GREEN NEWS & VIEWS
What Will It Take to“Build Back Better”?
and aquifers, and simultaneously se- quester carbon. • Providing care to those who are in- capable of self-care, including children and the mentally and physically inca- pacitated. • Preparing our children for respon- sible and fulfilling lives. • Restructuring political and economic institutions to shift power from profit- maximizing corporations to life-serv- ing communities. In discussing our options, we too often get sidetracked into a debate be- tween political philosophies—capital- ism vs. socialism—that sidesteps the larger issues. We need a different framework. Our common future depends on serious institutional rethinking and restructur- ing to localize power and share it on a global scale. Life, as we now understand it, orga- nizes from the bottom up, not the top down. As living beings who depend on the health of a living Earth, our future depends on learning through our lived experience to do the same.
one’s basic needs. The misallocations include, among others: • Preparations for and the conduct of war. • Mass production and support fa- cilities for cars, trucks, ships, and air- planes for needless movement of peo- ple and goods. • The labor, technology, and energy consumed in supporting financial speculation that produces no real val- ue. The urgent unmet needs that require the application of our intellectual and physical labor include, among others: • Eliminating the causes of war, mass incarceration, and desperate mass mi- gration and reassigning the resources thus freed up. • Restoring the health of Earth’s lands, waters, and atmosphere, which in- cludes eliminating human sources of Earth’s contamination. • Restructuring how we live to assure everyone a place to live and reducing the need to move people and material goods. • Producing the food for nutritious di- ets for all the world’s people in ways that maintain the health of soils, rivers,
tutions to address these crises. Our future depends on finding com- mon cause in creating a world of peace and beauty; a world in which every person has opportunities to contrib- ute that earn them respect and mate- rial sufficiency; a world where families and communities are strong, people support and care for one another, and nature is vibrant. It is a vision both progressive and conservative. Some call it an Ecologi- cal Civilization, the theme of the next print issue of YES! Magazine . In 2020, Earth issued a wake-up call we could not ignore. COVID-19 dis- rupted daily life and imposed suffer- ing on billions. The pandemic made it impossible to ignore the injustices of an economic system in which those who do the most essential work are often the least secure and most poorly rewarded. Herein lie essential lessons. As a society, we massively misallocate our labor and other resources, spending them in ways harmful to both people and Earth. Defenders of the failed sys- tem claim the burdens are necessary to create jobs and generate GDP growth, while at the same time they insist that we lack the resources to meet every-
BY DAVID KORTEN
Much has transpired to disrupt the political status quo since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris chose their campaign slogan “Build Back Better.” But the chaos and violence of former President Trump’s final days in office may help to open a deep national dialogue on what “bet- ter” means, and what it will require. We will soon have in place a new ad- ministration focused on solving prob- lems rather than creating them. Espe- cially in the wake of recent events, we hope that principled Republican lead- ers are ready to join principled Demo- cratic leaders in the cause of creating a better world for all. Humanity faces a potentially termi- nal crisis of collapsing environmental systems, extreme and growing in- equality, failing institutional legitima- cy, and disintegration of the basic trust of one another on which the social fabric depends. No individual caused these vast problems, and no individual or group of individuals can solve them alone. We may differ on the details, but we should unite in common recogni- tion of the failure of our existing insti-
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PATHWAYS—Spring 21—33
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