Mindful Relations

Balanced Budgets

2008-03-26T11:54:00.001-04:00

Balanced Budgets

I confess to having believed that sometimes it just makes sense not to have a balanced budget. I believe FDR was correct in spending more money than we were taking in to provide for many during the calamity of the Depression. Government spending acted as the key stimulus to the economy. It improved the quality of life for many. Today we all stand on the shoulders of FDR and his decision. Balanced budgets are not sacrosanct.

But I want to reconsider that confession. For nearly a generation we have been deluged with the economic gospel of the balanced budget creed. Perhaps they have finally worn me down. But what is a budget and what does it do? We budget to help us allocate resources. And surely if we learned anything from our Depression suffering parents it was to save as much as we can and stay away from debt. Isn’t that why we feel a deep satisfaction when we find a “bargain”? I think it is.

But what’s wrong with this picture? Budgets, as generally construed by financial wizards, treasurers, or accountants, only look at a piece of the operation – whether of a company, an organization or a government. They look only at the monetary side. And that’s what they try to balance. Not only that, but they are focused on a relatively short-term window for balancing a budget – a single fiscal year.

I want a budget that balances a triple-bottom line – financial, social, and environmental. A budget must balance more than the narrowly focused financial side of the ledger. Until those ledgers include the harm shifted onto the backs of others they will never truly be balanced budgets. How about we measure the human cost of not providing basic health care to everyone? How about we factor in the ongoing cost of caring for our veterans who have suffered physical, emotional, and psychological injuries? How about a ledger that includes the cost of depleting the soils for future generations or of poisoning our rivers and lakes?

The idea of balancing them in the short run (a fiscal year) almost guarantees that we will not make the long-term major investments we need to insure a sustainable future. There are clearly times when we need to shift resources from one area of concentration to another. There are times when we need to borrow resources to make the long-term investment in a better life, buying a home being a perfect example.

Politicians, pundits, and corporate voices dominate our airways and written media with this false screed to balance a narrow, short-term financial budget. The inordinate weight given to the economic sphere of life over the social fabric and the ecosystem integrity is almost all encompassing. I would argue that this economic dominant worldview is the exact opposite of what a sustainable future requires. For in fact, the economy is the wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around. Without a biosphere that can provide us with necessary air, water, and soil to sustain life we’re goners. The pervasive economic myth is slowly destroying the life systems that support us while lining the pockets of those who are particularly fortunate and/or well schooled in the rules of the game.

I say game, because like most games we play, it is grounded on competition intentionally designed to create winners and losers. It should be no surprise that sports have assumed growing iconic power in our culture. The emphasis on competition and on winning marries well with those who play the economic system to their advantage. Let’s win at any cost. The abuse of winning at any cost we see sometimes through individuals like Mark McGuire, Marion Jones or Ken Lay. What we don’t see are the many more losers forgotten along the way, or the legacy that we leave for those who follow us. He who dies with the most toys is not a winner.

Most of the wisdom traditions passed on to us have attempted to wake us from this delusion. There is a common wealth that has been bequeathed to us – ecosystems that provide air to breathe, water to drink, and soil that can provide life to us all, and infrastructures, that for example, allow us to travel more easily. But in trying to “win” the economic game, we become pitted against each other. We focus more on what separates us than on what we share in common. We have created so many artificial boundaries between us – political, class, race, gender, age, ethnicity, religion, - that we forget we are one species on a singular, finite planet. We need to begin to erase these boundaries that keep us apart and acknowledge we are all interdependent with the community of life.

The definition of insanity is to continue to do the same thing but expect a different outcome. We follow the myth of economic dominance, competition, and short-term financial budgets toward a precipice from which we may not salvage our common future. The high priests of our economic system tell us we need more of the same. If you believe in winners and losers to the point you’re willing to push others off that cliff, then the future holds little hope for the human family.

Let us re-look at our future together, where there are either no losers or we all lose. A future where the children who follow us will be able to reach their full potential. Not just my children and your children, but all the children. Let us respect the intricate and complex community of life that sustains life and for which we are a part. We can begin by learning to balance our budgets over the long haul and with equal consideration of the environmental and social impacts. Let’s elect candidates who see our future with the community of life as one future, undivided, with liberty and justice for all.

Terry Link , Director

Office of Campus Sustainability

Michigan State University

8767 E Price Rd

Laingsburg, MI 48848

February 2008

an incentive to build communities

2007-07-18T15:44:00.001-04:00

The May-June 2007 issue of In Business http://www.jgpress.com/inbusiness/archives/_free/001372.html has an interesting article on creating a “distance tax”. Product bar codes could indicate the place of production. When it is purchased at some outlet later in the supply chain a tax would be calculated based upon the distance from production to purchase place.

The author makes arguments that suggest such a tax would support local/regional self-reliance and community development, reduce environmental burdens by shipping great distances, and encourage use of local materials and labor.

Now all dramatic actions of this kind have downsides somewhere for someone. I can see several including a reduced need for over-the-road trucking, thus a decline for those businesses that rely on moving materials a great distance, and those companies that rely on distant markets to create profit. But look at all the positive gains – less fuel consumption - especially petroleum, which reduces demand, and cost, concerns about oil embargoes, etc.; less pollution and greenhouse gases emitted; better use of local resources.

Now while some industries, as noted above, may be forced to recalibrate their business model, the potential gains seem to be worth a serious discussion. Any industry which is forced by a policy decision considered to be in the interest of the commonwealth, will likly complain about “unfairness”. Weapons makers can complain when we don’t have wars to fight; car manufacturers can complain when we force them to achieve better mileage or safer vehicles; but these complaints should not override the commonwealth.

As Tony Benn clearly pointed out in Michael Moore’s “Sicko”, if we can find the money to manufacture weapons and hire soldiers to kill people, why couldn’t we find the money to care for people (health care for all), or if I may extrapolate - build stronger more sustainable communities. A distance tax might help us accomplish that. Local entrepreneurs would relish such a challenge and opportunity. But are we so entrenched in the globalized model that relies on externalizing environmental and social costs that we are incapable of finding an alternative? Time will tell, of course. But the reins of economic power are held in the clenched fists of global corporations and other vested interests, not in the communities where we live. Will we challenge the status quo to help us build strong, sustainable local communities or surrender or rights as citizens?

Footprints Newsletter...

2006-10-29T10:57:00.000-05:00

The November edition of the Footprints newsletter is now available online at http://www.ecofoot.msu.edu/newsletters/footprints.newsletter.11.06.pdf for you to download. Included in this issue is information on the visits by Michael Shuman and David Ervin, as well as som"Food for Thought." As always, feel free to e-mail us at link@msu.edu with questions or comments!

Active Citizenry

2006-10-16T08:16:00.000-04:00

Walking on a college campus one is surrounded by subliminal adverstising adorned on bodies everywhere. The Nike swoosh, Ambercrombie & Fitch, and other brands blazened on the apparel and personal goods from t-shirts to backpacks, baseball caps to water bottles. Is the wearer or carrier being paid to be a walking advertisement? Do they even know what kind of company they are advertising for? What if we were to compare this to how we treat bumper stickers.

People put bumper stickers on their vehicles to make a very specific public statement. They want others to know where they stand. America: Love it or Leave it! War is not the Answer! Gods, Guns, and Guts Made this country great! Make Trade Fair!

How comfortable are we in proclaiming what we believe strongly in? Why is it that many of us will often unwittingly afford free advertising for companies and products we know little about, other than we like the way they look or function. But we’re hesitant, nay, afraid to show as proudly what really matters to us.

As we enter these final weeks of the election season, it is expected that nationally less than 50% of registered voters will go to the polls. Since large numbers of citizens are not registered, especially young people, the actual turnout of our citizenry will be way below 50%. Of that minority of citizens, few will pound a sign in their yard, or put a sticker on their bumper announcing their support for a candidate or a ballot proposal. Few will make a monetary contribution to a candidate of their choice. Fewer yet will write a short note to their local paper trying to convince others of the reasons to vote one way or another. Even fewer will roll up their sleeves and work for a candidate or ballot proposal.

This learned helplessness is arguably allowing our governance system to slide into one controlled by money and active special interests. While the partisan bickering continues, citizenship continues to decay. Talk is cheap, and no doubt those supporting the losing side will complain loudly on November 8 about the state of our society. But given how few of us actually get involved we are our own worst enemies. With rights come responsibilities. If you want a vibrant democracy you must work to make it so. So find a candidate or proposal you believe in and help get them elected. It’s not too late to learn to be a citizen. If you don’t, it may soon be too late to rescue us from failed policies.

How Much Is Enough?

2006-07-18T10:11:00.000-04:00

"Occurring in such quantity, quality, or scope as to fully satisfy demands or needs". So reads the definition of "enough" in my Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. But I can't help wondering if our culture (American and University) sees any limits to "enough". We seem to be "un"satisfied with the amount of income, paper, energy, computer speed, etc. we get. As the university passed a new budget yesterday that raises tuition by more than 5% we must ask ourselves if maybe we have enough students, enough, faculty, enough income, enough computers, yes, even enough books in our library. This is a finite planet. There is only so much land and water. There is a growing population, most of whom do not have anywhere near what we feel we "need" to live a good life here. The math of the Ecological Footprint is pretty simple - there is not enough usable land for everyone to live our North American lifestyle. To do so would require a couple more planets, and obviously we don't have them in the neighborhood.

As we're beginning to see with oil, the resource wars are almost upon us. If we want to live in a world without constant war, we need a more equitable way of sharing the limited resources of the earth. As a first step, we in the privileged developed world, and especially the U.S. must rethink what enough is, or what we leave for our children will be a future with little hope.

Gandhi, Violence, & Making Change

2006-07-11T11:29:00.000-04:00

I just read Arne Naess’s Gandhi and Group Conflict (1974). It’s one of those books I would like to read again and again. Naess studied Gandhi’s own writings and public utterances as well as what philosophers, psychologists, and other social scientists, who had studied Gandhi and his approach (Satyagraha) to changing the status quo, have written. Satyagraha can be translated roughly as “truth seeking”. Gandhi believed that we were all seeking truth, but that we could never know the whole truth. This he argued required us to be humble in that pursuit of truth. Given our fallibility then, he offered that it was immoral to use violence against another who sees the truth differently.

Gandhi was a doer, not simply a thinker. But he was incredibly reflective and critical of his own fallibility and weaknesses. While some might revere Gandhi as a saint (Mahatma is a title bestowed on him which means “great soul”), to me he is one of many teachers we can use from which to view our own lives and actions. Having viewed just the other night the compelling film “Why We Fight” I struggle with my own involvement in ending violence that is practiced by our own government in our name. Should I shrug my shoulders and say I can’t do anything? Is writing a blog, a letter to the editor, or waving a peace flag sufficient?

For readers of this, both of you, there is likely some compelling issue that troubles you. The question for us humans then is,“what ought we to do”? Gandhi believed in the ‘means’ being justified in themselves because we can never know for sure that the desired ‘ends’ will follow. Thus his struggle with finding truth and speaking it and acting it with as much integrity, transparency, and self-reflection as possible.

If there is something we wish to change in this community, how ought we to proceed? Speaking our truth is surely a first step, followed by listening to others’ truth and then reflecting and building on that new whole. We have much work to do. Let’s get talking and listening!!

What Resources Are Available?

2006-06-22T22:35:00.000-04:00

I think you make an excellent point about climate change -- that we need to look at tackling the issue in a more 'connected' way. You give an example of thinking more conscientiously about our purchases, taking into account where the products come from and who profits. Unfortunately, most of us don't put that much time, energy, or research into our purchase decisions. Where does one go to find out more information on making sustainable buying choices?

Climate Change PLUS

2006-06-22T11:03:00.000-04:00

So thanks to Al Gore more people are interested in our response to climate change. As The Inconvenient Truth hits the Lansing area next week (fundraiser at Celebration Cinema on the 29th, show opens to the public on the 30th) as folks leave the theater with hopefully a better understanding of what we know and don't know, how will we respond?

My fear is that we will run forward to latch on to the latest technical fixes. Hopefully more people will buy compact flurorescent lights (cfl's) and install them for example. This is a good thing as electricity use will be cut 75% by a switch from incandescent bulbs which use 90% of their energy to give off heat, not light. But I want to suggest that we strive to think about climate change in more connected ways. and not as some disconnected challenge from all the others we face. So perhaps one better question to address is how do we use less energy while simultaneously diminishing the gulf between rich and the poor. For we can surely do this in a way where we keep helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. One consideration therefore might be, where do we buy the bulbs? If we can get them cheaper at Home Depot or WalMart is that the best deal for our community? Remember much of the profit from those global giants does not remain in our community but leaves immediately to corporate headquarters and into the hands of some of the wealthiest people on the planet - not all stakeholders share in the wealth.

This isn't the only connection we should try to make as we rush to slow the climate disruptions we know we are causing. Sustainability, if it does anything, should help us consider how things are connected - local to global, economic-to-social-environmental, personal-to-community. present-to-future. We need each other to help us think about what costs we externalize when we propose a solution. If we can think of the reverberations of those choices across a wide array of connections we are more like to minimalize unintended consequences and grow in our communities what we truly value.

What's in a name?

2006-06-21T13:20:00.000-04:00

I had the hardest darn time trying to find a title for this blog that conveys the sense of sustainability without using the darn ‘S’ word. Hopefully this title gets to that - that we exist in a nest of relationships of which we are mostly ignorant. So we want to encourage respectful and soulful conversation around how we make choices given an understanding that we are all in this together. The local affects the global, the economic affects the environmental, the social affects the spiritual and each in turn affects the other in a complex web of relationships. Besides the growing evidence from emerging science that we are all connected, we must also face the fact, that as physicist and cosmologist Brian Swimme suggests, we are now in a world remarkably different from that of Plato, Newton, or Darwin or other earlier intellects. In the world that they were pondering, humans were one of many species and the natural world was pretty much out there, separate and distinct from humans. As a species we are now both so numerous and so powerful with our increasing technologies, that we are capable of, and in fact are, changing the natural systems upon which we rely for life.

This incontrovertible truth requires us to think differently about our choices today and the legacy and impacts they have for those who inherit what we have sown. This space will thus be used to glimpse relationships in a complex web of life that we are part of. None of us alone are smart enough to know the answers but we hope by raising the possibilities that arise out of recognizing relationships we may collectively learn to make choices that might grow justice, health, peace, and true prosperity for all present and future generations in balance with all that we share this spinning green sphere. That’s our intent. What do you think?

Footprints Newsletter...

2006-06-18T12:10:00.000-04:00

If you haven't seen it already, please check out the May 2006 edition of our newsletter, Footprints. You can view the newsletter online at:

http://www.ecofoot.msu.edu/newsletters/footprints.newsletter.05.06.pdf

We will be coming out with another edition of the newsletter shortly, with plenty of information on events and speakers coming up at the start of the new academic year. To be notified about the newsletter and other events related to campus sustainability, please join our mailing list:

http://mailman.lib.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/msugreen

Welcome Mindful Relations...

2006-06-18T12:04:00.000-04:00

As we prepare for the upcoming 2006-2007 academic year, the MSU Office of Campus Sustainability is excited to announce the launch of our new blog! The Mindful Relations blog has been created as an online forum for discussing issues of campus sustainability within the MSU community. We hope that you will not only return to this site frequently, but that you will add our RSS feed to your live bookmarks so that you can always remain up-to-date.

Please feel free to take an active part in this blog -- after all, we created it for you! If you are interested in becoming a member of this blog, with posting privileges, please send us an e-mail so that we can add you to our team! Thanks, and we're looking forward to working with you to create a more sustainable community at Michigan State!