The Green Economy

“We have probed the earth, excavated it, burned it, ripped things from it, buried things in it, chopped down its forests, leveled its hills, muddied its waters, and dirtied its air. That does not fit my definition of a good tenant. If we were here on a month-to-month basis, we would have been evicted long ago.”

-Rose Bird, Chief Justice of California Supreme Court 

In the 21 years since Rose Bird passed on, our track record as “tenants” has only gotten worse, further demonstrating that we have no understanding of our collective responsibility to take care of our home planet.

This is because our civilization is largely acquisitive; we are deemed “successful” to the degree that we acquire wealth, and that, more often than not, comes at the expense of the natural world.

If the future is simply an extension of the past, our days here are indeed numbered.  Yet there is a path forward to sustainability, and it lives in something we call the “green economy.”  As a species, we respond to financial incentives, and thus, if we can put a tax on all forms of environmental degradation, while rewarding environmentally sensitive behavior, we will have instantaneously created the incentive we need to act decently.

If it is to function correctly, however, this new economy needs to be thought through very carefully.  Take hamburger as an example.  McDonalds alone kills one cow every minute of every day.  Where do these cows live before they are slaughtered?  Often, it’s land that was formerly Brazilian rainforest, that has been cleared for the purpose of beef production.  That rainforest was formerly a CO2 sink, and a habitat for various species that are rapidly going extinct.

I would say: Do you want that hamburger?  Fine.  Pay for it.  Somewhere on Earth, we need to be rebuilding our planet at the same rate we’re destroying it in Northern Brazil.  Someone has to pay for that, and what could be more fair than charging McDonalds and its heart-diseased customers?

Business-as-usual is a path to destruction, but we do have a choice.