Cultural shift needed for sustainable society

By Michael Richards

Entrepreneurial business initiatives responded to the global oil crisis of the 1970s with rapid technological advances in solar, wind, electric cars and other breakthroughs in the areas of renewable energy. During ensuing years, bio-based alternatives to replace petroleum-based industrial inputs and computer technology for advanced “smart grid” energy systems have been developed.

Why then do we still have an Iowa economy that is primarily based on carbon fuel, energy waste and petrochemical industrial and agricultural raw materials?

One reason is simply the huge vested interests of the obsolete fossil fuel-based corporate interests that still wield huge influence over our economy, our political decision-makers and even our cultural way of thinking.

Why would major funding of the recent federal economic stimulus be directed to more highway construction to keep the car culture growing, rather than directing the majority of funds to build energy-efficient homes, sustainable/walkable neighborhoods and bio-based industries?

Granted, a few token “green economy” funds are included in the economic stimulus package, but on an anemic symbolic level rather than a substantive, change-inducing scale.

Our challenge is cultural, not technological. We have had all of the necessary technology to build the elements of a sustainable society available in the USA for more than 30 years, yet we still operate our economy with a carbon-burning binge that shows no signs of abatement. We have not yet experienced the cultural change where citizens actually expect and demand that their political representatives fully engage the necessary shift into a growing, green economy and sustainable communities.

We are still asking the wrong questions. We ask how we can produce biofuels to keep the car culture running at full speed. We do not ask with the same level of commitment how we can build sustainable towns and cities where we no longer burn so much energy to heat and cool our homes or get to work and school.

Our real challenge at present is to activate a major cultural shift where citizens choose the elements of a sustainable society. Only a profound cultural change will bring about the necessary shift from a low-value/high-consumption society to a low-consumption/high-value society. Any major national change starts at the local level.

Forward-thinking Iowans gathered in Cedar Rapids recently for the third annual S.E.E.D. Conference to consider the elements of a sustainable society from the perspective of cultural change. Such change always starts with small groups that pioneer change in their own lives. Cultural renewal then grows out into the community at large. During the first S.E.E.D. Conference in 2007, it was recognized that such cultural evolution takes one generation. Those first participants made a commitment to this endeavor for the 20-year cycle of one generation.

After year three, seeds of change are growing in Iowa, the USA and our planet as a whole. We will build a sustainable society, because we must. The meaning of sustainable economics is simple and clear: Can the economic activities of a society be sustained from one generation to the next?

The scientific realities of global climate chaos and non-renewable resource depletion make it clear that business as usual is not sustainable. An economy that's divorced from the underlying ecology can only survive for a finite period of time. We've reached the limits of our present unsustainable economic structures.

It is good to know that Iowa's entrepreneurial pioneers and cultural change agents are building the foundation for an Iowa economy that's intelligently integrated with the underlying ecology. History documents that the few always chart the path forward for the many.

Michael Richards of Cedar Rapids is president of Soyawax International and author of “Sustainable Operating Systems/The Post Petrol Paradigm.”