The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment (5 page)

CHAPTER 3

A World Worth Inheriting

The reason I have chosen this path in life over others that may have been easier or cushier is to fulfill my one highest goal: I want to create a world worth inheriting. Everything else pales in comparison.

I have three children, and I have every expectation of having grandchildren someday. I fervently wish for them to have the same opportunities that I have enjoyed. But my goal extends well beyond my small clan. I want
your
children and grandchildren to have an abundant world filled with meaningful relationships, activities, and careers where they can use their gifts and talents. I believe that a world in which everyone enjoys some degree of prosperity will enrich life for all of us, our children and grandchildren, and those who come after them.

I am concerned that we are on a path that will deliver the opposite of what I hope for. My worry is that the reflexive response of those in power will be to rather defensively attempt to perpetuate the status quo and that their earnest attempts to conduct business as usual for another decade will unquestionably lead to a world of less prosperity, not more. If we pursue this policy of attempting to sustain the unsustainable, what we face is a future filled with scarcity, conflict, and diminished opportunities. I cannot accept those outcomes.

But how can we change the future? Where do we even start? We must begin by taking an unflinching look at our predicament and facing it squarely. No more kicking the can down the road for the next generation to deal with, and no more pretending that real issues don’t exist. The measure of any generation is what it does with what it has. Luckily, we still have abundant natural resources, and we have all the information we need to make a better future. But our window of opportunity is closing rapidly. Solutions are becoming fewer, and options are shrinking. Someday they will disappear entirely, our opportunities to be proactive will have been permanently squandered, and we will be left to choose among an unpleasant palette of reactions to an unfortunate set of circumstances that are mostly out of our control.

To me, a world worth inheriting is one where the inhabitants are living within their economic and natural budgets. It is a stable world where people and businesses can plan for the future because they can trust what will be there when they arrive. It is a world in which the brittle architecture of our just-in-time food systems and businesses is replaced by robust, sustainable, locally focused operations. In this world worth inheriting, communities take on more responsibility for their destinies, and stronger and more fulfilling relationships develop among neighbors.

Right now we cannot even count on our money, the sacred contract that binds us all, to be there for us in any recognizable form in the future. Perhaps it will be worth a lot less; perhaps it will be replaced entirely. These are both possible and even likely outcomes given our current economic trajectory, and both are unacceptable. We can do better, and we deserve better.

But the issues extend well beyond just our money, and the sooner we recognize the dimensions of our predicament, the sooner we can get on with the work of responding intelligently to the numerous challenges that wait.

Step one toward creating a world worth inheriting is to become aware of what the problems and predicaments really are. Step two is to deepen that awareness into what we might call
understanding
. Step three is to craft intelligent responses to the issues as we understand them.

How do we accomplish these things? We begin by changing the stories we tell ourselves. The narratives that we run at the individual, national, and even global levels define the actions we take and what we prioritize.

Here is an example: Up until about 2006, the entire developed world was perpetuating an ongoing story that went like this:
Houses always go up in price
. As we now all know, that tale is not true, but it was a deeply embedded belief that shaped individual decisions and led even the most sophisticated investors in the world astray. That’s the power of a story. The right narrative can save the world, while the wrong one can be incredibly destructive. This means that we should take the time to examine our current stories and assess whether they are truly the right ones for our era and our set of circumstances.

There is a very strong chance that some or all of these stories (and many more) will prove not only to be wrong, but, like any false narrative, also highly destructive to hopes, dreams, capital, and prosperity.

We are at an absolutely unique time in humanity’s history, where a sharp corner lies in the road ahead, the traditional controls that we use to steer ourselves will no longer produce the intended effects, and much of what we believe to be true will be proven false. We need to locate these stories and change them, while at the same time supplanting them with realistic, positive visions that will guide the transformations that we need to see.

In most stories of change, there are winners and losers. I want to give you the opportunity to be among the winners. I also want to set the stage for building a more prosperous future for everyone. I believe it can be done. I don’t think we need new technologies, or revolutions, or dramatic breakthroughs in thoughts or ideas; we already have everything we need, save one thing: political will.

But that, too, can be overcome. It begins here between us, in this book, starting with a proper and open assessment of the situation in which we find ourselves. I am confident that together we can indeed create a world worth inheriting.

CHAPTER 4

Trust Yourself

To enhance your use of the lens described in Chapter 2 (
The Lens
), I invite you to adopt another somewhat radical technique:
trusting yourself
.

Rather than waiting for someone else to hand you an “expert” solution, give yourself permission to rely on your own intuition, research, and experience regarding what is best for you and your family. Go with what you just know to be right. If something doesn’t seem right, however you arrive at that conclusion, it probably isn’t. If you wait for authorities, even trusted professionals, to offer a clear signal that it’s time to take different actions and make different decisions, you will almost certainly be disappointed with the results. It may not sound easy, but if you learn to trust yourself first and foremost, it will greatly improve your chances of future success.

It took me a while to come to this realization, but I finally figured out that my interests were only accidentally and occasionally aligned with those of Wall Street and the numerous purveyors of their products. Conflicts of interest abound in this area and are mostly hidden, so when a downturn comes along and there’s not enough money both for Wall Street to pay itself and for your portfolio to gain in value, it pays to not follow the advice from Wall Street.

In fact, distressingly, it often pays to do the exact opposite of what Wall Street recommends. But Wall Street is just doing its job: making a profit . . . for itself. That’s all it cares about, that’s all it does, and it does it really well. Similarly, politicians deal in a form of profits, too, but their currency is power. It took me a while to see the game for what it was, but I now know that waiting for the political class to inform us about any issues of real or pressing urgency is not wise, especially when the issues do not have any clear political advantage. Take Peak Oil (discussed in Chapter 16), for example—there’s no “win” in that story for any politician in office, which results in nothing being said at all. They simply don’t talk about it . . . publicly, anyway.

Where Wall Street has misinformed us and politicians have chosen not to inform us about critical issues, the mainstream media has also dropped the ball, failing to counteract these transgressions by providing essential oversight and context. The media, our “fourth pillar of democracy,” has largely failed in its investigative duties, and now mainly provides interesting but generally unhelpful post-mortems on accidents after they’ve happened.

The way to counteract this conflict of interest is to simply decide for yourself what makes sense and act accordingly. Do not wait to read about a looming issue above the fold of your local newspaper or hear about it on television from a politician, because by then it will be too late to do much about it.

In a nutshell, if something seems wrong, it probably is. I have lost count of the number of people who have told me that they “knew something wasn’t right” as their portfolios shed 40 percent or more in 2008 and 2009. Many did not fully trust the placating explanations offered by their stockbrokers, but they didn’t act on those feelings, and they subsequently lost money. The critical thing about trusting yourself is that it often means acting on incomplete information, relying on what you might call a “gut hunch” or intuition. I have learned that our bodies will often “know” something is up well before our minds can fully process the situation. In the future that I anticipate, where colliding trends in the economy, energy, and the environment are going to deliver extremely large and fast-paced changes, the ability to make rapid decisions will be essential. This is the sort of landscape where trusting yourself becomes a vital skill.

A second aspect of trusting yourself is that quite often your instincts will lead you to do what very few other people seem to be doing. Surprisingly often, your gut sense will tell you to buck the conventional wisdom, ignore your broker, or override a past decision. I am now extremely glad that I have been able to make decisions that run counter to conventional wisdom and sometimes cut across the social grain. I benefited greatly from trusting gut feelings that led to responses such as buying gold when it was generally reviled as an investment back in 2003, selling my house before the housing collapse, and dumping all of my stocks before the big rundown into 2008. I fought my broker and withstood smirks from knowing friends and even some family members who were sure that they were watching me make enormous mistakes. After all, nobody else seemed to be doing these things, so how could they make any sense? Today these look like genius moves, but they were obvious decisions to make. All that was required to make them was taking a good, hard look at the data and then trusting myself.

To be fair, some of the decisions that I made have led to financial gains, and some led to improvements in my quality of life, but not
all
of them did. The important thing here is that trusting my intuition ensured that I was not paralyzed. There is a time to reflect deeply and accumulate as much information as you can before making a decision, but during less-certain or fast-moving times, you just have to go with what you know to be true on some other level. When events unfold rapidly, the desire to stay ahead of them places a premium on quick decisions. How can you arrive at the best decisions most efficiently? This is the main issue, and it is the primary reason why I promote the idea of trusting yourself. Feeling secure in your intuition is the quickest way to ensure a worthy decision.

The most important lesson that I have learned is that you should trust yourself and act accordingly. If you have significant doubts about the sustainability of your country’s current trajectory, or the stock market, or where food comes from, then those doubts are worth observing and acting upon. There is a time to trust professionals, and there is a time to trust yourself. Now is the time to trust yourself.

We are about to embark on a series of chapters where I will present evidence indicating numerous current but unsustainable trends that will not only someday stop (as all unsustainable things must do) but will potentially even collide, magnifying their individual impact into something greater than their individual parts. These trends are complex, nonlinear, and intertwined. But they can be understood, and should be, because that understanding is the best way of illuminating the future.

Just as we don’t have to understand molecular biology in order to “know” about the process of aging, we can assess the trends in the economy, energy, and environment without having to know every detail. Much of what I am going to present is really just a common-sense connection of dots, combined with a researcher’s ability to extract relevant information and an educator’s desire to make it all interesting.

As we step through the material in the next chapters, I am going to invite you to recall the simple questions above, particularly
Is this sustainable?
At the end of it all, if you find you agree with me that we are collectively on a highly unsustainable path, then the decisions you need to make will become clear. All you need to do is trust yourself.