Orion Magazine - September-October 2008

JG: I know lots of people working on clean energy technology in places like Silicon Valley who would argue that the forces of progress need to be accelerated, not slowed down.

GS: Well, I do stress the need to ditch the old technologies that have gotten us into this trouble and bring on as fast as possible new technologies that are designed with the environment in mind. That’s all accurate, I think. And I’m delighted to see the renaissance of environmental concern in the country.

But having said that, I just don’t believe it’s enough. What you’re really describing is what can be thought of as kind of a dematerialization of the economy, of the movement toward every kind of gloriously high-tech economy with just electrons moving around—

JG: A Google economy.

GS: Yes, a Google economy. But there’s still huge impacts, even with all of that, and as these new companies grow in size, those impacts become ever larger. And right now there’s been very little dematerialization of the U.S. economy. It’s gotten more e;cient, it creates less pollutant per unit of output in our economy. But still, we’re using a huge amount of stu= and releasing almost all of it back as waste into the environment in some form.

Changes of the type that would bring on this technological nirvana are just too slow and too partial. They need to be combined with other things that basically slow the current up. And that means taking the priority o= of growth. It means >nding a new set of laws for corporations—to change their incentive structure. It means us consumers becoming more interested in living more simply.

JG: Of course, when you talk about taking the priority off growth, it’s no longer a technological issue. It’s a political one.

GS: Yes, but the trouble is, our politics simply won’t sustain the changes that we need. And so we really need to create a mighty force in our country that seeks to reassert popular control over our politics before it’s too late.

We’re in a vicious circle where the more powerful [certain] interests get, the less able we are to reassert control, and those that have enormous power and wealth in the country [become

even more] able to assert even more. And I think that the environmental community needs to see political reform as central to its agenda, and it doesn’t now. That’s not what the environmental groups do. And that’s a huge mistake, because right now they’re playing a loser’s game, and they keep losing. Winning some battles, but losing the planet.

The other thing that needs to happen is that there needs to be some fundamental challenge to our dominant values. It’s been addressed by religious organizations and psychologists and philosophers and countless others for a long time. But until we reconnect in a more profound way with ourselves and our communities and the natural world, it seems unlikely that we will deal successfully with our problems.

JG: You quote Milton Friedman as saying, “Only a crisis produces real change.” What kind of crisis do you have in mind?

GS: I hope it doesn’t take that. But I think if you have a crisis— a Great Depression, whatever—in a time of wise leadership, we can construct a new narrative that builds on the traditions of the country and its highest values, but also explains where we need to go in the future, and why we went astray in the past.

In the end, the thing that I hope for is a huge mass movement in the country before it’s too late. I really don’t know any other way to make the change happen other than a grassroots movement. The nearest thing we’ve seen to this in living memory was the civil rights movement.

JG: One of the paradoxes of this is that fear is not always a good motivator, especially when it comes to confronting an issue like global warming. People become immobilized and say, “What the hell, there’s no point.” How do you communicate the seriousness of the challenge we face without pushing people over into despair?

GS: I think people respond out of love and out of fear, fundamentally. We will never do the things that we need to do unless we understand how serious the situation is. So you’ve got to deal with the facts.

Do we need also to talk in positive terms, to say we can deal with these issues? Absolutely. And is being hopeful about the prospects for the future very important? Absolutely. But in order to make the deep changes that are needed, people need to sense the scale of the problem.