I realize that I am blogging patetically infrequent. Worse, there isn't all that much new in Ingo-world (or rather, nothing I'd be eager to blog about) but I did write up a rant regarding the new "green revolution" and thought I'd share it. If you are still reading this blog at all, I'd be happy to briefly hear from you!

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Making a buck on the green revolution – why we need to re-think, not re-buy

A few weeks back I attended one of San Francisco’s green networking events. I had expected it to be yet another “preaching to the choir” exercise, a hand-holding circle of tree-hugging hippies and tote-bag wielding bicyclists cheering each other on to save the planet, flush the toilet only when really justified, and shun Safeway for the local farmers market.

Alas, it was nothing like that. While there were a few honestly green souls there, what I mostly found was a motley crew of (ex)management consultants “trying to get a foot in the door” for the next big thing, newly minted “sustainability consultants” advertising their services, and a headline presentation happily proclaiming that even in these new “sustainable times” one can still make a good buck, even with “business as usual”, as long as one could impress on one’s customers enough green credentials to keep them buying. It was a heavy dose of green opportunism. I “networked on” but I could not quite shake the feeling that I was sort of in the wrong movie.

Days later, I stood flabbergasted in the giant main hall of SF’s Green Festival, overwhelmed by the massive scale of green consumerism washing over me. Most of the festivals stands were, you guessed it, about buying stuff. Green stuff, for sure, and organic stuff, and trash was politely recycled, but in the essence, there were again hundreds of green entrepreneurs trying to sell me the next green thing. It was off-putting to say the least.

I understand that people need to make a living. But climate change is different. It’s not just another technical challenge to be overcome by the innovative muscle of technology, not just a question of buying the same, just green. It is a challenge to the assumptions that underlie our current way of living. Climate change is the bill presented to us by the planet for the way we organize our society, a way that has not only become unsustainable but, perhaps more importantly, has failed to make us happy.

We have wasted millions of years’ worth of saved-up, irreplaceable easy energy, in a quixotic quest for making more stuff, driven by our definition of success as owning more stuff and building a fence around it, thank you very much. We only now are beginning to recognize that we are also unhappy living that way because it neglects our nature as communal beings and is built on excessive competition and isolation.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and soon a fundamental breakthrough in green technology will save us. Perhaps some unexpected twist to something exotic like, say, cold fusion will suddenly provide us with all the energy we’ll ever need, and do so safely and without emitting greenhouse gases. That would of course be marvelous, and considering the current glacial pace of progress on the conventional path (international climate negotiation) it might well be our only chance to assure our survival as a species.

But, as paradoxical as that sounds, such a breakthrough might also be a missed chance. Right now, impending catastrophe is forcing us to re-think. It is forcing us to consider new ways of organizing our society, to define benchmarks for success other than ownership of things. It is forcing us to cooperate on levels never seen before. It might finally break down the north-south divide and make us one global people, fighting together to keep our planet livable for everyone.

A sustained global effort, over several generations, to turn around Titanic Mankind and create the more sustainable human structures, both economic and social, that we will need to survive, could mark humanity’s finest hour. In the process, we might not just find purpose; we might even find happiness.