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Strategy For A Sustainable America by John Dernbach
If we have learned anything from the last eight years, it should be the limited utility of labeling issues as economic, social, environmental, or security. No issue fits into only one category. For example, climate change and the economy deeply affect our national security.
And all of these issues concern our freedom, opportunity, and quality of life. Accordingly, the Obama administration needs to employ a national strategic process to understand, prioritize, and address the various security, environmental, economic, and social threats we face. That process should include the following elements:
1. The federal government should consider a single strategic plan that both synthesizes various agency strategies and identifies key sustainability issues and challenges. In doing so, the United States needs to conduct, on an ongoing basis, an analysis of all actual or potential threats (including environmental threats) to its interests, and prioritize them accordingly. As the Military Advisory Board, a group of 12 retired generals and admirals, recommended, the "national security consequences of climate change should be fully integrated into national security and national defense strategies."
2. The federal government should develop a set of sustainable development indicators that cover the environmental, social, economic, and security aspects of national life. These indicators should quantitatively measure various human activities and natural events. While we are very good at tracking and measuring quarterly and annual changes in gross domestic product and employment, we do not do a particularly good job at measuring or evaluating the relationship between these measures and other aspects of our wellbeing. Sustainable development indicators would help us have a better understanding of how well we are doing overall.
3. Congress should establish an Office of Sustainability Assessment to advise it on matters relating to sustainable development. Such an office should be staffed with professionals from a variety of disciplines, which would increase the capacity of Congress to understand and address the great variety of sustainability challenges and opportunities the country faces (including, but not limited to, environmental sustainability).
Recent biofuels legislation suggests the need for such an office. In 2005, Congress required that a specified amount of U.S. gasoline be made from biofuels, including corn ethanol. In 2007, Congress greatly increased that requirement. Now it appears that some types of biofuels can have adverse environmental impacts and increase world food prices. An Office of Sustainability Assessment might have helped Congress more fully understand these impacts in advance.
4. To fully integrate environmental objectives with social, economic, and security objectives, the United States needs to make greater use of legal and policy tools that send appropriate economic signals. Among other things, Congress should reduce or eliminate environmentally damaging subsidies, including those for fossil fuels.
5. The national government should lead, support, and encourage, in a variety of contexts, sustainable development efforts by individuals, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations. Furthermore, it should re-establish and reinvigorate its collaborative relationship with state and local governments.
Too much work is needed on too many fronts for the federal government to do it alone. Growing public interest in, and awareness of, sustainable development provides reason to believe that substantial segments of the public would respond positively. President Obama has exactly the kind of inspirational ability needed to lead this effort.
Sustainable development recasts the role of the environment in human affairs - from something that can be degraded in the pursuit of achieving security, economic, and social goals to something that must be protected and restored to achieve those goals. Sustainable development is profoundly in the national interest and will better equip us to address the dangers and challenges of coming decades. And if these dangers and challenges are great, so are the opportunities.
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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Those are fantastic ideas. Hopefully Congress will actually choose to open up a discussion about this. Now that they seem to have come to some sort of agreement on the stimulus package, they should be able to move on to issues like this.
ReplyDeleteI saw that the Friends of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is asking people to give their opinion on the most important thing for Congress to do next. Then they are going to focus their efforts on getting Congress to accomplish what we actually want them to do.
What do you think Congress should do? Should they establish something like an Office of Sustainability Assessment? Should they work to increase their focus on sustainable development in general? Or should they focus their efforts on completely different areas? Make sure to add your opinion so Congress can know what we want them to do next - http://www.friendsoftheuschamber.com/email/email4.cfm?id=200
Humbled Masters of the Universe
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sldi.org/newService/SLDIFeb2009.html
This year's official World Economic Forum Davos theme - "Shaping the Post-Crisis World" – might well have been – “How could the giants of capitalism have been so stupid?” For many, Davos this year was "where the pent-up dismay and anger over what Wall Street wrought boiled to the surface" despite efforts to contain it. The rock stars here this year, surrounded by adoring fans, were two economic analysts, Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who saw the disaster coming before most everyone else, as documented in this column previously. Implying but not naming America, China's Wen Jiabao said the financial crisis was "attributable to inappropriate macroeconomic policies of some economies and their unsustainable model of development characterized by prolonged low savings and high consumption; excessive expansion of financial institutions in blind pursuit of profit."
Back in the US, the news about our local leaders wasn’t any better. Time magazine profiled iconic Palm Beach County as “The New Capital of Florida Corruption” In just the past two years, four city and county commissioners have been convicted of federal corruption charges related to “pay for play” land development schemes, and a fifth could soon join the others in serving time. While in power, these public officials “alienated the general public and took a haphazard view of development — a common South Florida practice that's indelibly tied to helping those companies and private interests that supported them.” Unfortunately, this practice is not limited to one area of the country, or one political party. According to the current Palm Beach County GOP Chairman, "I think that what everyone has realized, the general reaction is, America has a problem. We are corrupt from coast to coast and border to border." Back room deals and corruption, perceived and real, often inhibit progress and change.
Back room deals and corruption, perceived and real, often inhibit progress and change. In a transparent and public proposal offered to President Obama’s administration, SLDI has offered a public-private partnership, its Sustainable Land Development Best Practices System, and the breadth of its research and collective knowledge to combat the country’s economic woes, enhance environmental stewardship and increase social responsibility - all at the same time.
Your participation and comments are welcome.
Terry Mock
Executive Director
Sustainable Land Development International
www.SLDI.org