A Great America Once Again
by Annie Dunn Watson
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we
belong to each other.
- Mother Teresa
This month, I face a wonderful and rather daunting opportunity:
along with my colleague Carl Etnier, I will be presenting a
mini-workshop on “Framing the Peak Oil Challenge” at the
4th annual
DemocracyFest! in
Manchester, NH. My part of the session will focus on how peak oil
can be presented to the American people as a challenge worth rallying
around, one requiring no less than the best we have to offer:
innovation, hard work, a strong commitment to our children’s
future, and the willingness to pull together when times get
tough. Surprisingly, I find I have a lot to say.
America has not always been a selfish nation, but we have become more
so, in
large part due to oil. Oil is not evil, don’t get me wrong
--- oil has made a great many things possible: remarkable
advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation, communications, and
so much more. But the lifestyle that has risen up around
oil’s easy acquisition and exploitation, and the marketable
appeal of that lifestyle, have reduced our need for one another.
Easy oil allowed an “every man for himself” attitude to
flourish over the last half-century, dealing a near-death blow to the
“we’re all in this together” approach that
characterized the
years that came before. Easy oil skewed our
values, obscuring our traditional measures of success. But Peak
Oil means easy oil is getting a lot harder to come by; a lot of other
things are going to get harder to come by, too. Among the many
tasks we have ahead of us, one of the most important may be learning to
measure our society’s worth by more sustainable yardsticks,
ones that emphasize traditional American values of cooperation and
resourcefulness over those of
hyper-individualism and consumer culture.
It’s time to make America great again by reviving our most
enduring ideals: mutual responsibility, exemplary diplomacy, healthy
and well-educated children, strong and vibrant communities, creative
thinking, good
paying jobs, honest communication, and social equity.
Dealing with peak oil as a community and a nation
offers us the chance for this kind of greatness once again.
What is the measure of a country’s greatness? Is it
reflected in its GDP? Environmental degradation raises the GDP as
money changes hands to “clean up” the damage. I see
no greatness there. A rise in cancer? Wonderful for the
marketplace, but nothing to celebrate when you are trying to gauge a
country’s progress - or when you are watching a loved one
die. These figures cloud the true nature and meaning of
the expenditures that boost them; they also hide the economic disparity
that has grown
between the top tier of wealth holders in the nation and every other
American over the past 40 years. The
S.S. GDP may
have risen with the tide, but it sunk quite a few boats along the way.
A country’s greatness should be measured in its people: in
the caring and responsibility they show for one another, in the respect
and tolerance they demonstrate for differences, in the effective and
responsible diplomacy they display in their dealings with the rest
of the world. Greatness is reflected in the quality of health
care and education a nation provides its citizens - all of them, not
just the ones who can afford it. A great nation invests in its
children, knowing that the future of the nation rests in their
hands. It strives to understand the natural world and to steward
and preserve its magnificence as well as its utility. Greatness
does not shirk from challenge or responsibility;
it meets them head on, eyes open. I cannot imagine a more
resounding call to greatness than the moment we are in today.
Peak Oil demands an investment in renewable energy, as well as a
commitment to maintain, strengthen, modify and expand our aging
infrastructure in preparation for a different way of life. We
must revitalize railroads, repair water and sewer systems, improve
public transport and redesign our electrical grids. We must
explore, develop, and localize sustainable economies, agriculture,
and arts. And, we must
make a commitment to train our young people for the jobs that will
result from this reallocation of resources and priorities. These
times demand
that we develop new definitions of prosperity, fulfillment,
achievement, and worth - unfettered by rampant consumerism, meaningless
acquisitions and an unsupportable “growth
economy.” We
must redefine our values. And this may be the biggest challenge
of all.
Imagine a great America; imagine us all great citizens once
again. What does that look like to you? To your
neighbors? Your children? These are the eyes through which
we must learn to revision ourselves. And these are the selves
with which we must begin to build a new, more sustainable America.
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