Imagining a New Global Eco-Economy: A Future US Presidential Blog Post

San Francisco Main Public Library, February 2006. PHOTO: THOMAS HAWK

I think for a while we forgot what was possible. Maybe we are rarely good at imagining that things could be different. Maybe that's what we mean when we talk about the Enlightenment. For a while there we understood that the ultimate source of power is the imagination.

"Through new uses of corporations, banks, and securities, new machinery of industry, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers (sic) - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into the service of economic royalists. It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control of government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. It its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor and their property. And as a result the average man (sic) once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men (sic) could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness. Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of the Government."

That was Franklin Roosevelt, talking as president to the nation in 1936. But then we forgot again. We went back to imagining that things could only be as they were. We said "people are like that," or "human nature will never change" or "we are all guilty of original sin," or "this is democracy, this is the free market, this is reality itself." It was global and so it looked like it was universal.

But the world continued to change. Trying to shape that change is not a bad thing. Free market economics is a plan - it plans to give all decisions to the [invisible] hand of the market. But the [invisible] hand never picks up the check. To deal with the global environmental crisis we now face without making any more plan than to trust the market would be like saying, We have to solve this problem so first let's put out our eyes. Why? Why not use our eyes? Why not use our brain?

A major part of sustainability is social justice, here and everywhere. Think of it this way: justice is a technology. It's like a software program that we use to cope with the world and get along with each other, and one of the most effective we have ever invented, because we are all in this together. When you realize that acting with justice and generosity turns out to be the most effective technology for dealing with other people, that's a good thing.

Everyone's part of the team and should have a part to play. Capital is created by everyone, and should be owned by everyone. People are owed the worth of what they do, and whatever they do adds to humanity somehow, and is worth a living wage and more. The Earth is owed our permanent care. We have the capability to care for the Earth and create for every one of us a sufficiency of food, water, shelter, medical care, education, and human rights.

To the extent our economic system flatly opposes these values and goals, it is diseased. It has to be changed.

That's what we're doing in history; call it the invention of permaculture. By permaculture I mean a culture that can be sustained permanently. Not unchanging, that's impossible. We will have to adapt and continue to try to make things even better - so that permaculture implies also permutation.

Taking care of the Earth and its miraculous biological splendor will then become the long-term work of our species. People worry about living life without purpose or meaning, and rightfully so, but really there is no need for concern: inventing a sustainable culture is the meaning, right there always before us. We have to become the stewards of the Earth. We have to learn how to do it in the attempt itself. It is something we are going to have to imagine.