Sustainability. Closing the loop is a way to create lots of jobs.

[gulliver]

Most people think of environmental conservation as costing jobs. They have been fed a steady stream of snail darter and unemployed lumberjack stories for quite a while now. It's nothing like the seventies when I grew up. Woodsy Owl was in network prime time ads with a catchy jingle. We had a crying Indian who guilted us out several times a day, and John Denver was on the top of the charts. Now we have people like Rick Perry and James Inhofe claiming to discern global conspiracies of climate scientists, while funny farm guards look on helplessly. It's no wonder Americans think conservation and sustainability are a drag on the economy and a burden.

We should be turning the tables on that. What seems to be largely missing from the jobs vs. environment debate these days is that the project of creating a worldwide sustainable civilization would actually produce a lot of jobs. Sustainability, which we ultimately can't avoid, could be a tremendous source of demand, and demand produces jobs. We seem to focus so much on the creation of goods that we forget about the reduction of "bads." But we only have to look at how big health care—an industry that depends entirely on disease, damage, and other misfortunes—has grown. Planetary health care could be big too.

Survival translating into demand is hardly new, and global warming is not just a scary death threat and source of misery. It could be seen as a challenge, a call to arms, and an opportunity to put people to work. Global warming, fishery and water supply depletion, pollution, etc. are exactly as big a promise as they are a threat. Inaction threatens us with a slow motion train ride through ugly scenery followed by a wreck. Action holds out the promise of useful, well-paying employment on a large scale, not to mention a better world.

I'm not talking about new "green jobs," although I am glad to hear about those. If our entire production/consumption/reclamation loop were a closed, sustainable circuit, then all jobs would become green. Our plans should be as big as our challenges. Ultimately, all jobs should be green. Just getting there would take an awful lot of work, and that happens to be something we need right now, an awful lot of work.

[Omaha Steve]

1. More people have full time work in collecting aluminum cans than have jobs making them

I agree. K&R!

[The2ndWheel]

2. Very human-centric

That's why it's not going to work.

[NYC_SKP]

3. K/R... Some of us are moving schools in that direction.

And eduction is KEY.

It's now "cradle to cradle", and there's no such thing as waste-- everything is a resource.

But the big businesses resist change (even change that makes economic sense).

K and R.

:patriot: