Wanted: One Durable Economy

Since Bill McKibben visited Mid-Michigan earlier this fall, his 2007 book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, has come to feel almost prescient.

In the past, he writes, “We could rely on economists, skilled at removing the obstacles to growth, to act as guides through the wilderness. Alan Greenspan was the wisest of wise men.”

But, on the downside, “any faltering of the growth leads quickly to misery; to recession and all its hardships.”

As an alternative, McKibben proposes a “deep economy” based on local innovation, sustainability and community. “We need economics to mature as a discipline,” he writes.

To see how, Capital Gains tagged along with McKibben during his day-long visit to nearby Albion College. Here are excerpts from his various conversations with students, faculty and Capital Gains during that day.

On the New Environmental Approach

Bill McKibben: In the last 50 or 60 years, a whole other thread has entered American environmental thinking that has as much to do with community—human community—as with wilderness. I think for the American environmental mind, the farmer’s market is now as interesting as the mountaintop.

That’s kind of a new place, and that focus—on how we might figure out how to live together as a community, in ways that might actually allow the whole world, human and natural, some margin in which to operate—is what most interests me.

On Local Energy Innovation

We’re so used to big, centralized sources of energy—and just a few of them: coal, gas and oil, really—that our tendency is always to look for big, silver bullet solutions. It’s not going to work that way in the future. There’s nothing that’s going to be as effective and cheap as coal and gas and oil have been.

And so instead of looking for silver bullets, people need to look for silver buckshot. There are a lot of things that, taken in kind of small and responsible levels, will have their use.

There are a hundred thousand things we could list that could be part of the answer and that we need to be exploring. And they tend to be smaller in scale than what we’re used to doing, and hence more local and less centralized.

On Michigan’s Green Economy Assets

You have half the freshwater on Earth. You’ve got great farmland; it’s got a lot wind blowing across it. These are all things that are going to be in short supply.

I’d begin with things like wind. It’s exciting to be up north in Michigan and see the enormous potential for stuff like that. There’s almost no windmills compared to Minnesota and Iowa.
 
[Michigan’s] got the technological know-how, but it’s been put to the wrong ends. Detroit’s spent the last 30 years thinking that the real mission of the world was to increase torque. I mean, talk about a misapplication of human capital! Engineers spent all this time trying to figure how to get you from zero to 60 half a second faster. It’s just crazy.

It’s also highly ironic that it turns out the fastest way to get from zero to 60 is in an electric car.

On Rethinking Waste

We need to generate much less waste—partly by consuming less in the first place, partly by having what we consume be much smarter, with less packaging than we use.

And then we need to take that waste and treat it not as waste but as raw material—as the source stream for what we need to make next.

Much of the future of the steel industry is in building small steel mills that take the remains of the Rust Belt that we don’t need anymore, in its current form, and turn it into new product. And that’s much less energy intensive than mining and refining raw ore.

We’re going to keep landfilling things, but one of the good things about that is that we’re learning to take a lot natural gas out of the landfill once it gets going.

On Michigan’ Coal-Fired Power Plants

It would be an amazing irony if GM finally manages to build an important car—its Chevy Volt—and everybody in Michigan is plugging it into the back of a coal-fired power plant.