2005
Martin Melaver

I was driving the kids to school recently. We’ve been on a jag listening to lots of Eric Clapton. It not only makes the 20-minute ride to school more enjoyable at that early hour of their day, but it keeps them from fighting with each other. Anyway, the kids are very much intrigued by the meteoric rise and fall of the band “Cream,” so named as probably most of you know with a certain arrogant certainty in having assembled the cream of rock’s talent at that time: Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, and of course Clapton. And the central question on the kids’ minds was simply this: “Dad, if they were so amazing and successful, why did they break up and go their separate ways?”. From the mouths of (not so young) babes . . . I gave them the typical pabulum of artists needing to go their own creative ways, that even high-performance teams come and go, the tension among talented egos, etc. Truth be told, I really didn’t have a good answer for them. The question becomes even more problematic when placed in the context of the sustainable movement now seeming to gather steam everywhere you look. There are over a million not-for-profits working to improve the state of our planet. You can’t pick up a major paper anywhere without finding some prominently-placed article on sustainable initiatives: from an in-depth interview with Amory Lovins on the cover of the NY Times to Jeff Immelt’s betting-of-his-legacy at GE on Ecomagination, sustainability seems hot. But the question remains, do the parts coalesce to create a more powerful whole? What do we do about the fact that despite all this buzz of activity, the state of overshoot that Denis Meadows, et. al. described as occurring around 1985 has not reversed course at all but still seems very much headed in the wrong direction (See The Limits to Growth). With all of this talent and collective wisdom out there, are we really playing together or simply all going in our own separate, creative directions? How, as Ray Anderson likes to ask, do we go about Networking the Net? It’s a very pragmatic question that begs answering, quickly. And it’s not as though we’re lacking in models. Interestingly enough in these so-called days of globalism, the models tend to have regional identities. There’s the Chicago Mandate, a series of green initiatives that are largely being mandated by a sole political leadership. Anyone who’s read The Devil in the White City shouldn’t be all that surprised to see charismatic personality pushing the agenda. And then there’s the California Forum, a battlegound of advocacy groups pushing forward-thinking legislation. And finally there’s our own backyard, the Southern Style, a model that may have the most far-reaching prospects. From the way Austin has built a broadbased consensus with its own utility provider playing a leading role, to the way in which the city of North Charleston is rebuilding its city sustainably through a complex private/public initiative, to Atlanta, reclaiming the largest brownfield site in the US to become almost a city within a city: our region seems to be using its key asset of deep-rooted relationshps built over generations to promising effect. It is way too soon to call these collective, stakeholder-building efforts a model to be emulated broadly. Returning our planet to a state of net replenishment in any case is going to call for a variety of strategies, all aligned in the same direction. But these efforts do merit considerable attention. Steven Levitt argues in Freakonomics that while morality is about how people would like the world to work whereas economics represents how it actually works. With this in mind, the examples of Austin, North Charleston, and Atlanta offer up promising ways in which communities have moved from the idealism of sustainability per se to the pragmatism of aligning the incentives of various stakeholders. So at the end of the day, maybe my own kids won’t have to explain to their kids why a talented bunch of political leaders, not-for-profit heads, academics, and business people couldn’t learn to play together.