Sustainability

Agree or disagree, I always find the Lou Dobbs program of interest. Recently, commentators talked about making English the official language of the United States. I think that those who want to keep English as the primary U.S. language should instead consider the demographics: maintain or increase net fertility of English speakers to the net replacement rate of an average 2.1 children per female, or greater; then educate them to speak English. Otherwise, simple population trends will defeat any legislative effort. Wealthy, aging Americans will be happy to pay for low-cost immigrant labor to perform the manual tasks of our fading empire.

While we're at it, however, let's also educate them to be proficient at science and innovation, sustainability, diversity, and yes, other languages. There is an interesting article in the 12 February 2005 Science News (vol. 167 page 99) that reports on "Asian Kids' IQ Lift: Reading system may boost Chinese scores". In essence, "Learning to read 2,500 pictorial symbols, as Chinese students do in grade school, yields a 5-point advantage on IQ tests, compared with the scores of Westerners whose languages are based on alphabets, according to a new analysis of mental capabilities of Greek and Chinese children. The international team of analysts...attributes the scoring disparity to a superiority in visual and spatial tasks that comes with learning to read Chinese." They continue, "'Our findings support the assumption that reading and writing systems are powerful methods for influencing the development of mental abilities, and perhaps brain growth, in individuals and in cultures'...."

I have been following the IQ debate for a long time. As a Black American of Amerindian, Euro-caucasian, and African ancestry, I have examined the data since Arthur Jensen's Harvard Education Review article on Race and Intelligence in the Winter of 1969. The United States has been wasting a tremendous amount of its cognitive capital since the beginning of slavery by simply denying whole classes of people a good education. We have operated on a theory of either punishment or money as the principal motivator of human performance. Alfie Kohn demolished that theory in his 1993 (reissued in 1999) book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. Unfortunately, Skinnerian Behaviorism remains alive and well in corporate America and among the political class and regime that supports it.

Interestingly, I read years ago how the rag-tag colonial American Navy was able to beat the British, then considered the rulers of the waves, principally because of the motivational difference between our volunteer sailors and their "press gangs" of sailors often literally "Shanghai'd" into service. Of relevance, among the earliest educated Blacks in America were those who became sailors to gain freedom, seizing the opportunities at hand, and publishing before even the celebrated Phillis Wheatley (see http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/bolbla/briton_hammon.html).

Today, however, the corporate drive to attain both higher and more controllable profits for managerial shareholder elites (not the institutional shareholders, who are often disenfranchised through the governance process) has led to increasing efforts to remove the American population from the production process. By outsourcing, national competitions maintain lower wages. But, where we exploit precisely the same motivations that once enabled our Navy to defeat the British, we are defeating ourselves. The talented workers from Asia (perhaps using their culturally acquired IQ advantage) are seizing the opportunity in the freedom they gain, while Americans become Babbits of Consumption, fat and happy with an indulgent existence increasingly addicted to the neural pleasures commercially exploited with corporate marketing and interactive media. Worse, the video games that actually improve cognitive capabilities are also desensitizing our children to violence and to the dehumanization of "alien others". Many of our best and brightest are precisely those enlisted into our military, through the appeals to finance an education they could not otherwise afford. We send them to fight wars with a cover story of "nation building" for "freedom and democracy" when in fact it's for "free market" access to oil and gas.

What we fail to grasp geopolitically, however, is the relationship between our acquired (now threatened) political, industrial, and economic power and the exploitation of our natural energy and water advantages. We have built an unsustainable civilization dependent on fossil fuel (and nuclear) resources whose technical characteristics tend to induce the global inequities we observe. Those very inequities then induce competition over a scarcity that cannot be overcome in the energy economy we are now operating. As full economic competition increases, we are being driven toward an inevitable conflict of powers that can only be resolved if we are able to build a planetary civilization based on sustainable energy, resources, and relationships.

Diversity in culture has a function like diversity in nature: it permits a specialization of functions, attributes, and capabilities for mutual advantage. But not all forms of diversity work merely because they are diverse. When we eliminate natural habitats that evolved over millennia, we cannot restore them to "orginal" condition. Letting them "go fallow" results in domination by opportunistic species -- like the accidental introduction of Kudzu. We are then required to achieve not "restoration" but "transformation": creating a new but viable arrangement of nature in which human civilization is itself an integral and sustainable part. Diversity in culture means building sustainable relations between communities, peoples, and nations in the same way.

That brings us to the subject of jobs, energy, and "carrying capacity." If we work to build a sustainable planetary civilization, we will want to minimize the movements of mass and material so as to reduce the use and waste of energy and other resources. That would necessitate more local production, hence more local employment. On a related topic, scientists investigating food production have been trying to warn us about food imports from a health perspective. We do better biologically and ecologically if we grow and consume more of our food locally. We also know a great deal about low cost building strategies that can utilize local materials. U.S. inventors and firms have developed methods of brick-making and fiber board production, construction, and energy supply that were designed for sustainability (e.g., see http://www.sustainabledesign.com/, http://www.enviroboardcorporation.com/, http://www.terrabuilt.com/, and http://www.ttcorp.com/index.asp). We need only apply these lessons -- that is, if we actually were to learn them in school.

If our only goal is to consume with impunity, we will likely perish, whether from obesity, war, or social chaos. Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, has recently published a new book of considerable relevance: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. While I applaud Lou Dobbs’ continuing focus on middle class survival in America, the truth is that keeping out illegal aliens, legislating English, and a host of other self-protective measures are more likely to produce unintended adverse consequences than to increase the sustainability of our current lifestyles. Diamond shows an interesting contrast between the survival of Innuit and failure of the Vikings. One group was adapted to its environment and open to mutually beneficial trade. The other was focused on maintaining an environmentally destructive social system. The latter perished, although the modern inhabitants of its former lands appear to have learned some lessons, because they are seeking to become self-sufficient with renewable energy.