Let me begin this by venting.
I don’t know how much of our national wealth has been
squandered in the past year seeking first to obscure a host of looming crises
and then to apply a few useless bandages to stanch the bleeding of activities
whose basic flaws left them well beyond repair or recovery. My guess, however,
is that when historians 100 years hence total up the damage, it will be in
the multiple trillions of dollars range, making the bailout figures released to
date look like chicken-feed.
Even those in charge of most rock-ribbed institutions are
having a tough time ignoring the momentous changes taking place in the nation
and around the globe. Many question whether it makes sense to throw money and
effort into perpetuating systems that are no longer relevant to the emerging
situation, yet here we are poised to go back to the well again (and presumably
again and again) in the hope that there’s a magic elixir somewhere short of when
the bucket hits bedrock.
My concern is not that these infusions of money can’t produce
a short-term appearance of recovery, but rather, what then? The list of “spend
your way into prosperity” historical success stories is virtually blank, yet
here we go again flying into the face of precedent.
Is it any different in the world of waste? I worry how long
it will take for the revolution taking place all around us to fully impact our
waste systems as well, and for us to realize at a visceral level that not only
will our practices be affected, but that the basic assumptions on which we’ve
built our present-day programs and systems may no longer apply to the realities
of a future coming at us at the speed of heat.
For certain, I don’t know how to read tarot cards, and, even
if I did, I couldn’t glean from them how you should prepare for the
uncertainties of the future. But what I do know is that now is not the time to
look to the past for answers, because they are the waste world’s embodiment of
stranded investment.
No, it’s radical thinking—approaches that focus firmly on the
challenges themselves and then to solutions free from preconditions and agenda
of another day and age—that will be our salvation. It is my fervent belief that
in following such an approach we will bring about greater environmental and
societal benefits than we’ve produced in the past.
Have I made you mad enough to spit? I hope so, because my
beliefs don’t mean doodly-squat. Yours do, and those are the ones I want to
hear. So how about letting fly—Pro or Con—in the space below?