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We Can Solve The Economic and Environmental Crisis By Building an All Inclusive Green Economy

Ironically, at the heart of the massive corrections in the global financial markets, record unemployment and a growing sense of uncertainty as to the future of humankind due to climate change, exists a stunning array of possibility, so awesome in scope as to dwarf all previous eras of economic activity. Perhaps the Chinese symbol that suggest there is the seed of opportunity inherent in every crisis as a means of understanding our current situation.

Timing however is everything, at what point do we arrive at a place of critical mass in terms of awareness and commitment to act? One degree more of temperature rise? Another foot or two of swelling ocean levels? Of course these are big broad brush stroke issues. Closer to home, the price for a barrel of oil is back in the ascendant, and checking the weather increasingly looks like sci-fi or a bad horror film. What do we do?

We get busy! Exploring, unpacking and digesting how to re- imagine the world. Regardless of how we earn our livings, where we find ourselves, or how we’ve lived up to this moment, everyone of us is on the cusp of bold new possibilities to change, heal, and renew. Imagine for a moment that you lived at the dawn of the industrial age. Conventional wisdom dictated that when Henry Ford and other pioneering inventors of the motor car went calling on investors to back them, that they not be taken seriously, after all the horse and buggy had been permanent fixtures of life for centuries. Entire industries, specialist crafts and careers hinged on their survival. And yet steam, rail and electricity utterly transformed life as it was known up to that point. Was this a tumultuous period full of uncertainty, social upheaval and all manner of resistance on the part of saddle makers, blacksmiths and carriage makers? Millions of small scale farmers, were forced off the land and into factories and unthought of occupations.

What’s different? Huge, game changing elements that unlike the roll out of the industrial age that drove the subsequent fossil fuels economy that now threatens life as we know it, we are entering a period where we get to march boldly forward with eyes wide open, unhampered by the delusion of zero consequence or costs for unlimited looting of resources, using our environment as a dumping ground in service of consumption. This time we can choose to innovate, generate and re create products, services and wealth on a scale never before witnessed. The green wave era by definition is about clean, renewable and sustainable development, production and consumption of everything.

The green wave is about the convergence of new technologies with a social mandate that vests everyone. This new wave is about rethinking what it means to be one of millions of life forms inextricably linked to a single geography – Earth. As such, injustice to any element of the life web is an injustice to all sooner or later.

Yea right and what does this have to do with jobs, money and whether most of us will ever see much of either again? Everything! The green wave is new economics like we’ve never seen, principally because it engenders a wholly different paradigm that is about a unique connectedness based on inclusion rather than exclusion of ideas, ingenuity and effort. The key drivers -education or rather, re-education about new products, services and lifestyle choices and secondly but of absolutely equal importance – the delivery of products, services and choices to consumers, communities and businesses.

Drilling down a bit further, let’s get a few basic assumptions out of the way:

1. Scientists, engineers, inventors and innovators of all stripes will come up with baskets of solutions for new power and fuels, sustainable materials for any and everything, and ways to radically mitigate carbon emissions;

2. Governments will get on board or out of the way of ensuring the above can happen;

3. that we actually buy enough time to get the above together.

All things being more or less equal, somebody has to get billions of people on board making, using and distributing all the stuff that comes out of all the radical invention and intervention that will be unleashed. To have a real fighting chance, the means of production must be decentralised, shared and networked. Likewise the rewards and means of compensation will shift. Individuals, neighbourhoods, communities can become Open sourced socially networked development and production hubs for everything from food, healthcare to energy, resource management, and beyond.

As stated, education i.e., the unleashing of information, training, and benefit analysis is a key driver of the green wave because people will need support and refocus on how to adapt, embrace and create the new paradigm of green/sustainable, healthy, abundant living.

Example, roughly 30-40% of carbon emissions are produced by buildings of all types. Teaching benefits around energy conservation, weatherizing and refitting just our homes would contribute massively to reduction of emission and create savings thereby putting more money in people’s pockets. Extend this to teaching people how to compost, grow their own food, harvest water, and the benefits grow exponentially.

Furthermore, education will be about teaching citizens that the green wave offers us a wholly new economic construct i.e. – a social entrepreneurial economy, one in which society, networked, producer/creator led generates wealth and well being. As such, we will all be social economists, in the original Greek sense of the term – oikonomos meaning – “one who manages a household or resources efficiently and profitably, avoiding unnecessary expenditure or waste. And entrepreneurs i.e., from the old French – entreprendre, meaning to undertake a task or enterprise between parties. The parties in this instance, members of our homes, communities, nations and planet.

The unleashing of the green wave economy starts with the assumption that everyone can be a player and that we all can add value. Again, we refer to the original Greek meaning for economy ie management of our households in a sustainable and profitable manner. Profitable from the perspective of optimising value, extending the life cycles of everything we use and consume and igniting our imaginations to see ourselves as primary drivers, producers and distributors of the benefits this new era.

Fundamental to the realization of the green wave is a shift in our perception of relationships between resources, production and consumption. Rather than continue along the path of the highly conflicted story we’ve been telling ourselves that on the one, hand resources can be exploited without regard for future consequence or availability and then in the next instance – to insist that resources are scarce, limited and must be hoarded and manipulated to artificially increase their value, but to push consumption over the precipe of reason as long as there’s money to be made.

The green wave represents an opportunity for a new paradigm in which we align with the fully observable laws that govern nature ie, abundance based on reciprocity, replenishment, imagination and evolution. Even more,the green wave invites us get excited, enthused and passionate about what we really want and how we really want to live.

Bottom Line – We can do this!

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Ihab Salloum