Sustainability Policy, Purpose and Context
Depiction of energy grid with two-way transmission allowing small clean sources to “feed in”. (Creative Commons CC0 1.0, public domain image, 2010, Bruno Zaugg).
Even though the US president announced withdrawal from the world’s agreement in Paris to slow emissions of greenhouse gases, sixteen states, hundreds of cities, and major corporations spoke to the world from California at the recent Global Action Summit, saying, to paraphrase the New York Times account, “we can do this” (https://www.globalclimateactionsummit.org/). This summer, the Supreme Court allowed the Children’s Atmospheric Trust case to go forward (See the briefs in support of the Juliana plaintiffs, for example, https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/lawlibrary/). When the federal government deported the parents of children separated at the border, the ACLU went to court and Central America to reunite the families. As leaders have failed to tackle the public health problem of guns, high school students have spoken up. For those who ask, where are our leaders?, there are many among us. Political will for responsibility is not at this time flowing from the center, but it resides in the body politic.
How do we tap the reservoirs of good will that Obama noted? We have many tools at our disposal to move forward – we have a body of environmental and public health law that can, with some adjustment, gently shift our systems into balance, if we gather the will to use it.
To help, we have the memory of the meaning of the Constitution, giving us a government of the people for what we love. But for those who need something more concrete, we also now have the bright and very real analogy of the new clean energy vision – a world in which we are efficient and smart,[i] and our system knits many free sources we all own together in a resilient grid.[ii] This is analogous to how we can link the distributed energy of conscience and have a more resilient and efficient political system. When energy (electricity or reason) flows both ways, and isn't only dispensed from a central location, power is less susceptible to capture.
How do we tap the reservoirs of good will that Obama noted? We have many tools at our disposal to move forward – we have a body of environmental and public health law that can, with some adjustment, gently shift our systems into balance, if we gather the will to use it.
To help, we have the memory of the meaning of the Constitution, giving us a government of the people for what we love. But for those who need something more concrete, we also now have the bright and very real analogy of the new clean energy vision – a world in which we are efficient and smart,[i] and our system knits many free sources we all own together in a resilient grid.[ii] This is analogous to how we can link the distributed energy of conscience and have a more resilient and efficient political system. When energy (electricity or reason) flows both ways, and isn't only dispensed from a central location, power is less susceptible to capture.
American patriotism has often called for “participatory democracy”, a force that can transcend left-right struggle by forming an interactive whole. When you consider that the two sides of a body are not in opposition, and the body walks by integrating them, partisan struggles become ridiculous. The body politic can determine that it is in the public interest for our systems to be transformed so that they serve the public better and not endanger our existence. This is not a left-right battle. The conservative role of being skeptical that we know how to transform can be appreciated, and the liberal role of striving to evolve what we need can be honored.
Not long after the original wave of unity that founded a republic that spoke the word Liberty, (though imperfectly providing it), there was the wave represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the others who came to be called “Transcendentalists”. One can say the action of transcending is necessary today, considering our partisanship, and recognizing the unity of truth and beauty, the power of ideals. While this is considered intellectual, Henry David Thoreau went to jail for refusing to pay taxes because of his country’s war with Mexico. He made ideals real by living as a member of a society of moral individuals. As the state park at Walden Pond copes with overuse, we remember that this man who said the least government is the best also urged that government act so that every town would have a Walden Pond. In the same way Adam Smith, that proponent of the free market, said there were things government should do to control it. Freedom is to be found in our heritage of citizens seeing themselves as the instruments of morality and duty in government. Thoreau apparently died free of the “quiet desperation” he observed in “most men”.
The resonance of reason and delight in Nature is like the electrons that connect us. In a shared sense of existence we find potential for the will to heal our politics as the Administration rolls back rules that would reduce harmful emissions, as if requiring profligacy. The individual souls tried by the rejection of responsibility can form a greater soul of a country wanting to restore self-government, not waiting for false promises of things to be done for us. Analogously, the producer-consumer model of life can be reshaped as cleaner energy and production systems. The silver lining in the dark clouds gathering today in the many grasping once again the Common Sense Thomas Paine spoke of, is a reminder of the founders’ “decent respect for the opinions” of the world, the power they found in the articulation of moral reasoning. The available free energy in reason is like that of the sun. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay History:
He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate
The capture of our regulatory structure was accomplished by harmful myths about government – and the supposed infinite virtue of the market. When former chemical company representatives run EPA it is because bad stories are believed. When investors keep the dirty energy system in place it is because good stories are not. There is a good story about government, and shared systems that belong to all of us.
The idea of democracy has been besmirched by the imperial behavior of nations calling themselves democracies, (see, for example, Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire) and by the occasional tendency of voters to elect people who tip our world even more precipitously towards destruction. But the ideals of democracy can be revived, and we can change our dirty dead-end fossil-fuel system to one that uses clean, renewable energy by connecting the energies of rational good will resident in so many citizens. Emerson’s friends Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller replaced rote learning with two-way dialogue and conversation in their classrooms, changing the hierarchy, valuing individual thinking, as Socrates used inquiry to replace dogma. Fuller wrote, in At Home And Abroad Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe:
Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.
Two thousand years ago Lucretius wrote in De Rerum Natura that better arrangements of society arose through cooperation in response to pressures. Those pressures now include fresh recognition of how nature can mercilessly respond to our recklessness. Homes explode in Northeast Massachusetts because nature degrades pipes, (the group Mothers Out Front has been asking for government action on gas leaks for years); forests burn on the West Coast, (local communities implement sensible measures, contrasting with the Interior Secretary’s proposal to increase clear cutting); and the oceans we have heated throw up hurricanes, (volunteers save the stranded while government resources are strained). Restored responsible governance will help. Emerson said, in his essay Nature:
The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him.
The truth is in the floodwaters and what the California Global Climate Summit attendees demonstrated. The need is dire, the tools are available. The children in the Juliana case remind us that governments have the duty, as trustees of the world, to protect our atmosphere. Thoreau said in Civil Disobedience:
I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.
Does a government that allows violence to human and natural relations have the legitimacy of the consent of the governed? If more transcend to the ideal of unity that a rational apprehension of our shared existence requires, and more pick up the tools of mutual self-governance, we may yet re-balance our politics and ourselves within the natural world.
[i] See Amory Lovins on the infinite resource of efficiency, as yet only lightly tapped: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad965
[ii] Get practical information at the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy’s https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/grid-connected-renewable-energy-systems) and a vision for system redesign from the Acadia Center: https://acadiacenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/AcadiaCenter_UtilityVision_WebView_S.pdf
Not long after the original wave of unity that founded a republic that spoke the word Liberty, (though imperfectly providing it), there was the wave represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the others who came to be called “Transcendentalists”. One can say the action of transcending is necessary today, considering our partisanship, and recognizing the unity of truth and beauty, the power of ideals. While this is considered intellectual, Henry David Thoreau went to jail for refusing to pay taxes because of his country’s war with Mexico. He made ideals real by living as a member of a society of moral individuals. As the state park at Walden Pond copes with overuse, we remember that this man who said the least government is the best also urged that government act so that every town would have a Walden Pond. In the same way Adam Smith, that proponent of the free market, said there were things government should do to control it. Freedom is to be found in our heritage of citizens seeing themselves as the instruments of morality and duty in government. Thoreau apparently died free of the “quiet desperation” he observed in “most men”.
The resonance of reason and delight in Nature is like the electrons that connect us. In a shared sense of existence we find potential for the will to heal our politics as the Administration rolls back rules that would reduce harmful emissions, as if requiring profligacy. The individual souls tried by the rejection of responsibility can form a greater soul of a country wanting to restore self-government, not waiting for false promises of things to be done for us. Analogously, the producer-consumer model of life can be reshaped as cleaner energy and production systems. The silver lining in the dark clouds gathering today in the many grasping once again the Common Sense Thomas Paine spoke of, is a reminder of the founders’ “decent respect for the opinions” of the world, the power they found in the articulation of moral reasoning. The available free energy in reason is like that of the sun. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay History:
He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate
The capture of our regulatory structure was accomplished by harmful myths about government – and the supposed infinite virtue of the market. When former chemical company representatives run EPA it is because bad stories are believed. When investors keep the dirty energy system in place it is because good stories are not. There is a good story about government, and shared systems that belong to all of us.
The idea of democracy has been besmirched by the imperial behavior of nations calling themselves democracies, (see, for example, Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire) and by the occasional tendency of voters to elect people who tip our world even more precipitously towards destruction. But the ideals of democracy can be revived, and we can change our dirty dead-end fossil-fuel system to one that uses clean, renewable energy by connecting the energies of rational good will resident in so many citizens. Emerson’s friends Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller replaced rote learning with two-way dialogue and conversation in their classrooms, changing the hierarchy, valuing individual thinking, as Socrates used inquiry to replace dogma. Fuller wrote, in At Home And Abroad Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe:
Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.
Two thousand years ago Lucretius wrote in De Rerum Natura that better arrangements of society arose through cooperation in response to pressures. Those pressures now include fresh recognition of how nature can mercilessly respond to our recklessness. Homes explode in Northeast Massachusetts because nature degrades pipes, (the group Mothers Out Front has been asking for government action on gas leaks for years); forests burn on the West Coast, (local communities implement sensible measures, contrasting with the Interior Secretary’s proposal to increase clear cutting); and the oceans we have heated throw up hurricanes, (volunteers save the stranded while government resources are strained). Restored responsible governance will help. Emerson said, in his essay Nature:
The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him.
The truth is in the floodwaters and what the California Global Climate Summit attendees demonstrated. The need is dire, the tools are available. The children in the Juliana case remind us that governments have the duty, as trustees of the world, to protect our atmosphere. Thoreau said in Civil Disobedience:
I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.
Does a government that allows violence to human and natural relations have the legitimacy of the consent of the governed? If more transcend to the ideal of unity that a rational apprehension of our shared existence requires, and more pick up the tools of mutual self-governance, we may yet re-balance our politics and ourselves within the natural world.
[i] See Amory Lovins on the infinite resource of efficiency, as yet only lightly tapped: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad965
[ii] Get practical information at the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy’s https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/grid-connected-renewable-energy-systems) and a vision for system redesign from the Acadia Center: https://acadiacenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/AcadiaCenter_UtilityVision_WebView_S.pdf
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