Alan AtKisson pleads with us to give him one little favor: If money put into sustainability is returned 3, or 10, or 50 times over in savings, let’s think of it as an investment, not a cost.
Because the world is now brimming with proof that very many expenditures to keep our environment cleaner, help prevent climate change, and otherwise save our hides (as well as the hides of other creatures) are also profitable. Very profitable indeed.
Here I imagine a "bwah-ha-ha-ha!" But in a good way.
He gets taken to task in comments for more or less disregarding the meaning of the technical accounting term "cost," but I think commenter David Foley has it right: That’s not really the point. The point is we need to convince the contemporary mind that sustainability pays. Don’t let it pass by when folks say otherwise.
I keep enjoying things Alan puts up on Worldchanging, like this and this and especially this, which I’ve been meaning to post on since it went up a month ago. Since that just keeps receding down my to-do list, for now I’ll just say:
Yes. Whatever one calls the social movement that deploys "well-grounded Yeses and hard-hitting No’s in equal measure, with tactical accuracy," sign me up for it.
I’m a little hesitant about the taxonomy that would hang all the No’s around the neck of environmentalists and leave the Yeses for the "sustainabilists" or "worldchangers" or what have you. The green coalition is a motley one, and clumping its constituents under one tag probably obscures more than it reveals anyway, but I can think of other ways to divide them just as salient as Yes vs. No.
But whatever. All the semantics palaver and frame games of late, all this talking about talking, has left me not giving a good giblet what it’s called — as long as it has the aforementioned "tactical accuracy." Let a thousand flowers bloom, let there be lobbyists, scientists, entrepreneurs, treesitters and treehuggers (and foresters), quacks and wonks, soldiers and worshipers and builders, everyday folk,Yeses and No’s, and last but … well, probably least, bloggers.
We share a common vision: a healthier planet, and human culture, as the planet’s heart spleen cooties limbic system, healthy along with it. The idea that such a coalition could up and "die" was always kind of silly.
