ZEITGEIST: Sustainable America - A Blueprint

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Toward A More Sustainable America by John Dernbach

Most of us have a pretty good idea that the United States has been moving in an unsustainable direction. Yet the difficult question is what to do about it. How do we get to a sustainable America?

The question is too complex, and involves too many areas of American life, for any one person to answer. And because it will take decades to achieve sustainability, a prudent approach is to focus on what should be done in the short term.

One recent effort involves 41 experts - from colleges and universities, government, the private sector, and nongovernmental organizations - who make more than a hundred recommendations for the next decade. These recommendations can be distilled into ten themes, which provide a basic map of the direction they believe we need to go.

They are:

1. The United States should systematically reduce its ecological footprint
2. The United States government must adopt, as soon as possible, greenhouse gas emission reduction programs to reduce U.S. emissions to our fair share of safe global emissions
3. The United States should create more employment opportunities in environmental protection and restoration, and make it easier for unskilled and low-income people to enter and remain in the workforce
4. Sustainable development should be an organizing principle for all levels of government
5. Nongovernmental actors should play a major role in achieving sustainability
6. Individuals, families, and consumers should have more options so they can make sustainable decisions
7. Sustainable development should become a central part of education
8. The United States should strengthen its environmental and natural resources laws and remove damaging subsidies
9. The United States needs to play an international leadership role on behalf of sustainable development
10. The United States needs to improve the available information and data so the public can make decisions for sustainability

As these recommendations suggest, sustainable development requires government, but cannot be achieved by government alone. All parts of American society - individuals, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, scientific and technological communities, educational institutions, religious organizations, families, and others - need to play an active and constructive role.

The recommendations concerning government, moreover, are not about more government or less government but rather better governance. Governments at all levels make better and less costly decisions when they incorporate environmental considerations and goals in advance, rather than trying to fix things afterwards.

These recommendations indicate that the task of becoming sustainable is achievable. For a wide range of activities, there are specific steps the United States can take in the next five to ten years to move toward sustainability. These are not long-range, pie-in-the-sky recommendations; these are things we can do right now. In fact, we could make considerable progress in every area of American life if individuals, businesses, organizations, and governments simply applied the best practices of their leading counterparts.

A sustainable development agenda will make us better off than we would otherwise be. Steps toward sustainability will save us money, improve the quality of life in our communities, improve our security, make us healthier, create new well-paying jobs, and foster new scientific and technological developments. The journey to sustainability will not be easy, but continuing our present course puts our security, economy, well-being, and environment at great risk.

The road map provided by their recommendations provides ample grist for discussion, debate, and, of greatest importance, action. We need to summon what is best about us - our ingenuity, creativity, determination, capacity for hard work, cooperative spirit, and compassion for those who follow us - to do the great work of achieving a sustainable America.

John C. Dernbach is a Distinguished Professor of Law at Widener University in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He has written widely on sustainable development, climate change, and environmental law. He is also the editor of Agenda for a Sustainable America (ELI Press 2009). To learn more about this book, visit http://www.agendaforasustainableamerica.com/

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