As I pushed my cycle through the front door last night after arriving back late from Volans, Elaine asked me whether I wanted to watch Simon Schama on BBC – the first programme in a new series on the American Future. We proceeded to do so and it proved to be the most extraordinarily powerful indictment of a particular style of development that has pushed much of the US economy ever-closer to water scarcity, just as pioneers like John Wesley Powell warned that it would.
The spooky thought I was left with after watching the programme – and on the back of work I have been in recent days, going back to my interest in the late 1960s in the waves theories of economists Nikolai Kondratiev and Joseph Schumpeter – was that maybe we stand on the threshold of a depressive era, as Kondratiev’s theory would suggest, with climate change-related issues representing the next decade’s version of the American Dustbowl tragedy.
In an email a week or so ago, Bill Drayton of Ashoka noted that the Great Depression spawned many of the social and financial institutions that we now take for granted. This uncomfortable thought, that we need such meltdowns to drive what Schumpeter called “creative destruction” and, in the process, create the pre-conditions for the next great cycle of innovation, economic development and institution building was central to my 2001 book, The Chrysalis Economy (Wiley/Capstone, 2001). The notion here was that the first 30 years of the twenty-first century would face profound discontinuities as our old ‘caterpillar’ economy began to metamorphose into something more like a ‘butterfly’ economy. I warned, however, that times of stress could turn large slices of our world into ‘maggot’ economies.
The social and ecological dislocations of such discontinuities will be profound, and not simply because of all the private equity and hedgefund people who will lose their jobs. How is Iceland, for example, going to pay back even a proportion of its national debt – by decimating cod stocks? Let’s hope not, but there are likely to be Strange Days indeed. History suggests that in periods of turbulence, new movements can erupt and gain momentum at astonishing speed, including those driven by extremist politicians. As a countervailing force, we need to shift our various sustainability-related movements onto something more like a ‘war’ footing. We need to be both more political and more programmatic.
On the (strongly) plus side, one of the people I have long hugely respected is Green for All founder Van Jones, the powerhouse behind the Green Jobs Now movement in the US. “We can’t drill and burn our way out of the current crisis,” is the motto of the Green Jobs people. ”But, working together, we can invest and invent our way out.”
Some background from their website: “Green For All is a national organization dedicated to building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. By advocating for local, state and federal commitments to job creation, job training, and entrepreneurial opportunities in the emerging green economy – especially for people from disadvantaged communities – Green For All fights both poverty and pollution at the same time. Green For All is working with other organizations to advocate for the formation of a Clean Energy Corps (CEC). The CEC would serve as a combined service, training, and job creation effort to combat global warming, grow local and regional economies and demonstrate the equity and employment promise of the clean energy economy.”
As it becomes ever clearer that the next President of the United States will inherit a poisoned chalice, so the need to link bail-outs to investment in the real economy of the future will intensify – and Jones and his colleagues seem key to that potential world order, alongside people like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, where the mantra is ‘Abundance by Design.’ Watching the Presidential debates and reading the analysis of the rival candidates, McCain – for me at least – emerges not as ‘McSame’, though there will inevitably be elements of that, but as a man whose thinking and choices are too quirky for what we now face. Obama may or may not have the makings of an FDR-like President, but the tsunami of news sweeping in all around reminds me of something that Churchill once said, to the effect that extraordinary times call forth extraordinary people – and extraordinary leaders.
It needs an FDR-like leader to jump the current green movements to the point where Green Collar work is aspirational for millions and then billions of people. Whoever is the next man in the White (or Green?) House, he will need to build and communicate a vision not only of ‘Hope’ but of very practical steps and stepping stones that will carry us into the next Kondratiev Wave in good order. My vote is would be for a President willing and able to tap the Power of Unreasonable People at an unprecedented scale and speed. Meanwhile, I suspect, we are going to see something of shake-out in the various movements pushing for such changes, including, I fear, those represented in the Volans Trailblazers portfolio. My hope here is, to paraphrase the late Anita Roddick, that what doesn’t kill us will make us stronger …
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