resources in the earth more than makes up for the extra time.
A potential downfall of deconstruction comes if it is used as an excuse to expend additional energy to take apart still-sound buildings at whim simply because that type of demolition has become a more environmentally-friendly option. I would hope, instead, that buildings are only deconstructed when the integrity of the building makes it unsafe for inhabitance, and that as the practice of deconstruction gains popularity that the construction of each building would make more use of salvaged rather than virgin materials, that structures would be built to last as long as possible with repair rather than replacement coming first, and that new buildings are built in such a way that deconstruction would be a readily available option should the time eventually come that a building is beyond repair.
A friend pointed me to an interesting article earlier this week from the New York Times entitled A Locally Grown Diet with Fuss but No Muss. I wanted to cover this article more in-depth than just a link in my Friday News Roundup, and after reading through some of the comments from No Impact Man’s post about the article, I had even more to say about the topic of the “lazy locavore.” I encourage you to check out the article first, then come back to read my thoughts. I’m sure others will have more to say, so please add to the conversation in the comments.
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While the article points to a rise in the demand for local, organic food – a shift that many see as incredibly important in reducing our negative impact on the planet, getting healthier and fresher food to our tables, and spurring local economies – my worries about the “lazy locavore’s” means of participating in a localized food-system are manifold:
(1) that having a third-party work one’s private land does nothing to engage the land-owner in a relationship with the land through which he or she might learn more about the fragility of the earth and how to take care of it;
(2) that while the Modern Era marked a time of specialization, calling for different tradespeople to attend to different tasks, this system has shown itself to be largely unsustainable and a Postmodern Era ought call for more self-reliant or cooperative living in which people grow their own food or have access to land on which individuals have a hand at growing publicly-available local food;
(3) that while I applaud those who are helping build the service economy, a focus on the service described in the article increases the supply of local food only to those who can afford it; focus should be put instead on services that can increase the supply of local food for all;
(4) that while it could perhaps be said that the system in which the “lazy locavore” takes part is a stepping-stone to a more thoughtful system, I think it more likely that it is a means of taking part in a movement without actually taking action to progress that movement, making it, perhaps, malproductive.
Again, I realize there is so much more to be said about this topic, so please leave your comments below.
Imagine no industrial agriculture. No monocrops depleting the soil of its nutrients, no politics driving food production, no unsafe nor unsanitary conditions for farm workers and animals. Imagine instead that your kitchen is full of a variety of fresh vegetables, fruits, dairy, eggs and meat; that each time you sit down for a meal you know where and how each ingredient was grown, and that you are eating the freshest and most healthful ingredients for the season. Imagine that these ingredients also had a positive impact on the quality-of-life of all involved in the food system, from the farm workers, to the animals in their care, to yourself, and to the land on which the food was grown.
Rising food prices and regular threats of unsafe meat and produce are evidence that the industrial agriculture system is collapsing. Organic food has come into vogue in the US, but coupled with a refusal to shift one’s mindset away from that of the consumer, a large portion of the organic food available in supermarkets today still comes from industrial farms that require energy-intensive farming practices. Local, sustainable agriculture is a necessity, and requires a shift in how one views food supply.
My partner, K, and I this year bought into a local farm’s Community-Supported Agriculture program (CSA). Each week we walk to our neighborhood farmer’s market and bring home a pre-paid half-bushel of their locally-grown organic produce. We see the people who grew our food face-to-face each week, and we experience first-hand what nature has to offer as the growing season progresses, and what recent weather patterns have meant for the crop. Participating in a CSA was an important decision that K and I made months before we would be getting any of the food we paid for. It was a decision that has led to wonderful experiences as we explore and learn about vegetables that we had never cooked before, and a decision that has begun to shift our thoughts away from earlier notions of food as a product that follows the patterns of supply and demand to food as a fragile necessity that depends on the well-being of an ecosystem that we too often neglect.
Changing habits and changing the way we think about food can be a difficult process, but go back to the imagined image of fresh, healthy, sustainable food; now find out where your local co-op or farmer’s market is located, ask your grocery store to stock local produce, or find an area where you can start your own food garden and make that image a reality. Imagine no industrial agriculture.
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Per a call for ideas from solutions-based online magazine, WorldChanging, this entry explores “the end of some outdated aspect of contemporary society and its replacement with a better way of doing things.” Read more about the challenge here.
