Portland Mayor Sam Adams raves about sustainability. Quoting his website:
Sustainability means meeting our needs without compromising our children’s ability to thrive. It means economic, social and environmental justice… Portland is the ideal starting place for this nation to get serious about environmental sustainability. We can show what’s possible, setting an example the rest of the world can follow. And we can prove sustainability pays off.
Sam and the rest of his green-warrior cronies tend to forget that by enforcing and requiring sustainability at the environmental end, they ignore the selfsame aspects of economic and social justice the mayor mentions.
Honestly, who cares about green-this or sustainable-that? Some obviously do, but what is it? The green/sustainable codpiece is something that the mayor and his sort wear as part of an obfuscated marketing campaign.
That these folks get so wrapped up in the green movement, it is still not defined. I understand that there is a hat-rung for the progressive crowd who enjoy taking to the outdoors, but otherwise, I am not sure that the green world of Sam Adams has a defined objective or motive other than keeping him in office.
When in America's history has meeting our own needs compromised our children? Never. We are a progressive nation in this manner. But there is a real fear by some in this country that such compromise is imminent. The fear, however, will never manifest unless the greens and their ilk have their way and still proceed on their current bearing.
If we live according to our needs, it can never happen, and if so, we can never lose—as a city or as a country. When we live according to our wants and desires, the compromise will occur, no question, and appear seemingly out of nowhere.
So, Sam can have his flights of fancy to Washington, D.C. and go play Hungry Hungry Hippos for dollars drizzling out of Congress, the Treasury, and the myriad other federal entities while searching for money to fund Oregon Sustainability Center—a utopian commune that is nothing close to sustainable if it uses public money passing as capital to build the thing—but all he gets is a free trip to D.C., a few of his loyalists a warm-fuzzy, and the rest of the common folk at home a headache (at the very least).
How about we start sustaining our economy here in Portland with something other than platitudes? First, the motor vehicle must be championed as the prime economic mover in our society once again. It has been demonized to the point that folks will drive cheap foreign cars—or none at all—purported to be safer for the environment, rather than drive a reliable one that is safer for the kids.
Next, we need not focus on some amorphous grouping of industries that becomes “the green economy” while redefining itself wily-nily. What happens if that Confederation of the Environment somehow changes or loses favor with the next crowd to stampede into Fourth Avenue and bully about the folks in Portland?
The timber industry—a greener one there never was—ultimately failed in Oregon, though in no small part to the emerging band of enviro-saviors and the core business moving elsewhere. The lesson: don't put all one's eggs in one basket.
Last, attitudes must change. Newer is not necessarily better. “Green” might be cool and have good ideas, but until “green” meets reason and accountability, the people cannot, and ultimately will not, stand for it.
The “green” that fails to be mentioned in much of the rancor is the cold-hard dollar. While building green and having a 200,000 square foot monstrosity known as the Sustainability Center claims to save money in the long run, that doesn't count. For Sam Adams claims to avoid “compromising our children's ability to thrive,” yet he, among others, puts the millstone of debt around our neck. Debt is not sustainable and passing it down the line compromises our posterity.
Passing the buck to the federal government for a nonsensical vision of the future has good reason to make people in New York, Georgia, South Dakota, and California, to name but a random few, more angry at us in Portland, Oregon.
The biggest problem with the green movement, perhaps a result of its emergence from the leftward flank of our politics, is that it is too frenzied to recognize that it needs to be prudent. Being spendthrift in the short-term will never amount to long-term gains. I, for one, have been there, done that.
While we can be fortunate for the greens and much of what some of their allies have to say, there lies a problem when it pervades in government. The green movement's place, like any other so-called movement, is in the private realm, where, like it is on the Serengeti Plain, survival of the fittest occurs. When it is a battle of ideas, the ideas need to be out in the wild. The animals of Africa act quite a bit differently when cloistered on a few thousand acres in Texas.
Boone Pickens, not a “green” himself, but of green-tinged sympathies to a degree, retreated on his massive windfarm project when he realized that it was too capital intensive to proceed at this time. His goal, as I understand it, is to find something that will bridge the gap for the new energy technology. Does this mean that this new technology will be “green” by nature?
Whether green or not, the test is to see whether we end up with more green in our pockets and banks by the end of the month, while at the same time not having to, in the parlance of some, defecate where we eat.
We can ride bikes all we want around town and the city government can cut off even more lanes of traffic to cars and to the people driving them. The result: a possible—though negligible—increase in air quality, but what then will the lives of the people be like?
With green, the outlook looks like the blues.
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