The work that I do to earn the money to pay my bills and fund my retirement has taken a left turn into a different province. The work that I have been doing is so tightly related to the whole picture of American life that this new direction will circle back on all that has been accomplished by the company and people who work there. The new word is Sustainable.
Individual people have a sense of what sustainability is while businesses and power brokers do not. Built into the human psyche is that biological imperative to procreate. Each person feels a need to pass on his or her genes, ideals, morals and wealth to a next generation. Fathers want sons to carry forth the surname. Fathers start businesses with their name and add "Son" or "Sons" to it in the hopes of sustaining the hard won successes of the father. Boards of Directors will adopt and abandon any name which suits its goals to sell goods and services to make the profit it needs to satisfy the investors. Corporate businesses will hire and dispose any employee who they feel benefits the bottom line. For businesses the world is composed of lines that have a beginning and an end. They prefer it that way.
Consider the timber logging industry. They get legal access to a stand of trees, cut them all down and move along to a new stand of trees leaving the clear cut slopes to fend for themselves. It's a beginning, a middle and an end. No feeling of responsibility remains after the last tree is cut. After all there are more acres of trees to conquer.
Coal mining operations are the same. Dig coal, pile the tailings and move on. They sell the coal, bury the dead and discharge the injured. Coal matters. People don't. Coal is wealth. People are liabilities and expense. As long as there is a vein of coal to dig the mining companies can proceed in straight line along the seam. As long as there is another miner, old miners are put aside like a rusty drag line bucket.
We allowed industries to turn greenfields into brownfields and pull up stakes leaving the land to sit vacant and poisoned. Beverage containers typically track a linear path from manufacture to a landfill serving one portion to a customer.
These paradigms of consumption work only as long as there is an ample supply of materials and energy to make things and ample space to dump the trash afterward. This model of sustainability is depends on the idea of infinite supply and cheap processing. It depends on a society willing to allow a business to ignore the negative side of production – the waste products.
Through a much maligned Federal oversight and regulation, many industries have been required to restore their wastelands to pre-operations conditions. They have been required to do a better job of not mucking up the environment in the first place. Businesses respond reluctantly when they respond at all. They cite the increased cost of their goods and services to the consuming public as the reason to be allowed to pollute the air, water and land. Businesses are willing to pick up and move when they have fouled their sites. Settlements of people are not so inclined or mobile. They end up tolerating the non-sustainable practices of businesses.
Other blog posts that are related in a Series
todays-reasons-to-exist
shared-history
reason-to-exist
factors-that-are-missing
sustainable-community
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