Why envisioning?
Feedback and Response
I would like to thank everyone for their insightful comments into our initial effort at Envisioning a Sustainable and Desirable America. I have received so many comments I cannot possibly reply to all of them, and instead will try to address some of the major issues in this brief note, with links to some of the relevant letters we received. If you would like to go directly to the comments we have received in response to the Rachel's Environment and Health News #727, please click here. If you would like to look at comments we received in response to Rachel #728, please click here. For this second group of comments, I have inserted a few replies directly following people's comments. I am still trying to figure our the best way to post comments and responses. As always, your feedback is welcome.
One of the more common comments questioned why we chose to limit our vision to only the USA? 1 2 3 4 There are a number of reasons. First, the USA is the leading consumer of global resources and the leading generator of waste. Achieving a sustainable future here will take us a long way towards achieving global sustainability. If we can arrive at a vision of a sustainable and desirable future, then other countries certainly can. Second, our goal is to bring together a broad cross section of the people affected by this problem, to discuss the issues and arrived at a shared vision. In the case of the USA, this means representatives of all the various social, political, cultural, religious and economic groups in the country. This is a tremendous challenge, of which we obviously fell far short in our first effort. It would be that much more difficult to achieve on a regional or global scale.
A related question is why we were so arrogant to refer to the USA as America, ignoring the fact that South America, the Caribbean and the rest of North America are also part of the Americas? 1 2 We accept the criticism, and I guess our weak response is that ESDUSA is even a worse acronym than ESDA. No arrogance is intended on the part of any of us involved in this vision. As an aside, it is probably almost as arrogant to refer to the USA as simply the US, since at least Mexico and Brazil are also United States. We welcome the suggestion for better names. Look at these suggestions,(Gaia, Earth-now) then please send yours, or post it on the discussion board.
Another concern many people expressed was that the vision we developed of a future society is unduly restrictive of individual liberty. I hope I am speaking for all of us in the ESDA when I say that we believe that individual liberty is very important, but also includes the freedom not to suffer from the actions of others. If people are free to pollute, others lose the freedom to breath clean air. If people are free to make as much noise as they want, others lose the freedom to enjoy silence. If we accept that we live on a finite planet, then unlimited freedom to consume on the part of one generation may reduce the options (hence freedom) of future generations. Many people seriously object to restrictions on the emissions of the car they drive, while others seriously object to choking on the exhaust from that car while they ride their bicycles to work. More dramatically, if global warming is a threat, the freedom of Americans to drive their large cars everywhere deprives citizens of Mauritius, the Seychelles and other small, low elevation islands of the right to a country. However, and perhaps most importantly, in describing our vision I think most of us imagined that people would give up large cars and large homes due to the advantages of public transportation and less undesired work (i.e. less time being forced to work to pay for everything). Our vision is the carrot, not the stick. It is interesting that the most recent census (2000) shows more Americans have cars and larger houses, and are also working harder and driving further to work to pay for them. WhatÕs the point of a large house if weÕre too busy to use it? If one personÕs actions had no effect on anyone else, then there would be no need for concern. However, we believe that on a finite planet, dependence on polluting and/or non-renewable resources is ultimately unsustainable, and has negative consequences for both present and future generations.
A third important issue is the difficulty of selling our vision to the broader public. Some comments suggested we were trying to impose our values on others. In part these comments address another issue that needs to be resolved, and that is how to incorporate more viewpoints into our vision? As we have repeatedly stated, our goal is to bring together a broad cross section of Americans and develop a shared vision, something we can all agree on. At our first ESDA conference, we did not have as widely representative a group as we would have liked. It is very difficult to get people to donate three days of their time to create this vision. In spite of our best efforts to bring together a broad and representative group, those who did participate were to some extent self selected, people concerned about the issues of sustainability. The broader a cross-section of America we bring together, the narrower the common ground will presumably be, but the mandate for moving towards that vision will be correspondingly more powerful. Still, even with a vision generated by a broad cross-section of Americans, communicating that vision will be extremely important. Our desired vision will be sustainable. Currently, people are inundated with a constant barrage of advertising attempting to convince us to consume more with little consideration of sustainability. While people argue that advertising is free speech, the global advertising industry spends over $650 billion annually convincing us to consume material goods. $650 billion is not free. We will need some way to compete with that message, some way to advertise the non-material values that we believe will play an important role in a sustainable and desirable future. We welcome suggestions for bringing together an extremely broad range of participants to contribute to creating a vision, and also suggestions for disseminating that vision once it is forged.
Another set of comments took issue with our envisioned world view in which humans would consider themselves as part of nature, not separate. Many people thought that some religions might be offended, while others thought we were exaggerating the existence of the human/nature split to begin with. I am not qualified to speak on religion, but my understanding is that most religions envisioned the entire planet as the product of divine creation. Our basic point is that humans and all other life forms are part of creation, however we believe that creation came about. If creation was divine, then it is all that much more clear that it is worth sustaining. Again though, the solution is probably to bring representatives of these different religious perspectives into the envisioning process, so that the resulting vision is acceptable to them as well.
There are too many other issues to address, but click on the links below to see what people had to say about:
Institutions, Infrastructure, and Schooling