Excerpt
Why green-collar gurus should stop condescending to the brown-collar crowd.
You don't have to look far in the canon of the sustainability movement to get a sense of where labor fits into its world-transforming vision. In his enormously influential 1993 tract, The Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken hymns a new economic order where "certain industrial skills will become less valuable," to be replaced by "biological knowledge and understanding" that "will provide the means to integrate human needs with the carrying capacity of natural systems."
So, for example, farewell miners: "While coal mines will be shuttered, removing the last insult from the lives of men and women who have long suffered for the Industrial Age, opportunities in solar hydrogen will expand." We will, Hawken continues in an air of distinct managerial chagrin, "no doubt try to protect the livelihoods of coal miners, much as the Luddites were legitimately concerned about the destiny of hand loom operators." But we all know how that story turned out. When the civilizing mission of the postindustrial age beckons, well, then it's time to put away your childish things—or your drills and pickaxes, as the case may be. As Hawken puts things, in high-visionary style: We must not hold up "the critical process of economic evolution in order to continue outmoded forms of production," but rather "recycle lost livelihoods into the jobs of the future."
Surprised to find such patrician talk in one of the founding manifestos of today's sustainability movement? You shouldn't be. The idea of sustainability, as envisioned by Hawken and other lead theorists, was to reconcile modern business civilization with the urgent mandates of preserving the earth's household. It is, in other words, management theory, with its eye firmly fixed on maximizing production efficiencies—and its accounting hand eager to put the messier business of displacing workers, shuttering industries, and increasing the cost of living of the less well off far on the margins of that "framework of a broader perspective."
And make no mistake, with Congress now beginning the slow, grinding work of drafting legislation to enact cap-and-trade mitigations of greenhouse emissions, the workers caught in the unfashionable brown precincts of industry will bear disproportionate costs. A 2004 study conducted by the University of California-Berkeley noted that measures to curtail greenhouse emissions by 20 percent by 2020 would entail fearsome losses for the old polluting industries: 23,900 jobs in coal mining, 61,400 jobs in oil and gas drilling, 6,300 jobs at oil refineries, and more than 60,000 jobs at electric and natural gas utilities.
The standard sustainabilist rejoinder to such grim accounting is that other economic sectors in a greener economy will flourish. And there is some truth to this—though it's not the first time that American workers have heard such sunny rhetoric. After NAFTA, too, workers were assured they would be retrained to be credentialed members of the brave new information order. Then, too, their livelihoods were not so much "recycled" as kicked to the curb.
Much more in the full article.
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