I have spoken before in this space about my enthusiasm for the rise of sustainability thinking in Grand Rapids. Grand Rapids is an acknowledged sustainability leader on the North American continent, thanks to the presence and activity of a few government, nonprofit, philanthropic, and business visionaries over the last two decades.
By sustainability thinking, I refer generally to efforts and ideas for optimizing economic performance, environmental stewardship, and social equity – the three elements of the triple bottom line. I refer to businesses and industries that conserve or restore the environment instead of liquidating it, and economic activities that hold out hope of elevating the poorest of the poor.
The hopeful thing about sustainability is that, by discovering ways of harnessing profit to conservation and social equity, we may be able to do more conservation and support more of the world’s burgeoning population. We may be able to create a bit more certainty in an uncertain world.
What worries me is that it is not happening fast enough. During a 2005 visit, Presidential great-grandson Theodore Roosevelt IV, managing director at the global finance firm Lehman Brothers, remarked that sustainable business was not even on the Wall Street radar screen. American business is not reaching out energetically enough to grasp the opportunities that arise. A new green national economy seems very distant. And we seem to spend more time arguing about climate change than doing anything about it.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently reported that the seventh richest man in China, a plus-billionaire named Shi Zhengrong, got his enviable foothold in the country’s top 10 by manufacturing and selling cutting-edge silicon photovoltaic solar cell technology for generating electricity.
His company, Suntech, is the fourth-largest solar photovoltaics provider in the world after two Japanese companies and a British company. All of these companies are selling photovoltaics around the globe. Shi predicts that, in just ten years, solar electricity will be competitive with coal.
When will we be there?
The United States of America has yet to make a billionaire of Stanford Ovshinsky, the Michigan-based physics genius who has invented most of the technical breakthroughs necessary for the hydrogen economy, including the amorphous-silicon technique for low-cost solar electricity that is now spinning off jobs at United Solar Ovonic in Greenville.
Forbes doesn’t even recognize Ovshinsky in its top 400.
Warming Up to New Ideas
Government seems powerless to provide meaningful support or encouragement. Consider the legislators in Congress, present and former, Republican and Democrat alike, who have held the line on fuel efficiency standards for U.S. cars and virtually guaranteed that we would fall further behind the world's fuel efficiency innovators. Didn’t we already make that mistake in the 1970’s?
Now there is major, growing, worldwide demand for fuel efficient cars and trucks, with U.S. automakers once again caught by surprise. But no one can say we have failed to uphold our principles. It certainly takes guts to bring up the rear.
I know, I know, we mustn’t consider regulating the Jupiters of corporate capitalism, lest we arrest that effortless progress and hinder the ship of personal achievement.
Before I draw this little literary fishing trip to a close, let me just add the Wall Street Journal editorial page to my stringer.
Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, writing in the October 2006 issue of Scientific American, renewed for the umpteenth time his invitation to bring the world’s leading climate scientists to meet with the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal – along with any climate skeptics the Journal wishes to invite.
The Journal offers some of the highest quality reporting in the country, but its opinion editors continue to lead Pickett’s Charge against the Global Warming discussion.
I’d like to live long enough to see the opinion editors of the Wall Street Journal do a thorough and dispassionate exposition of the science of climate change on their pages. Meanwhile, I’d be mollified if they drew attention to the advances in sustainable development being attained here in Grand Rapids, at companies across West Michigan, and by entrepreneurs like Stanford Ovshinsky.
Playing to Win
Well, if you've read this far, thanks for holding. If you conclude from the above that I am anti-business, I respectfully submit that you are wrong. More importantly, you are missing the point.
What I am is pro-value and pro-success. And just getting rich, frankly, is not what I mean by success. “Success’ has to do with being part of the solution, or what we hope may be the solution, for our increasingly nervous species. “Value” has to do with being a source of hope to people in a harsh, competitive, polluted, dysfunctional world.
Grand Rapids, in my view, is a rarity among American communities, a city that mainly “gets it” and embraces the importance of getting aboard the ship of the future. We got a little head start, with LEED buildings and the Sustainable Business Forum, and a few other visionary initiatives.
I’d like to see us keep our lead. But the competition is warming up in every direction, and the finish line is a long ways away. We need more thinkers, and many more doers, to jump aboard.
All photographs courtesy of Ovanics
Photograph of Stanford Ovshinsky copyright Joe Polimeni