MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 19 July
2008
The sustainability
revolution
"Our
leaders were instructed to be men of vision and to make every decision on
behalf of the seventh generation to come; to have compassion and love for those
generations yet unborn. We were instructed to give thanks for all that sustains
us." Thus spoke the Native
American Faithkeeper, Chief Oren Lyons, in his address to the 1992 United
Nations opening of "The Year of the Indigenous Peoples."
The
classic definition of "sustainable development" was coined in 1983 as
"development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs." But Chief Lyons' formulation, passed
down since at least the time of the American revolution when an Iroquois chief
spoke of the seventh generation in similar terms, strikes me as a more
passionate and precise statement of this concept. It asks us to have compassion and love for our children's
children's children's children's children's children--the generation that will
be born around 2130.
Think
of sprawl in Northwest Arkansas, of the big box stores and malls springing up
along I-540, of the calls by Northwest Arkansas Council business leaders for
yet more lanes on the interstate, yet another western beltway to add to the
beltway we've already cluttered with "development." Is such development sustainable?
Think
of the US automobile industry, with its decades-long tunnel-vision focus on
big, powerful, and innumerable cars.
This is the industry that during 1925 to 1950 waged a systematic
campaign to put streetcar lines out of business all over America, the industry
that has fought every attempt to legislate higher efficiency standards. In the current failures of the big
three automakers, we can see that they were not even mindful of the first
generation, much less the seventh.
A
sustainability revolution is sweeping America today, and I'm happy to note that
it has so captured Fayetteville's imagination during the past eight years that
we have at least four mayoral candidates--Clark, Coody, Eilers, and Jordan--who
espouse such sustainable policies as recycling, tree planting, trails, impact
fees, light rail, infill, downtown renewal, sprawl limitation, traffic calming,
buses, affordable housing, and a smaller carbon footprint.
I'm
even more delighted to note that we have at least two young, smart, and
promising sustainability candidates for city council, namely Sarah Lewis in
Ward 4 and Matthew Petty in Ward 2. Both are not only compassionate toward future generations,
but also knowledgeable about the many technical details needed to build a
successful and sustainable society today.
They are exactly the kind of folks we need on our city council.
The
sustainability revolution was in a way inevitable, arising as it does from a
fundamental transition in the global environment. Global society has grown to its limits in recent decades. Before the twentieth century, the world
was mostly "empty" of population and economic activity. But exponential growth of all kinds has
now used up our land, our water, our atmosphere, and our resources. Today we find ourselves facing the "full"
world that Donella Meadows and others wrote so presciently about in their 1972
book Limits to Growth. The result is global warming,
overpopulation, the end of easy oil, species extinctions, and so forth. These can be seen as depressing facts
to be denied, or they can be seized as an opportunity for a new, happier,
higher quality society that is compassionate toward the seventh
generation.
I
suspect that the global sustainability revolution will be felt most strongly in
the United States, and that it will involve much more than environmental
values. We are surely the most politically conservative nation in the
developed world. The right-wing
ideology of rugged individualism, limited government, laissez fair economics,
militant foreign policy, fundamentalist religious values, rapid growth at any
cost, and near disregard for the environment has served us miserably,
especially during the past eight years.
The
results: an endless and mistaken
war; we are now a nation that tortures; dangerous national and personal
indebtedness; disastrous global warming with America the chief culprit; the
lowest-performing but most expensive school system, transportation system, and
medical care system in the industrialized world; the highest poverty and crime
rates in the industrialized world; a crisis of confidence in the nation's
housing and financial systems. And
so forth.
Some
of us have begun to notice that something is amiss, something that other
nations are doing right but that we are missing.
Americans
cannot help but notice the effects of the global limits that we're now up
against. We feel them at the
gasoline pumps, we'll feel them this winter when our heating bills arrive, and
some of us noticed them in Al Gore's film about global warming. Furthermore, it's obvious to those who
will open their eyes that our environmental and resource problems are part and
parcel of our industry-dominated political culture. For example, the oil industry has worked for two decades to
create the impression that global warming is a myth perpetrated by environmental
extremists; this is the same oil industry that most of us recognize as having
everything to do with America's problems in the Middle East. Thus, the sustainability crisis might
have the effect of causing a reconsideration of our nation's dangerous rightward
drift in recent decades.
A
healthy and sustainable society await all of us if we just have the vision and
the wit to grasp it. That vision
is likely to involve a lot more than traditional environmental values. Compassion and love for the seventh
generation demand that we reconsider our political, social, and cultural
values.