Obama's Phoenix: Promises of a Green Economy

The phoenix, a mythological bird of scarlet and gold feathers, lives one thousand years and then dies in flames. From the ashes, a new bird emerges ready to live another thousand. A new phoenix is poised to take flight right now from the ashes of the still-smoldering United States economy, and I believe that unlike its ancestor, this bird bears plumage of green. We have an historic opportunity to grasp the possibilities and steer our future in a manner that will benefit the world for generations to come.

A year ago I was faced with job loss in our family and the realization that my nowhere career as an Administrative Assistant was not going to cut the mustard. I started looking into online programs and stumbled onto Oregon State University's distance degree program in Natural Resource Management. My first thought was, "Yay...there's finally something besides business degrees!" My second thought was, "What do you do with a degree in Natural Resources? Park Ranger? Nursery Manager? What, exactly?" I had previously thought of environmentalism as an ideal that was nice to have, but not economically practical.

Today this is no longer true. In fact, it is the potential of green business and energy that could resurrect our economy. Rising energy costs and cheaper technology have created a new tipping point that bring previously unfeasible ideas into the realm of practical application. A quick example of that is the success of the Toyota Prius, a hybrid fuel vehicle that retails anywhere between $19K and $23K in US dollars for a 2009 model. During the worst part of the 2008 gas price hike when gasoline in the United States was $4 per gallon for regular unleaded at the pump, the cost of the Prius seemed much more reasonable when high fuel costs were factored in. When you sit down and do the math, the Prius is still more costly per year than, say, a Kia Spectrum, but that doesn't matter - the necessary magic happened. Suddenly, it was hip to drive a Prius.

Now, apply that thinking towards things like on-demand residential water heaters, passive solar building design, grey water systems, and wind turbines. Can you see the possibilities? My point is that environmentalism is not just about trees and owls and baby seals. It can also make money. I know...yuck, money! We should all be recycling and bicycling and singing love songs for our planet out of the goodness of our holy little hearts. But here's a hard truth - money makes the world go round. It always has, and it always will.

A prime example of this is CERP, the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project. This is a hotly debated, multi-billion dollar program that aims to restore the wetlands of southern Florida, which was discussed in detail during one of my introductory classes in the Natural Resource program at OSU. You can look at a project like this and see it in two ways. The first way is the traditional environmental activist way - that we should do this because it is "noble," and that the way to get it done is to push through legislature to fund it. Approached with such altruistic intentions, this project is bound to fail, and in fact it already is going way over budget and projecting farther and farther into the future. It just does not make fiscal sense to businesses and politicians to invest in an idea that has absolutely no angle for them. And so, the project that received a green light with a budget of $7.8 billion in 2000 and a projected completion time of 20 years is now mired in lawsuit hell, with a projected completion time of 50 years and an estimated 10.9 billion budget. It's almost a moot point by now, because the reality is that in this economy and with Florida's budget deficit, any program that is not seen as vital to financial recovery is going to get assassinated. If you can't wallop people over the head with big dollar signs and data that shows that CERP makes sense, it ain't gonna happen.

Obama's support of green business could change that, if done right. Here's the second way to look at the project: the loss of revenue, jobs, and real estate from NOT doing anything. The actual stated goal of CERP is "to capture fresh water that now flows unused to the ocean and the gulf and redirect it to areas that need it most." Is that a boring statement, or what? What does it mean? First, it means recreating marshland which acts as a natural barrier against flooding and damage from hurricanes. It also means proper water treatment. The term "fresh water" in this respect only means "not salt water," because the water flowing to the ocean is anything but fresh. What flows into the Gulf of Mexico is largely waste water and runoff. This adversely affects the population of commercially and recreationally important fish. It also contributes to coral cover decline, meaning that the coral reefs sicken and die out, leaving the coast more exposed to erosion and devastating the $5.5 billion yearly reef-related economy that relies on a healthy reef system for tourism, fishing, and jobs. Finally, the polluted water kills seagrasses that, yes, are home to many kinds of cute fishies but also help stabilize the ocean bottom and prevent erosion that eats away at the coastline and threatens human development there. Also, we like to eat those cute fishies and we would be very sad as eaters of cute fishies if they were no longer there, or if the price to eat them was substantially higher.

I like to think that I straddle the line between liberal and conservative. My beliefs regarding personal freedom are very liberal, but very conservative economically. And it really makes me itch when people start talking about federal programs, subsidies, and anything that the government "should" do. There are shoulds, and then there are shoulds, and we are doing a poorer and poorer job of discerning the difference. But Obama's support doesn't have to be in the form of legislature. He's shown more than amply on the campaign trail how he can energize and inspire people, and that is more important than any subsidy. Just think for a second what a little bit of evil capitalism (yes, I am being sarcastic) would do for something like CERP. Vocational training programs aimed at putting teens who are not college bound straight to work in the field, and specialized degrees in Environmental Science, Geoscience, Hydrology, Environmental Economics, Biology and Ecology for colleges (already a booming field of study in schools across the nation). Ecotourism. Marketing aimed at getting consumers to spend dollars, like buying sponsorship for a plot of land or a species. Fashionably branded goods with a portion of the proceeds going towards the program. Even celebrity support in popular media like TV and magazines. Why leave such an important experiment in the hands of non-profits when there is so much at stake and so much to gain by tapping into the entrepreneurial spirit? It's like trying to throw an outrageously successful party and serving only water and salad because they are healthier than soft drinks and appetizers. Maybe even throwing in a poetry reading for good measure. And then wondering why everyone suddenly has to go home to relieve the baby sitter at 7 pm.

Green is "in" now. Green grocery bags, green living, green cleaning, green weddings, green pregnancies. Even Associated Content is crammed full of green articles with comments from people trying to outdo each other on how green they are. But let's be honest, shall we? Put lipstick on a pig and it's still a pig, even if it's organic lipstick. We can chirp happily all we want about buying green and helping the environment, but it won't mean a thing if we still indulge in lazy thinking - and that means daring to say it's okay to profit. In my mind, we all bear a responsibility to change the paradigm and help Obama's phoenix soar.