Democrats and Republicans are dancing together on sustainability for their mutual benefit, avoiding action, rallying their bases
A brief political history of sustainability
[If you’ve watched my Short Course on Sustainability Leadership, you’ll recognize the following from my session on the political opportunities. I’m putting only the main points here. I’ll develop it more in a future post. I wanted to start writing. If you haven’t watched the course, I think you’ll find it one of the most important resources on our culture, the environment, sustainability, and leadership.]
Scientists discovered our environmental problems/symptoms.
They proposed solutions. Since academia skewed liberal, so did their proposals, even if they didn’t intend to advance their politics. They just proposed what made sense to them.
Conservatives saw their proposals as advancing liberal causes, all the more since they weren’t practicing their proposals, so reacted against the proposals, but didn’t look at the situation from their own core values and principles.
Liberals considered themselves right and others deniers who care about profit more than people or wildlife.
Conservatives and libertarians considered liberals self-righteous, anti-human, attacking freedom and liberty, ignorantly descending into Stalinism.
Both claimed themselves attacked, attacked others with same old arguments.
None consider sustainability possible or desirable, so they don’t act.
Each promotes pie-in-the-sky “solutions”, claiming the others are blocking them, taking pot shots to rally its base.
They mutually benefit from what I see as dancing together: not acting, claiming others are the problem, rallying their bases.
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