Past Insights

A Conversation About Creating a Regenerative Economy

Last week my good friend Otto Scharmer (co-author of Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society and author of Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges) invited me to participate in an amazing conversation that he had been having with Seventh Generation’s own Gregor Barnum and a select group of others.

While I won’t highlight all the participants, six of whom I’d never met before and who had a profound impact on the dialogue were Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program; Gerry Hudson, Executive Vice President of America’s most successful labor union, the SEIU; Joyce and Nelson Johnson, founders of the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro; Dayna Cunningham, Executive Director of the MIT CoLab, Co-founder of the Green Hub, and a former civil rights lawyer; and Phil Thompson, Professor of Urban Politics, at the Department of Urban Studies, MIT.

Achim Steiner is charged with an almost impossible task: to corral all the major nations of the world into setting CO2 emission standards high enough to mitigate the most devastating consequences of global climate change. Right now, he is desperately frustrated but he nevertheless remains equally passionate and committed to his task. He sees the possibility that the current international discussion will redraw lines between collaboration and competition around the world and that the certainty of global ecological disruption (beyond local & national disruption) will cause conversations that would never have happened to occur between people who previously would never have come together to have them (think, for example, a discussion between the insurance industry and the environmental community).

These conversations are more important than ever because more of what needs to be changed in the world is about the environment than ever. Global inequity, for example, has moved from being about the uneven distribution of financial resources to an issue more concerned with the disparate use of natural resources. Americans are simply using more than their fair share of global resources. This is a matter of equity and social justice.

Achim also discussed the management and manipulation of financial markets, which has become a “game” totally divorced from the needs and interests of the people who the money belongs to, and from reality itself. The manipulation of commodities such as oil and gas, has had devastating effects on the poorest economies. It’s the same with food. Last year the world produced more grain than ever before, but market manipulation doubled prices. In a world flooded with grain, too many countries were unable to afford it and too many people who needed that grain to survive died of starvation.

Joyce and Nelson Johnson are founders of the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, North Carolina. They recently collaborated with 19 business, community, and neighborhood groups as well as individuals with expertise in community organizing and the building trades to help Greensboro become a green city.

19.4 % of Greensboro’s population is at or below the poverty rate. Approximately 38% of the population earns less than a living wage. These unacceptably high negative economic indicators are combining with a breakdown of community to adversely impact almost every dimension of life from health care and housing to education and child care. At first glance it might appear that only low income and communities of color are impacted. However, closer examination reveals that the whole city is suffering economically, socially, and culturally.

In the face of this challenge, the Beloved Community Center and their partners are committed to a community building approach that will have the greatest impact on energy efficiency per dollar spent in the city’s history. They will build equity, wealth, and sustainability in underserved, neglected, and historically discriminated poor communities and communities of color. This will help ensure a higher level of health care and education, reduced crime, and it will reduce the tension and conflict between various segments of the community. This model for the wisdom of communities working together towards energy efficiency and a better quality of life is one the whole world can learn from.

A discussion ensued around the question “why can’t we put a significant amount of GDP to work to solve global climate change, when we can put trillions of dollars to work to bail out the economy, and during World Wars 1 and 2 we put 45% of GDP to work?” Here’s some of what was said:

• “Spending public funds to solve global climate change is perceived as the redistribution of wealth. Any discussion that moves into the territory of redistributing wealth is labeled socialist at best, communist at worst. We can have hundreds of years of slavery and apartheid, but we can’t even have a discussion about the redistribution of wealth to repair the damage.”

• “There is an analogy to our destruction of nature with the way we continue to not honor and value diversity through the way we perpetuate racism in society through the incredibly high levels of incarceration, unemployment, and HIV infection in minority communities across the nation.”

• “What do we need, a movement? A movement that builds on the broad coalition that came together to elect Barack Obama. Movements are in part driven by the right vocabulary, “working class,” “race wars,” “the civil rights movement, the “woman’s rights movement.” How do we come up with the right vocabulary that defines and catalyzes this new opportunity in a way that defines the common interest of people to come together?”

• “There is tension between building change at a local grass roots level that directly addresses short term needs, and the need for creating global, institutional, systemic change. There is tension between the pressure to create change quickly and the need for change to take place over time to build a movement, to build the capability, to change in a thoughtful, intentional manner.”

• “No master plan will provide the answer to managing the impact of global climate change on local communities. We need distributed capacity and capability.”

• “Why do we so often talk about material waste and not human waste, wasted lived, lives that are degraded and squandered. Nature doesn’t waste anything.”

• “We have a crisis of crises; economic, environmental, fresh water, inequality, and yet no vision. Our real crisis is a crisis of vision.”

Some selected video clips of this amazing conversation will be available shortly at the Presencing Institute.