Sustainability and the Economic Crisis
How do the goals of sustainability relate to the current economic crisis? There are many opinions about this and the differences that separate them are unlikely to be settled anytime soon.
At Xavier the biggest concern seems to be whether or not the financial crisis will significantly compromise the plans to build the new academic buildings according to LEEDs certification standards. Will we be able to afford the commitment to buildings that truly minimize our environmental footprint and be able to set an example for both students and the community, demonstrating that buildings, like all of our actions, can be teachers not just places within which we teach?
Nationally the debate ranges across the entire spectrum. There are those who say that until we can get our economic system in order, we cannot afford the distraction and expense of commitments to long-term sustainability. The other extreme claims that it is only the commitment to long-term sustainability and the building of a new energy economy that will be able to provide the foundation for a new economic system ensuring a brighter economic and environmental future.
To look at this, we need to briefly examine the economic crisis. The first point is that it is an economic crisis, not merely a financial crisis. Financial systems work as part of economic systems. To date, there has been far too much public emphasis upon the financial system alone and upon the injection of fiscal capital into that system in order to create liquidity so that credit, the grease that makes the economy function, will begin to flow as it did back in "the good old days" of a year or two ago. But there are those who think that it is not the financial system that is the problem but the economic system as a whole and that until we begin to address this more fundamental systemic economic problems no amount of attention to the financial issues can possibly be anything more than the proverbial band-aid on the cancer.
The second point about the current economic crisis is that it is global. Not global just in the sense that many countries all over the world are experiencing some type of crisis of their own, but global in the sense that the economic system is global and when we talk about solutions to the crisis, there will be no solutions to the U.S. crisis without there being solutions to the global crisis. The global technological, economic and political interpenetration is now such that no returns to forms of economic nationalism are any longer possible. Granted we are likely to see these swords rattled and hear the slogans "Buy American" or "Buy French" or "German" or "Chinese" but sword rattling is all that it is. No such economic isolationism is possible. Like it or not, we are all in this together.
The fact that the crisis is systemic and that it is global undoubtedly makes it infinitely more complex. This is why, as we listen to either the current Washington administration or its critics, we need to understand that neither side has a neat and quick solution. There are no neat or quick solutions. We are dangling over an abyss for which we are unequipped economically and for which we are psychologically and socially ill prepared to deal.
But in this economic crisis there is opportunity and that opportunity is that we begin to systemically address the question of sustainability. The root of our economic crisis and the root of our ecological and sustainability crises are the same. In the US and as globalization has "progressed" there has been a predominant guiding principal?expansion. The very notion of "progress" is tied to constant expansion of wealth, of power and of techno-science. An economy is not "good" unless it is growing, stocks are not successful unless they are increasing in value, a good housing market is one in which the prices are increasing. We do not consider ourselves successful unless we are expanding?our wealth, our power, our house or car size, and even the amount of debt we can manage. This obsession with progress as expansion has brought us much. It has been an engine of innovation, it has been a great motivator personally and socially, and it has created the almost wondrous world in which we live
