New Quaker Notebook

The current crisis is far more than an economic predicament, a global commerce disaster, or even a failure of recent political wills. As such, then, the current crisis won't find its solution in expensive economic stimuli, the mending of global levees, or through energetic regulatory structures. Yet we continue to look at it as if it's the broken mirror in the bathhouse where Wall Street and K Street boys came to fondle themselves. Not without surprise, we want them to cover themselves, express their shame, and get the place all cleaned up; with such hope that will erase their perversion and put them to task re-stoking the coals of the hot steam engine of our society.

Any repair of this crisis using the very techniques that caused it will surely give us the pretense of something new, but the aging structure, with its inherent malignancies, must reassert itself again and again, and the future will look like the past. If the stock market never rebounds, if it finally "hits bottom" but never recovers, then the investor will desire new models for financial growth; this in turn ought to necessitate new models to replace the stodgy, deadly publicly traded multinational corporation. If we cannot return to the global business model in which workers are off-shored, costs are externalized to the economy, and profits are the bright beacon guiding the corporate ships, then our attention will be diverted to the small company, the domestic company, the sole proprietor and the entrepreneur for essential products and services.

I am now one mind with Jacques Ellul on this issue:

If we want to make society livable, people will have to improve themselves. Moral progress is necessary. Political organization, economic change, or psychology will not do it. The actual situation shows us that contrary to what Marxism imagined, moral progress does not result from raising standards of living or bettering economic conditions or increasing the means placed at the disposal of all. On the contrary, these things simply trigger a frenzy of evil. The urgent need is not to establish a moral order, which cannot be done externally even by superior authority, but to find the way of self-mastery, of respect for others, of a moderate use of the powers at our disposal. This is the way of wisdom and morality. Such words are not greatly valued by our age-so much the worse for us! We have to consider that not taking this path will lead ineluctably to the impossibility of living in concert, a situation far worse than an economic crisis or war.¹

We have before us an opportunity—indeed a world-wide opportunity—to make systemic changes that will guide us toward an entirely new prospect. Instead of weeping, we ought to rejoice in the expectation of this new adventure.

Green as Bile

For a long time now I've thought that Thomas L. Friedman, author of two best-selling books on globalization, The World Is Flat and The Lexus and the Olive Tree, is just full of it. Now he comes out with another best-seller, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How it Can Renew America. I haven't changed my mind.¹

Does anyone remember something similar, another green something-or-other, except that it was 40 years ago? How about Charles A. Reich and his best-selling book, The Greening of American (Bantam Books, 1970)? Reich wrote:

There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions and social structure are changing in consequence. It promises a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. Its ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty—a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land.

Yes, Reich was full of it, too. However, what Reich meant by "green" is not what Friedman, the new faux-futurist-in-training, calls "green." Reich meant something involving a new "consciousness" (his own highfalutin word for a new way of looking at something) which has, he says:

emerged out of the wasteland of the Corporate State, like flowers pushing up through the concrete pavement. Whatever it touches it beautifies and renews: a freeway entrance is festooned with happy hitchhikers, the sidewalk is decorated with street people, the humorless steps of an official building are given warmth by a group of musicians. And every barrier falls before it.

In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. One thing that always struck me about the term "green" was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined
by its opponents—by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as "liberal," "tree-hugging," "sissy," "girlie-man," "unpatriotic," "vaguely French." Well, I want to rename "green." I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.

How do our kids compete in a flatter world? How do they thrive in a warmer world? How do they survive in a more dangerous world? Those are, in a nutshell, the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st century. But these problems are so large in scale that they can only be effectively addressed by an America with 50 green states—not an America divided between red and blue states.²

Getting America green (and saving the world in the process) requires "mobilizing free-market capitalism" to generate innovations that lower energy costs without increasing pollutants or global warming, at prices that are at least as cheap as the current, high-polluting alternatives. He says,"The only thing as powerful as Mother Nature is Father Greed." So there is really nothing moral in this endeavor. Getting these "innovations in energy-saving appliances, lights and building materials and in non-CO2-emitting power plants and fuels" is just another business opportunity. This new "Greening of America" is a return, so to speak, to the pre-revolutionary "consciousness" belonging to "the wasteland of the Corporate State" which Reich says was in the process of being replaced.

In all fairness to Reich, I would say that his prophecy was undone by his own success. As soon as his book made it to the best-seller list, its seminal idea became a business opportunity, and was (in a word also from the 1970s) "co-opted." As such, it ceased to function as prophecy and became a commodity that effectively undid what he thought was going to happen. Sharks are known to eat their own young. And so the Corporate State made movies out of it, promulgated feel-good Coke® ads, marketed colorful clothing—and then dropped it, like a stinking fish, for the next great idea.

I suspect that Friedman is going to get the upper hand in this, because the Corporate State will find the new Greening of America a real business opportunity, one that will satisfy its global lusts. Friedman is telling us that there is a money to be made out there, and there is. But renaming "green" has its own hazards. Just as Friedman wants to own the issue, so does the Corporation, and it will call "green" what it wants to call green—and it will own it. Oddly, it will also not be green.

We see this now in the ethanol business, and here one wants to use the more colorful language of Father Tiago, a Catholic monk from Scotland, who has spent 20 years helping the sugarcane cutters of Brazil, themselves an integral part of that nation's own effort at "greening" the world through the promise of ethanol.

"Bullshit," says Father Tiago. "The promise of biofuel is a lie. Anyone who buys ethanol is pumping blood into his tank. Ethanol is produced by slaves."³

Brazil's ethanol industry is thriving, but at a heavy human cost.

We will also see this in every industry that requires water for its manufacturing process. These are not the first of such warnings, but they are getting louder:

A swelling global population, changing diets and mankind's expanding "water footprint" could be bringing an end to the era of cheap water.

The warnings, in an annual report by the Pacific Institute in California, come as ecologists have begun adopting the term "peak ecological water"—the point where, like the concept of "peak oil," the world has to confront a natural limit on something once considered virtually infinite.

The world is in danger of running out of "sustainably managed water," according to Peter Gleick, the president of the Pacific Institute and a leading authority on global freshwater resources.

Humans—via agriculture, industry and other demands—use about half of the world's renewable and accessible fresh water. But even at those levels, billions of people live without the most basic water services, Dr Gleick said.

A key element to tackling the crisis, say experts, is to increase the public understanding of the individual water content of everyday items. A glass of orange juice, for example, needs 850 litres of fresh water to produce, according to the Pacific Institute and the Water Footprint Network, while the manufacture of a kilogram of microchips—requiring constant cleaning to remove chemicals—needs about 16,000 litres. A hamburger comes in at 2,400 litres of fresh water, depending on the origin and type of meat used.

The water will be returned in various forms to the system, although not necessarily in a location or at a quality that can be effectively reused. There are concerns that water will increasingly be the cause of violence and even war.⁴

If we wait for the Corporate State to solve these problems, our wait will be long. These are not its problems. It doesn't care. If it wants green, it will call green what it wants to call green. When water becomes the problem, it will, like oil, make sure that governments serve corporate interests first.

The solution is not going to be in embracing Friedman's "new green ideology," for this is just another commodity he's selling. Paradoxically, it means a new "consciousness" on our part, not unlike that which Reich thought was underway 40 years ago, but one which is not bought or sold. I won't name this new consciousness, because it's not mine to own.

1. Matt Taibbi does a very effective job of clipping Friedman's wings, so the rest of us won't have to. See "Flat N All That," New York Press, January 14, 2009. A sample: "This is Friedman's life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebee's signs."
2. "The Power of Green," New York Times Magazine, April 15, 2007.
3. See "A 'Green Tsunami' in Brazil: The High Price of Clean, Cheap Ethanol," Spiegel Online, January 22, 2009.
4. "Ecologists warn the planet is running short of water," The Times, January 22, 2009.

Toward This Unfamiliar Future

Green as Bile