Green is dead. Sustainability is the future.
2011 will be the year that we move from the polar bear to understanding the economic value of our natural resources.
That the debate over climate change was never really about weather patterns, but about the fact that we have pinned our economies down to unsustainable economic models that rely on linear positive returns at the same time where our environmental losses are growing exponentially. Something is going to give.
Supporting examples would include the increased price of cotton, corn, oil. All commodities whose supply side problems are exacerbated by environmental degradation and over-exploitation, issues that have a direct tie to climate change, and are meeting demand side imbalances (increased urbanization, more people, etc).. Which is leading to price inflation.
Which gets us back to what this is all about. Or at least, what it has become.
Green is a “movement” that is emotional, intangible, and worked for many years to address specific environmental problems that existed (and could be solved separately of other problems), and it was in the natural position to take up the issue of climate change. However, as we have seen through COP15, when stakeholders were FINALLY aligned enough to agree to a full meeting, the intangible wasn’t enough. That, while the intangible green movement was able to build a large base of pressure from the bottom that catalyze world leaders to attend the Copenhagen conference, it was not tangible enough to get them to act.
Sustainability on the other hand is something very different. Sustainability is not about emotional connections, but about VALUE. That for their to be sustainability in the systems we have created, we will need to begin to fairly value those “other” systems. Systems that were created without our assistance by the natural properties of the orb we inhabit. Systems that are under pressure because our man made systems have largely failed to find value in the Earth’s natural systems.
Systems whose failures, while reported as environmental issues in the press, are really issues of economics. That, as we continue to fail in our ability to value water and allow our water tables to degrade in the name of economic growth, the natural economic and environmental cycles will lead to a re-balance that leads the supply of water scarcer… and the price of water higher. The same can be said for oil, corn, cotton, steel, and any other natural resource that we have failed to value properly as our systems grew.
Which leads me back to the title of this post and reiterating that I believe 2011 (and the years to come) will see the end to “green” as the movement towards true sustainability. We are already seeing global inflation and supply shortages of major commodities globally at a time when we should be seeing bumpers. It is going to be a time where politicians and economists will finally make the link between subsidized economic growth and consumption and environmental degradation.
It is going to be a time where, through economic adjustments, our economic process of transforming the luxurious into the commodity will reverse, and those items have the largest environmental / social impacts will begin to feel the strongest inflationary pressures.
It is going to be a time where we stop looking at wind mills as carbon offsets, but as critical economic investments that will provide the fuel for economic growth, and a reduction in wastes. Wastes that themselves result some of the worst environmental damage mankind has create. Wastes that are economic damaging, and completely unnecessary
It is a cycle that will require thought leadership on the value of our natural resources, and a cycle whose impacts are going to be vast. Yet, in many ways, it is through this process that the larger failures of environment, failures that cannot be reversed, can be avoided.
What do you think?
Should we continue to hold onto the polar bears and melting ice caps as our “symbols” for change, or should we begin to understand that if is not these icons that need to be saved. But that these icons possess an economic importance that need to be valued, and priced into our economies?
