Waking up from a stupor after hitting the Wall
By Ben Zion Ptashnik

Meeting Building a Green and Sustainable Community in San Miguel The Green Community, San Miguel Sustentable Wed, Jan 27, 7pm Chai E-community Café  Salida a Celaya 24

In San Miguel de Allende a group of private citizens, business owners and environmental activists have started meeting every Wednesday evening. These “Green Community” meetings are part of the Sustainable San Miguel network, aimed at charting a course for socially responsible development and ecological sustainability for our town. Recycling, water conservation, organic agriculture, renewable energy and green development are just a few of the topics discussed at these meetings.

In 2008 the world economy hit the Wall with a capital W, and our whole international financial system suffered a severe trauma. The Wall represents the demise and collapse of the old economic order, a house of cards built on the flimsy foundation of unsustainable growth, overexploitation of natural resources, and unfettered consumerism. It also represents a lack of personal responsibility for our environment and our grandchildren’s birthright.

On December 16, 2008, an Associated Press article reported that “more than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003,” according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is an acceleration of global warming based on measurements of ice weight by NASA’s GRACE satellite. “The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays,” said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. 

Changing weather patterns and their devastating effects on weather and food crops have begun to unfold, and there are many dire predictions about what effects the melting ice and global warming will have on civilization. All we know is that the process is accelerating, and there is an obvious connection between the consumption habits of our culture and our collective carbon footprint that directly affects climate. The United Nations Intergovernmental Committee on Global Climate Change reported in 2008 that there is now a 90 percent certainty that human beings are responsible for the acceleration of global warming. That report was signed unanimously by scientists from over 100 nations.

We must take action now, not ten years from now. The Wall we hit in 2008 could/should give us pause to reflect on the damage we are causing and create the impetus toward environmental action. At all levels of government we must promote a comprehensive, holistic recovery, creating jobs and prosperity through a new economy based on conservation and development of renewable resources—an economic recovery that at the same time fixes the environmental degradation we created and finally deals with the global warming issue.

If a recovery is to succeed, we must also make a personal commitment. We each need to evolve beyond the old addictions to individual consumerism, greed, and competitive materialism that our culture has succumbed to lately. That culture is, after all, the root cause for the collapse of the old world economic order in 2008, and the decisions made on Wall Street were, in effect, merely reflective of our individual and collective values. Social responsibility on many levels has been the ingredient most lacking these past decades.

Fifty years from now, at the rate of growth and exploitation we have followed (and seem to aspire to), there will be little left for generations that follow us: little fresh water or soil to grow food, no fish, no petroleum, no wood, no copper, no aluminum, no ice caps, no stable climate. And, let’s face it: some day when this reality hits, our grandchildren are going to look us in the eye and say, “What were you thinking, acting like a bunch of drunken sailors on shore leave?”

So we have to learn to live differently. I have no illusion that this will come easily, and I know that I am just as guilty as the next guy. These past few decades have been, after all, the venue of the “me” generation. But if there was ever a chance to wake up from our stupor, this is it. In 2009, as the economic collapse unfolds, and as the whole world focuses on Obama’s recovery package, we who have the earth’s ecology in mind are hopeful that this is the opportune time for comprehensive ecological education and action, and that our choices going forward are sharper and clearer than ever. 

Ben Zion Ptashnik is a retired state senator from Vermont. He is director of the San Miguel Institute for Sustainability Studies and a founding member of San Miguel Sustentable (Sustainable San Miguel) and the San Miguel green community, which meets weekly.