Looking Ahead: The Next 10 Years of Green Building
(Page 9 of 10)
May/June 2009
By Eric Corey Freed
DAVID ORR: Optimism is the recognition that the odds are in your favor; hope is the faith that things will work out whatever the odds. Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. I know of no good reason for anyone to be optimistic about the human future, but I know a lot of reasons to be hopeful.
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How can one be optimistic, for example, about global warming? Optimism in these circumstances is like whistling while walking past the graveyard at midnight. There is no good case to be made for it but the sound of whistling sure beats the sound of rustling in the bushes beside the fence. But whistling does not change the probabilities one iota or much influence any lurking goblins.
But sometimes optimism misleads, and on occasion badly so. This is where hope enters. Hope, however, requires us to check our optimism at the door and enter the future without illusions.
Finally, I am an educator and earn my keep by perpetuating the quaint belief that if people only knew more they would act better. We have it on high authority that the truth will set us free from illusion, greed and ill will, and perhaps with a bit of luck it will save us from self-imposed destruction.
SERGIO PALLERONI: I am hopeful for the future because I deal with the hopeful end, since I teach and deal with the young. There's no room for not being hopeful. I see in China, or Latin America, or Africa, or India, a real, sincere concern for the environment placed at the top of all issues. There's a worldwide and growing concern for this. We're all there. How do we take that one step further and make legislation to support this?
Another thing that makes me hopeful is that this new administration is much more willing to move beyond the boundaries and establish disciplinary political and social boundaries. There has to be a mutual collaboration and exchange, a transdisciplinary and transpolitical boundary of government. You really see it in this next generation. That makes me hopeful. Of course, I'm a born optimist, so that always makes me hopeful!
I work with the poorest people as my collaborators, and I see that solutions can emerge even in places there are no resources and political isolation. Places where people have been traditionally alienated and taken out of the political process. Despite all these things, people are arriving at solutions to transform their lives and make them part of the sustainable future of the world. If we can do it for the very poor, we certainly can do it with all of our education and resources that we have in this country.
GIL FRIEND: I am hopeful and concerned. Hopeful because I am a congenital optimist, which is not only naive optimism but also as an observer of the human experience and the process of technical and social innovation. I am hopeful because I see a significant and rapid uptake in understanding of sustainability issues and a commitment to them. I am optimistic because cap and trade is going to be coming online in California next year. We have a new administration in Washington that seems to get these issues and judging by appointments like [Energy Secretary] Steven Chu, indicates there is going be some serious, science based attention to these issues.
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