Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, sat at the center of a table in a ritzy room in Washington’s Union Station Wednesday morning, looking a bit like a king who had assembled his court. On both sides sat business leaders, politicians, and sustainability advocates.
The eminences had gathered before a crowd of journalists, college presidents, sustainability advocates, and others to discuss how the different factions and political parties could come together to create a more sustainable world and stave off environmental catastrophe. Aaron Brown, a former CNN anchor who is now a professor of journalism at Arizona State, moderated a discussion that included Anthony Cortese, president of Second Nature, a sustainability advocacy group; William Clay Ford Jr., chairman of the Ford Motor Company; Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota; John Hofmeister, former president of the Shell Oil Company; congressmen like Fred Upton from Michigan and Edward Markey from Massachusetts; and others.
“For us to continue to make progress economically, for us to continue to evolve, we have to do things in a different way,” Mr. Crow said in his opening remarks. “Most people are looking for new ideas, looking for leadership. … Hopefully we are the last era of the Stone Age leaders before a new generation can be transformed through our effort.”
Given the business-oriented lineup, the discussions that day centered on new products, better fuels, and smarter technologies. Mr. Ford spent time talking about the need to move to cars that burn hydrogen. (Sorry, that model is still under development.) Little to no time was spent on, say, redesigning our lives, buildings, and cities to reduce or eliminate the need for cars and new power sources. Amid all the talk of alternative fuels and the difficulty developing them, no one mentioned designing cities and neighborhoods to be walkable. (A perfectly competent designer — William McDonough, green architect and co-author of Cradle to Cradle — was reportedly somewhere in the audience and could have spoken to this.)
The business leaders said that gridlock in government and an uneven regulatory landscape were making innovation difficult. Mr. Ford and other panelists were asked whether government needed to “pick a winner” among alternative fuels for the next generation of cars, just to get innovation going.
“It would make our life a lot easier if we knew which way we were going,” Mr. Ford said. “It’s a chicken-and-egg problem — how do you fully develop something that is not picked?”
Sustainability is often compared to the 1960s quest for the moon landing, but Mr. Ford and others noted that the government and the public are too fractured to pull off an ambitious project like that. “The space shot happened because there was a national effort behind it,” he said. “Right now everyone just lobs bombs at each other.”
Mr. Hofmeister added that Europeans seem to have accepted that “there are limits to growth” and manage to get things done in alternative energy and sustainability without a lot of squabbling.
Mr. Brown asked the panelists whether Americans would be willing to sacrifice to pursue sustainability. Some called out Mr. Brown on this, saying that he should focus less on whether people will sacrifice and more on whether they were ready to grab opportunity. Whichever way you spin the question, the answer was fairly clear: No. Americans don’t want to pay more for anything.
Mr. Cortese said that one of the biggest challenges facing colleges tackling sustainability is the entrenched disciplinary structure. Disciplines are in silos, he said, but environmental problems and other sustainability challenges are inherently interdisciplinary. “The students are there, they are ready to go, but they don’t know how to lead their lives in a sustainable manner.”
Ira Flatow, the host of Talk of the Nation: Science Friday on National Public Radio, who was in the audience, asked how America could make progress on sustainability when there is no continuity of leadership. Jimmy Carter tried to show some leadership on renewable energy, Mr. Flatow said, and look what happened to him — he got run out of town by a guy who ripped the solar panels off the White House.
But core values, like civil rights, are maintained by politicians, whatever their party, said Mr. Crow. “Sustainability is not yet a core value,” he said. “We are still living in mind-sets that are in the Stone Age.” When sustainability becomes a core value, he said, every politician will have to respect it.
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