Building a Green Economy after the Great Leap Sideways - Environment - Utne Reader

Building a Green Economy after the Great Leap Sideways - Environment - Utne Reader

The Leap is first and foremost a cognitive jump, a shift in perspective and priorities. There is new technology and infrastructure involved—some of it fresh from the lab, some ancient in design—but it is not fundamentally about the tools. Whereas technological revolutions like the one that has reshaped telecommunications in the last twenty years are driven by new kinds of tools—“disruptive technologies,” in the preferred lingo of the digital world—The Leap is propelled by disruptive techniques. New kinds of policy, new metrics, new design parameters for vehicles and homes and whole cities, new ways of solving problems and thinking through challenges. It is not about material wealth or technical know-how but about creating the social and political will to commit to making the jump.
And finally—critically—The Leap is not just about escaping from but also moving toward, not motivated solely by the avoidance of disaster but also, even principally, by the desire to pursue our brightest possible future. The track on the other side leads not just somewhere safer but somewhere better.
The reason I can state this so baldly is because, as I said, I’ve been there. And what follows is, in one sense, a travel guide to the places where we arrive upon landing. I’ve seen first hand the exhilaration the Great Leap Sideways inspires, and I can see no good reason why anyone wouldn’t want to be where this Leap lands us. These are not allegorical scenarios like the train ride I described but real communities, cities, businesses, even whole nations—places that are already thriving in the sustainable twenty-first-century world order, all of them as real as Jeremiah Thompson’s New York and the yellowed pages of an 1818 shipping list. The Leap does not take us to a place of hardship or deprivation. It’s not about sacrifice, not a world predicated on going without or getting by. Quite the opposite: it’s a leap from a failing system to one that works, from decline and imminent peril to a new kind of prosperity with a healthy future stretching far out in front of it.