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Brian Milani Break Through…to What? Green
Economic Strategies and the Environmental Movement |
A discursive review of
Break
Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility
by Ted Nordhaus and
Michael Shellenberger
Houghton Mifflin, 2007
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Green Enterprise Toronto (GET) Business
Alliance for Local Living Economies The Green Economy
course, Transformative Learning Centre
Lowell Center for Sustainable
Production Product-Life Institute, Geneva
Forest Stewardship Council, Canada Institute
for Local Self-Reliance
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Scarcity
and the Effluent Society Energy,
End-use and Space in an Ecological Economy Market
Transformation and Globalization Strategic
Action for a ‘New Paradigm’ Every
once in a while a book appears that dramatizes the poverty of (North)
American environmental thinking on strategies of social change and economic
development. The latest is Break Through:
From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility
by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger.
Unfortunately, it is a negative example, with the authors calling for
a new paradigm of change, but offering a very limited (and often
contradictory) social vision, with little in the way of economic
alternatives. More interested in
delivering hard hits to assorted environmentalists, the authors engage in
suspect historical analysis and pop social psychology, apparently intended to
rally environmentalists to support economic growth. Clearly much of the attention that the book
has generated derives from its attacks on various individuals and organizations. But a lot of its appeal can also be
attributed to a combination of people’s authentic hunger for positive
economic action, combined with an acute lack of critical solutions-based
thinking in the mainstream of the environmental movement. While N&S put themselves outside the
mainstream, this is precisely where their ideas are coming from, albeit maybe
a little right of centre. The book is intended to flesh out and contextualize Nordhaus and
Shellenger’s equally adversarial but probably more constructive essay of
2004, The Death
of Environmentalism. That polemic basically argued for climate change
mitigation strategy that would prioritize massive clean energy technology investment
over narrow forms of environmental protection. It generated a fair amount of controversy
among the big environmental foundations and NGOs that Nordhaus and
Shellenberger (N&S) had worked for as PR and marketing guys in the
previous decade. But, more generously,
it could be seen as another call for the kind of positive alternatives that a
more visionary minority of the environmental movement has been advocating,
and developing, for several decades. That essay was far from a holistic vision of ecological development,
but it at least proposed a focus of action for big environmental funders on
climate change and echoed the calls of stalwart researchers like Ross
Gelbspan for major eco-industrial development in energy. Earlier in the decade, N&S were
participants in the initiation of a “New Apollo Project” for major The book, however, is a different story. Its stated concerns, defined in the
abstract, sound valid enough: environmentalism should go beyond a narrow
politics of limits, controlling pollution, etc. and focus on more positive
potentials. It should appeal to
people’s higher needs and aspirations, and develop a post-material “politics
of possibility” that “swims with, not against, the currents of changing
social values.” Sounds good—but then
read on to find out what N&S think these currents really are:
globalization, high technology, “creative class” communities-of-interest, and
a “new social contract” based mainly on self-interest. The book plays on the appeal of more
qualitative development, but delivers almost nothing but propaganda for
economic growth. In a nutshell, what’s
right isn’t new, and what’s new isn’t right. Some of the things it does get right—like the interconnection between
the social and environmental—it doesn’t follow through on. Break Through’s second chapter, for
example, clearly the best in the book, is a good discussion of how feudal
land tenure in the populous Northeast of Brazil fuels the destruction of the
Amazon rainforest many miles away, and how environmental movement strategies
in Brazil should prioritize debt relief and land reform. But analysis of
social power relationships and concerns with social justice somehow evaporate
in N&S’s subsequent discussion of American economic history, social
movements and postmaterial prosperity. Democrats are chided for their
preoccupation with social safety nets, universal health care and minimum wage
legislation; activists are disparaged for their opposition to globalization;
community-based economies are dismissed as parochial; and the Break Through website even endorses
Bill Clinton’s heinous mid-nineties purge of the welfare system. |
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Leaders of a New Movement? Ironically, it’s
their positive contributions that most raise suspicions about the intentions
of these ambitious young consultants. Positions consistently made by an
important minority of the environmental movement for at least 25 years
become, in the book, pretensions of a world-historical breakthrough by the
authors. They seem to see themselves as leaders of a new “post-environmental”
movement. It shouldn’t go unnoticed,
however, that, while N&S portray their green critics as Neanderthal
narrow protectionists preoccupied with a politics of limits, some of their
most vocal critics are among the cutting-edge innovators in alternative
economic development. This includes
Michel Gelobter of Redefining
Progress, a think-tank devoted to developing quality-of-life social and
environmental indicators of real wealth; and David Morris, of the
Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which for three decades has developed
concrete alternatives in clean energy, zero waste, green and healthy
building, eco-industrialism, benign materials, and sustainable
communities. The well-funded enviro bureaucracies for which N&S have worked as
marketers are apparently all they know of the environmental movement. Identifying environmentalism exclusively
with fund-raising, lobbying and oppositional activity, they seem to have
completely missed decades of green economic thinking and action. Perhaps most perplexing is that, despite their calls for a new social
contract based in postmaterialist values, N&S completely ignore the value revolution
that is already taking place in virtually every sector of the economy—and not
simply in energy. This nascent
revolution—still largely under the radar of mass media and big
institutions—includes major action for market transformation. This does not refer, as some believe, to
simply changing consumer behaviour, but to gradually transforming the basic
drivers of economic development—making social and environmental values
primary—while revolutionizing the very concept of wealth. Probably the
strangest thing about Break Through
is the contrast between the authors’ almost prophetic invoking of new forms
of qualitative thinking, and the modesty, even conservativeness, of their
view of economic development. In the
closing chapter of the book they reiterate their call for a “postindustrial
social contract that will allow the next generation of young Americans to
turn away from survival values and materialistic status competitions and toward
fulfillment, self-creation and a new ecological politics.” But what they actually propose are
megaproject technology investments in energy and what sounds very much like
old-fashioned quantitative Invoking Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs, N&S’s postindustrialism argues that economic growth
satisfying people’s basic needs must precede quality-of-life and
environmental concerns. In their view,
affluence generated the social movements of the sixties, and Afro-Americans
first had to become comfortable materially before moving to establish their
civil rights. With the same logic,
they argue that the 3rd World today will never buy into environmental
concerns until they’ve established substantial economic growth. And even in
the “affluent” US, the majority of people will never get over their
nonmaterial status anxieties unless climate change remediation can promise
more economic growth. Thus, there must be “muscular investment” in clean
energy technology and a turn away from “the politics of limits” (i.e. most
forms of regulation associated with the welfare state). What’s wrong with this picture? It’s by no means my
intention to argue against major green investment. There’s actually something to be said for Van
Jones’ conceptualization of stages of the environmental movement, moving
from a focus on preservation (19th century) to regulation (1960s-70s) to
investment (today). This schematic is
not meant to imply we can dispense with regulation (or conservation), as many
corporate critics of “command and control” argue. The focus on investment simply means that
green transformation demands a restructuring
of the economy to (1) more directly meet human needs
and (2) create circular resource flows. These two tasks actually require each
other. But such restructuring requires
not just a redirection of investment but basic economic rule changes—changes that
I suspect that N&S, along with much of big business, would resist.
These alternatives are very knowledge-intensive. They reflect a core
characteristic of green development to substitute human creativity for resources. Some
have described a green economy as labour-intensive. But “people-intensive” better suggests that
green work is a very different, more developmental, kind of labour than the
body- and soul-destroying cog-labour endemic to capitalism. Even some of the
most routine and physical of this work (caulking, ramming earth, etc.) can
lend itself to the worker’s development as well as society’s. For this
reason, a green economy depends upon our cultivation, and unleashing, of
human potential—throughout all of
society. It is not an exaggeration to
say that our climate crisis, like so many of our other crises, is a symptom
of our suppression of deep and vast human capacities. Most of us sense
this, and N&S cater to this intuition in their emphasis on going beyond
“the politics of limits,” but their vision itself is severely limited, and in
some ways even destructive. Despite
big talk of qualitative vision, there seems to be severe lack of
understanding of what an ecological economy is or might be, and the
structural changes necessary to implement it.
N&S’s negative attitude towards community raises alarm bells. Massive investment in infrastructure
without a primary focus on community seems to miss the point completely. Scarcity and the Effluent Society A fundamental flaw
in N&S’s thinking is confusing postindustrialism with
superindustrialism. Postindustrialism, as suggested above, is all about closing resource loops and directly
meeting human need—for nutrition, access, shelter, illumination,
entertainment, community, and self-actualization—in the most elegant and efficient
ways possible. Superindustrialism is the
channelling of the information revolution into the old linear
extraction-to-disposal economy in the same old resource-intensive,
labour-displacing and polluting ways.
As suggested above, in recent decades this has been the waste of human
potential as much as resource waste.
Today’s economic globalization, with its constant extension of
production and consumption loops, and its debasement and exploitation of
cheap labour, is an expression of superindustrialism.
The Great Depression itself can be seen as a spontaneous system
shutdown in response to the threat of abundance. Scarcity has always been the underlying
basis for old-line capitalist markets, the mindless markets constituting the
capitalism’s Invisible Hand. This is not necessarily a bad thing in an early
industrial era when most of society’s core needs revolved around very
material issues of food, shelter, clothing and basic infrastructure. But since civilization’s rise several
thousand years ago, the power of scarcity has also been a means of
maintaining social inequality. Class,
after all, is based in the control of scarce resources; and this suggests
that when resources are no longer scarce, elite dominance is much less
likely. One of the things that Marx
got right was that industrialism’s open-ended economic growth would
eventually threaten class power by eroding scarcity. This began to happen in the technological
and productivity explosion of the Roaring Twenties. What Marx didn’t fully anticipate was the possibility
that growth could be redirected into waste in order to reinforce scarcity and
class. Capitalism’s crisis of ‘overproduction’ had, however, a cultural as
well as an economic side because the source of this great productivity was
itself a cultural revolution that threatened that other major prop of class,
cultural monopoly. Class society had
always been divided into “high” and “folk” culture. But new forms of cultural production,
including science, white collar work,
mass communications, universal education, etc. began giving workers access to
“high” culture as both producers and consumers. In addition, at the pinnacle of material
production, new mass production industries gave workers access to broad new
forms of organizational power, expressed in industrial unionism which spanned
whole industries (UAW, Steelworkers, UMW, etc.). So in a very real sense, the rise of
culture-based development represented (for the elite) the overproduction of
working class power. There is also the more strictly market dimension of
overproduction. That is, by late in
the twenties, production Left Keynesians and New Dealers rightly saw that a key element of a
progressive solution to this demand crisis would be an equitable
redistribution of wealth, putting more purchasing power in the hands of
workers. More often It was not lost on
conservative policy-makers that it was the war that had actually ended the
Depression and begun to provide plenty of effective demand for American
producers. The Cold War was a handy
device to continue war production, and a vast military apparatus would in any
case be necessary to secure the resources needed for the wasteful suburban
economy which would fragment the American landscape. Many Americans would benefit materially
from this waste, but precisely how much, and for how long, is a valid
question of debate. The gains of industrial
unionism, along with New Deal rights to organize and bargain collectively,
were used to support wasteful mass production/consumption. Worker gains were partially deflected by
contracts that tied wages to productivity and short-circuited quality-of-life
and economic democracy issues. Wage gains were also offset by planned price
inflation—as a new debt-based economy put Americans on an economic treadmill
trying to keep up. Thus, grassroots
gains were real but double-edged. No one should underestimate the importance
of labour gains and social safety net achievements. And yet within core
economic development , choices for non-material fulfillment—along with true
social spaces, consumer services and public transit—were not provided or even
eliminated. What Galbraith called The
Affluent Society could more realistically be called The Effluent Society, a massive The post-WWII boom based on waste could only be maintained for so
long. Eventually the costs had to come due; “pay me now or pay me
later.” By the seventies, the burden
of waste began to register in fiscal crisis, stagflation, Real abundance in
the era of cultural production can only be qualitative not quantitative. This applies just as much to underdeveloped
as developed countries: the focus has to be on directly meeting human needs
(material and non-material) and building capacity to do this, not on mass
production or financial accumulation for its own sake. The specific combination of material and
non-material needs may vary tremendously from place to place, but the
priority and process is the same. Almost everywhere, material scarcity is
used as a means of social control. In Despite all their polling and focus groups, N&S are out of touch with
the pressures most Americans feel.
They are definitely drawn to postmaterialist values—because they
intuitively sense the suppressed potentials.
But what they experience are the same old pressures of material
scarcity that have always kept people in line, albeit in Recognizing that
that North Americans are suffering real material pressure helps us understand
the potential appeal of green development—especially if we are providing
interesting new realms of creative work.
It also reveals the horizons that open up if we can meet everyone’s
basic needs for food, shelter and clothing—creating a new level of security
that stimulates both individual creativity and a sense of community and
belonging. This kind of economic
development—geared not only to conservation but to massive dematerialization—can only result from
(and be powered by) a psychology of
abundance. But it is cultural even
more than material. People can better live with material limits when there
are many fulfilling choices they can be actively involved in. Energy, End-use and Space in an
Ecological Economy Let’s backtrack
somewhat to the little that’s concrete about N&S’s new paradigm of
possibility: the muscular investment in clean energy technology and
research. Clean energy—in particular,
clean energy technology—seems to be
the sum-total of N&S’s vision of a sustainable economy. Concerns with energy today are, of course,
extremely central to both dealing with climate change and establishing
environmental alternatives. It is
great that the Apollo
Despite their postmaterialist rhetoric, N&S’s views on energy, on
technology and on economic growth are mainstream industrial
perspectives. Two key dimensions stand
out: first, questions about the purpose of energy use—which
N&S fail to raise since they miss the wasteful character of North
American economic development since the Depression. Second, there is the centrality of organizational factors, particularly
spatial organization, in creating ecological energy systems. Back in the
seventies, when energy guru Amory Lovins was pioneering the Soft Energy Path, he
put the focus on the system, not on supply. Energy supply wasn’t unimportant:
a soft-energy system, he argued, would tend to be a flexible diverse mix of
largely renewable sources which would vary from place-to-place and
season-to-season. But his real focus was on end-use. That means not simply on conservation and
plugging leaks, but on human need. As
Lovins put it, we want “hot showers and cold beer”
and not necessarily power plants and fossil fuels. The latter are just
means-to-the-end, and usually not very sensible means. In Lovins’ view, by
focusing on real needs, and working backwards to find the most elegant and
efficient ways of meeting those needs, one could routinely dispense with lots
of unnecessary supply. A holistic focus on end-use takes us beyond simple efficiency to
questions of the purpose of production. The N&S seem to
feel a major research breakthrough is needed to establish their clean energy
infrastructure. Others have criticized
them for not specifying what this breakthrough would be, but to me that is
not the important thing. What’s
disconcerting is their pessimism about existing green technologies, basically
because they are thinking in terms of low-order linear substitution. Granted,
renewables should be receiving far more support than they have been. But our main energy difficulties are not a
hardware problem, anymore than world hunger is a productivity problem.
N&S’s technology solutions are avoidances of the basic problems: the
failure of mindless markets to meet real needs, and very bad organization.
This principle is routinely violated in modern These practical necessities suggest two general strategies for
eco-development: (1) nurture human creativity and participation wherever
people are, including in domestic work, in informal economies, and in the
rapidly-growing, largely non-market electronic commons; (2) nurture natural productivity wherever
it is, including in back alleys, on rooftops, on roadsides and in deserted
lots. Our first step is recognizing
that production takes place everywhere.
N&S don’t seem
to like communities much. In their view,
as bulwarks of NIMBYism, geographical communities apparently present
innumerable headaches to enlightened environmentalists seeking major wind
farm developments and the like. In
perhaps the silliest chapter in Break
Through, The Prejudice of Place, N&S
go from the specific struggle over the proposed Cape Wind windfarm
development project near the Kennedy family’s vacation homes, to grand
negative statements about the role of community in social change. Whatever
position one takes on Let us count the reasons.
Community is the nexus through which a green economy’s qualitative
wealth, organizational efficiencies,
and participatory democracy revolve.
We are talking about far more than abstract loyalties here. We are talking about optimizing the
potential of unique people, subcultures and ecosystems. We are talking about quality of life and
new concepts of wealth, about stewardship of complex social and ecological
micro-processes, and about new Community is the nexus through which a green economy’s
qualitative wealth, organizational
efficiencies, and participatory democracy revolve. As energy guys,
N&S should be more aware of the distributed character of green energy,
and the movement’s quest to make every building and settlement a producer,
not just a consumer, of energy. Even
most closed-loop manufacturing, based in reuse and design-for-disassembly,
demands increasing proximity and regionalization. So much of the waste of our industrial
economies is embedded in processing, unnecessary processing which can only be
short-circuited by the increasing use of local resources. This is not a reductionist “small is
beautiful” approach, but a question of appropriateness. Our forms of production and consumption
must link across scales, but the main trend for achieving both eco-efficiency
and meeting human need is growing self-reliance and community
empowerment. In their superficial generalizations about community and global
citizenship, N&S seem oblivious again to the main progressive trends in
alternative economic development, particularly a focus on the local—which has
already spawned corporate “local-washing,” as well as a dynamic grassroots
business movement (BALLE) which
is connecting social, economic, political, environmental, and even spiritual
dimensions through the nexus of community.
Certainly, emergent forces of cultural production have created new
forms of non-geographical communities-of-interest. But these forms of community can and should
be complementary. The networked information economy actually makes the
regionalization of physical production more practical. It should be a
given, however, that the road to redefining wealth and community development
will not always be smooth. There will
almost inevitably be contestation, because of the diversity of viewpoints,
because beneficiaries of inequality (class, race, gender, etc.) will want to
defend their power, and because there are ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ qualities in
both individuals and communities.
Communities just have to find ways of working those things through
themselves (albeit in relationship with other communities), and struggle to
constantly create choices that affirm the ‘higher.’ NIMBYism can take positive or negative
forms, as can YIMBYism. But while we
definitely need governmental action to support regeneration, we equally need
a spectrum of incentives and disincentives built into every area of
society. Just as a green economy
features distributed or decentralized food, energy and goods production, so also it needs distributed
regulation, expressed in finance, certification,
communication, education, community design, civic culture, and many forms of
participation. The scale of a green
community-based economy is, in itself, a key factor encouraging democracy,
participation and accountability. It
is no panacea, but it makes most of the other positive elements more possible
or effective. Market Transformation and Globalization Given N&S’s
attitude to community, it is not exactly a surprise to read their uncritical
attitude to corporate globalization.
To them, markets aren’t scary; there are good and bad markets,
depending on how we use them. Being
anti-globalization, they feel, is as meaningless as being a pro-globalist
free enterpriser. As David Morris
pointed out, this sounds like pure ideology, like one gets from the Cato or
Fraser Institutes. Even business
professors engaged with large corporations around corporate social
responsibility (CSR) acknowledge there are some structural problems with both
the corporation and global markets—succinctly if imperfectly summed up in the
documentary film The
Corporation. There is clearly lots
of debate about how one remedies this, but one cannot deny the need for, or
the existence of, major movements for market transformation. Their focus is finding ways to reduce the
all-powerful influence of the financial bottom line, and building more
constructive incentives and disincentives into markets. Partly, this means incorporating full costs
into market Because of these
structural factors, it’s pretty clear that companies can’t fully become
sustainable (let alone regenerative) on their own, regardless of the
intentions of their managers. Whatever they tell you, big or small, they need
help. Small values-driven businesses,
while they can put social and eco-values in command, need support networks,
access to finance and information, and markets. Big business has more resources and access
to information, but it is far more constrained by the single bottom
line. So it too needs help from the outside—be it
via regulatory rules, new enterprise networks, stakeholder pressure, or
certification systems. For guys big into new
paradigms and postindustrialism, N&S are surprisingly liberal about
markets. For them, postindustrialism
brings new anxieties for consumers, but doesn’t seem to affect macro economic
processes. In reality, there is a
simple basic difference between industrial and authentic postindustrial
markets: industrial markets have always been driven by exchange-value and postindustrial
markets must increasingly be driven by use-value, or real need. Exchange-value, or money, is just
abstracted Quantity; the bottom line for industrial enterprises has been
accumulation, whatever stuff is involved.
Consumption is just an afterthought, important only that it’s
sufficient enough to keep production going and people buying. Industrialism
(the technical form) and capitalism (the financial form) have, in a nutshell,
been all about material accumulation, full stop. In an earlier period, capitalism’s mindless
markets, however unfair, could allocate scarce resources reasonably well. Material needs are, after all, fairly standardized,
and generally ‘more’ is better. But
the Great Depression ended that era once and for all—even if corporate
capitalism since then has attempted to maintain the veneer of separate
political and economic spheres, in order to perpetuate production-for-production’s-sake. As discussed earlier, perpetuating these
structures and material obsessions has required the deliberate creation of
scarcity through waste.
It is no
exaggeration to say that corporate globalization, as we know it, is
antithetical to a green economy. As ecological
economist Herman Daly says, eco-efficiency demands increasing restrictions on
flow of material goods and physical capital, and fewer restrictions on the
flow of culture and information. Says Daly: “trade
recipes, not cookies.”
Corporate globalization pushes for precisely the opposite—via free
trade and intellectual property rights.
Both of these things suppress the potential of knowledge-based
development. Industrial
capitalism is also driven by a fundamentally anti-ecological relationship between
labour and resources.
The focus is on labour productivity (how much can be produced with as
little labour as possible) but not on resource-productivity, since resources
are so cheap or even free. Whether labour is displaced or degraded, the
worker is a cog in the industrial machine and a commodity on the market. In
our existing global economy, there is a distinct relationship between cheap
labour exploitation zones and the massive material throughput so antithetical
Strategic Action for a ‘New Paradigm’ Although N&S
promote their insights as the essence of a new paradigm, they resist offering
any real programmatic suggestions, except clean energy investment and
promotional themes for the Democratic Party.
By contrast, the following recommendations for environmental movement
strategy follow from the previous discussion about the actual form and
content of a potential green or postindustrial economy. Like most of other aspects of a future
sustainable society, they are already being developed by cutting-edge
elements of the green and/or other movements.
But all could use more support by mainstream environmentalism if
indeed ENGOs are to go beyond being mindless nay-sayers or surrogate
industrial managers. This is not to suggest that oppositional activity is not
necessary; far from it. But ultimately
solutions depend on our implementation of qualitative alternatives. Indicators of real wealth: Absolutely fundamental to creating
ecological or knowledge-based economies are Third-party certification: These
systems are among the most important applications of the indicators discussed
above. The most powerful ones are
simultaneously forms of evaluation, market creation, and regulation. As Robin
Murray has pointed out, the Fordist Waste Economy depended just as much
on the de-skilling of the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR): Along with the precautionary principle,
this is the most important regulatory application of the “life-cycle
approach” which underlies all ecological economics. Localization: There will likely always be some
appropriately world-scale industries.
But relative self-reliance is unquestionably an essential overall
direction for creating green economies today.
Decentralization—like dematerialization and detoxification—is a basic
characteristic of authentic economic development today. As noted Green Financial Systems: On the need for finance, I can agree with N&S, except
that the emphasis should really be on investment at the community level where
the core of a green economy is created, and it must go, not just to energy,
but to all the key sectors where values-driven businesses need capital. It should also be added that finance
should, in itself, be considered as a powerful regulatory tool. Every community should have credit unions,
development banks, etc. that lend preferentially to enterprises that
correspond to green community plans.
By the same token, we should be gradually gaining control over our
savings and pension funds so that they can be working for us well before
retirement.
Decommodifying Knowledge / Green
Wikinomics: While our social
movements are making the most of the Internet, most are unaware of the depth
of the economic revolution it signals and the importance of current struggles
over intellectual property. Over the
past 15 years, a new “networked
information economy” has In sum, the new paradigm of green economics
is about much more than clean energy hardware or changing voter/consumer
behavior. “Swimming with the current”
is good advice, but requires great discrimination to distinguish between
authentic currents of human evolution and retrograde materialist undertows.
With recent breakthroughs in mass environmental awareness, environmental
organizations have an opportunity to raise the level of discussion and
awareness to a new plane. It’s OK,
even desirable, for some companies to be trying to cash in on sustainability,
so long as evolving standards are guiding such self-interest in the right
direction. It’s essential, however,
that others are exploring the opportunities for creative engagement,
participatory democracy, social justice, and community regeneration provided
by more holistic green development potentials. Leaving behind a narrow politics of limits
and actualizing positive win/win possibilities does not mean relinquishing
one’s critical faculties or surrendering to the corporate/global race-to-the-bottom. The real horizons for knowledge-based
development have to do with community, democratization, ecological design,
and with actualizing new levels of human potential in every sector of the
economy. Embryos of this qualitative
way forward exist in all of our progressive social movements. The creation of
a new society has already begun; we first need to recognize and support those
already involved.
Brian Milani teaches green economic and green
business courses at York U’s Faculty of Environmental Studies and OISE-UT’s
Transformative Learning Centre, and is the author of Designing the Green
Economy: the postdustrial alternative to corporate globalization. A member of the Coalition for a Green
Economy, he also helped found Green Feedback is
welcome: bmilani (at) web.ca |
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had begun to outdistance the wages of
worker-consumers, creating a chronic shortage of “effective demand.” There
were a number of particular precipitators of the 1929 crash; but just one
fundamental reason for the absence of recovery—the inability of old-line
markets to service emerging qualitative needs.
than not, however, the abundance that
many of them talked about involved intelligently planned communities,
reduction of work time, universal education and free health care. That is, it
had strong qualitative elements.
Creating a green energy economy is about
far more than substituting clean for dirty energy. In fact, as eco-footprint
developer 
As permaculturalist 
