The Crash Course
The Unsustainable Future of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment
Chris Martenson, PhD; John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2011

The Crash Course is soon to be published, but in advance of that event the author is presenting much of this material in a full day workshop at the upcoming NESEA Building Energy conference in Boston on March 8 (www.nesea.org/be11). The next day, he and the conference keynote speaker David Orr have agreed to engage in a discussion in the opening of the Whole Systems in Action “track” of sessions, immediately following Orr’s speech to the conference on Wednesday morning March 9.

Let me say up front that I recommend you read this book as soon as you can get your hands on it. The book’s subtitle The Unsustainable Future of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment seems to signal that this might be yet another “gloom and doom” book intended to scare and intimidate. But this time it’s different: Chris Martenson is clearly a whole systems thinker. He gets at the root causes of the predicaments we face with our energy, environmental and economic endeavors, and offers a positive vision for how we might become more balanced and resilient as the future emerges.

One definition of crash course is “a rapid and intense course of training or research (usually undertaken in an emergency) – like cramming for a test. And that’s part of Martenson’s intended meaning here. The other part is that our complex and intertwined economic, energy, and environmental systems are set on a course to fail, and we must devise strategies to deal with this huge predicament. Martenson asserts that it is clear that we can’t expect technology, “experts”, or political leaders to set things right again.

It is a cinematic cliché for “action” moviemakers to celebrate the violence of multiple car crashes in slow motion, probably so we viewers won’t miss any exciting, schadenfreudlich detail of the death and destruction unfolding before us. Students of pop culture tell me that the 2003 movie Final Destination 2 has such a scene that ranks at the top of their lists for such things.

By analogy we intuitively sense that our systems have been on a seemingly slow motion collision course for quite some time. Early warning signs that the earth’s natural resources were becoming scarce and/or spoiled began to appear in the 1950s. “Peak coal” happened around 1960. “Peak oil” is happening today. With the first Earth Day in 1970, widespread environmental awareness began to seep into the mainstream. NASA’s photographs of our planet as viewed from the moon wordlessly drove the point home. And in our corner of the world, NESEA was begun in 1974.

NESEA members are a unique bunch of practicing professionals, concerned with the workable and measurable aspects of renewable resources and improving the quality of the built environment. But rather than being only a collection of experts and specialists, NESEA people are uniquely interdisciplinary, thereby synthesizing innovative ideas. It’s not enough to know how to install the best ground-source heat pumps available; one needs to understand how GSHPs and their limitations fit into the larger picture of climate control, energy efficiency, climate change, etc. Some NESEA members are collaborating to better understand how aesthetics is deeply connected to what we do. It is appropriate then for NESEA people to be part-time generalists; mindful of and understanding of the world outside one’s everyday circle. The Crash Course is appropriate reading for this reason alone.

Martenson’s forte is his deep understanding of the true economic factors that impact our wealth and standard of living. What I find treated lightly in the book is a discussion of how our collective social structures will need to adapt for the future. Restoring communities, local economies, and enhancing our connectedness to nature are all part of his book. However there is little mention of how the labor force will need to be reconstituted. My observation is that a much larger presence for worker-owned cooperatives is needed to restore the dignity, resilience, and value we place on human labor.

The Crash Course is a significant book. In articulating the need to (and a strategy to) deal with the present and face the future, it deserves to stand alongside The Limits to Growth (Donella and Dennis Meadows et alia, 1972) and Natural Capitalism (Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, 1999). The Crash Course is to be published in April. We have the chance now to connect with Chris Martenson directly at his workshop, a feature of the Building Energy 2011 conference. Try to take advantage of this opportunity.

——-William L. Stillinger February 8, 2011

Spring is upon us. Every year at this time we find an excess of people taking out ads paying lip service to “going green” or “saving the planet” or reminding us “For all of us here at the Apocalypse Corporation, every day is Earth Day” and associated claims.

Given our economic and political circumstances here in the U.S. let us hope some of this sentiment resonates and sticks in people’s hearts and minds, not put away once the season passes like we might do with a box of holiday ornaments.

I don’t have to say that sustainability is a serious issue: what it means and how quickly we can individually and collectively grasp its important implications affects our ability to carry on in a world awash in human abuse. Given the scale and breadth of our evolutionary history the challenge is daunting.

Elsewhere on the NESEA blog Joel Gordes is discussing the important definition of sustainability as articulated by the Brundtland Commission. I want to put forward some observations that may add some insight to the topic; not so much as a comment on Joel’s subject, but to branch off in a different direction.

For example, MIT’s John Ehrenfield states that sustainability is the possibility that life can continue forever. It’s an embarrassingly simple statement, but realizing that possibility seems impossibly complex.

The Brundtland Commission definition (“meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”) and its 1987 report “Our Common Future” suggests what needs to happen globally to accomplish such a state of affairs. But beyond generalities and government-style recommendations, it offers scant advice as to how to actually undertake the massive social, economic, and environmental  transformation required.

I don’t believe anyone truly understands sustainability. On the other hand, there are a number of people who by their experience and life’s work and from their perspective offer ways that society can move. Their examples are important puzzle pieces from which we can learn. I don’t believe that the movement to sustainability will ever be led by a single charismatic figure as has been the case for many social and religious movements. We certainly need leaders and thousands of good case studies to hold up for inspection. It’s probably also safe to assume that only in a democratic society will we hope to achieve a sustainable society.

So as a springtime exercise I offer up ten perspectives from ten brilliant people. This is not a David Letterman “top ten list”, but rather a gathering of names that should be important to everyone who cares about the subject. These are presented in no particular order. Perhaps you could produce a different grouping:

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Here we are 22 years later and the message brought by Harlem Gro Brundtland (b. 1939) and her United Nations Commission in 1987 has yet to reach very many of us. But it is key. She is a former Prime Minister of Norway, and has served as the Director General of the World Health Organization. She now serves as a Special Envoy on Climate Change for the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Rachel Carlson (1907-1964), founder of the contemporary environmental movement, author of Silent Spring, advocate of nature and environmental ethics. She is a remarkable study in courage.

Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), ecologist, forester, pioneer in land and wildlife management, author of A Sand County Almanac. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was an urban writer and activist who championed new, community-based approaches to planning for over 40 years. Her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, became perhaps the most influential American text about the inner workings and failings of cities, inspiring generations of urban planners and activists.

John McConnell (b. 1915) is responsible for a long list of accomplishments all strongly related to global awareness,peace, religion and science. He is the founder of Earth Day (and the Earth Flag), and an early drafter of the United Nations Earth Charter.

Dr. Karl-Heinrich Robert (b. 19??) is one of Sweden’s foremost cancer scientists who, in 1989, initiated an environmental movement called “The Natural Step.” In 1984, Robert won the Swedish Hematological Association Research Award. He headed the Division of Clinical Hematology and Oncology at the Department of Medicine at the Huddinge Hospital from 1985 until 1993. Robert has authored numerous scientific publications concerning leukemia, lymphoma, lung cancer and their clinical implications. His research on damaged human cells provided a platform for his interest in environmental questions. Later, with Dr. John Holmberg, he developed first order principles, the four so-called “system conditions,” for ecological sustainability.

Dr. Donnella H. Meadows (1941-2001), founder of the Sustainability Institute, was a professor at Dartmouth College, a long-time organic farmer, a journalist, and a systems analyst. Along with Dennis Meadows and others, she authored The Limits to Growth in 1972, examining the consequence of interactions between the Earth’s and human systems; a pioneering example of whole systems thinking on a global scale. Through her writing and speaking, Dana helped people understand global systems with long delays and complex feedbacks, while also inspiring many to think about individual choices in daily living.

Wangari Muta Maathai was born in Nyeri, Kenya (Africa) in 1940; the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree, and in 2004 she became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.”  It was while she served in the National Council of Women of Kenya that she began a grassroots organization with women groups whose main focus is the planting of trees in order to conserve the environment and improve their quality of life. Through the Green Belt Movement she has assisted women in planting more than 20 million trees on their farms and on schools and church compounds.

Ray Anderson (b. 19??) former CEO of Interface Global, the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpet. In 1994, while preparing remarks on Interface’s environmental plans for a company meeting, Ray read The Ecology of Commerce – an experience Ray has described as an epiphany, a “spear to the chest” awakening to the urgent need to set a new course toward sustainability for his company. Coupled with Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, the book changed Ray’s life and set Interface Global on its pioneering journey towards sustainability. Ray was quick to recognize the necessary connection between sustainability and organizational learning – an under-appreciated reality.

Janine Benyus (b. 1958) is a life sciences writer and author of six books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature in which she names an emerging science that seeks sustainable solutions by mimicking nature’s designs and processes. She now writes popular books in the life sciences, consults with sustainable business leaders and talks about the genius that surrounds us while living in her natural habitat – the northern Rockies.

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So that’s the list. Is yours different?

And by the way, the oil painting reproduced near the beginning of this post is titled “The Table” by Pierre Bonnard, and it is dated 1925. You can see the original and many others at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition of Bonnard’s work through April 16. If you go, I would ask you to think how Bonnard’s view of the world (he lived through World Wars I and II in France) relates to the concept of long-term survival and sustainability.

Finally, here is a cautionary if not humorous springtime poem from Amherst’s  Emily Dickinson (1830-1886):

A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown,
Who ponders this tremendous scene–
This whole experiment in green,
As if it were his own!

WLS  04-01-09