The Two-Way Street of Development
Written on 12/01 at 10:06 PM by Andy Posner
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Filed under: philosophy
Viewing sustainable development as a two-way street is an important way to foster a true global village, one in which people are able to maintain their cultural identities while partaking in global flows of information, trade, finance and ideas. The problem, however, is how to get people onto this two-way street. In other words, what are the on-ramps, especially for those that are currently poor?I think an important on-ramp to the two way street is green job creation. This is something that Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland has pointed out numerous times. Things Must Get Better Before They Get Better? America certainly has its poor, and they can't care about polar ice caps, deforestation and slums in Cairo until they have met their lower-order needs of job/fiscal security, safety and so on. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenback, in their provocative book "From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility," point out that the traditional environmentalist view is that things will have to get a lot worse before they get better-in other words, once environmental problems become so visible as to be impossible to ignore, the rational response will be for people to take action. They argue, however, that things with have to get a lot better before they get better. Why? Because only then can people contemplate the larger picture of how their actions correspond to global issues such as poverty and climate change.
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