Discussion
I have a bone to pick with you. You complain that the phrase "sustainable development" is an oxymoronic catch all term that arouses no opposition. So what if environmentalists have lost their power to shock and shame? Did you know that there are groups that are working hard to bridge the gap and ease the tensions between the environmental and the business community? In my opinion, you could be such a loser that you don't know when you've won! Climb down from your redwood tree dude!
We live in a ditch irrigated society where you can expect things man made to be plentiful and things natural to be scarce. You can expect a large population, a powerful military and the constitutionally protected right to harp on these drawbacks. It comes with the territory. We may have pollution, we may have greed, we may have crass materialism but I don't worry about nothin' until the wells in the Great Central Valley of California start pumping up air.
I went to a conference of civic leaders on Wednesday where the emphasis was on descriptive information gathering rather than on prescriptive solutions. The goal was to foster informed decision making and to develop a database by which to track progress on environmental issues. I must admit it was a difficult meeting for me to sit silently through because I am also an environmental activist afflicted with the vision thing. I'm one of those dreamers who thinks he can save the world.
When people talk about sustainable development I don't think about cosmetic solutions like recycling and energy efficient cars. I think about concrete solutions like making a suburban home built to last 200 years serve out its intended life span. In my opinion, the biggest threat to thousands of homes in the San Francisco Bay Area is not environmental collapse, earthquake, or nuclear destruction. It is the urban firestorm and I have built a web site around the script for a video which straddles the fence between environmental issues and fire safety issues. This is not a sell out. This is reality. I call this video, "The Cannonball Express" and my URL is http://www.best.com/~canonbal. I believe you will find this site to contain abundant food for thought and the political satire to be highly amusing.
As you ponder your next tactical move in the battle for hearts and minds in the war for the environment, have you considered that defending the status quo is an easy thing to do when the whole economy resembles one very large Ponzi scheme based on the illusion of cheap and plentiful water? ie People who got into the game early (who were around to vote for FDR's New Deal and Pat Brown's California Water Project) stand to reap the rewards invested by all of us poor suckers at the bottom of the social security pyramid. It is just the way it is.
We can disrespect the rapaciousness of the people who built the great cities of this country. We can mourn the loss of our forests and fisheries. We can decry our wasteful way of life as compared to other societies. The well educated and fit can even pretend that this social injustice is not perpetuated by unequal property taxes on identical houses on the same street based soley on their date of purchase. But the thing for true patriots to focus on is that disposable housing will begat disposable children and disposable children will grow up to be warehoused adults who haven't figured out that life in a ditch irrigated society means obeying written laws. And it costs more to imprison someone for a year than to put them through a year at Stanford University.
This is not to say that civil disobedience and nature based religion doesn't have a place at the proper time but won't you help me save some of that disposable housing here in the San Francisco Bay Area from being neglected to death? The next big urban firestorm is a disaster waiting to happen and the Sarah Winchester school of thought irks me. ("Keeeep building!")