The Price isn't Right

Here at Sustainable Frederick, we believe in the mostly free market. There is no doubt that a market economy is among the most amazing inventions in the universe. Let's take a minute to admire it.

Milton Friedman is the famous classical economist that is most associated with touting the amazing benefits of the free market.

Friedman talks about the simple pencil and the important point that no one person or organization could plan to gather the resources -- wood, graphite, rubber, metal, paint and labor -- from around the world and put them together into a pencil that costs only pennies. It happens so cheaply because markets exist where sellers of those resources meet buyers and exchange the goods for money and everyone walks away happy. Here is the video -- its worth seeing because this idea is (was) truly revolutionary.



Friedman and his ilk contend that the one true evil in this scenario is regulation. Only by mucking around with rules can we diminish the magic of the market.

Oh, the idealist! Really, right wingers always talk about lefties living in a fantasy world, hanging on to unreal and insubstantial dreams that look good but aren't realistic. The problem I see is that these folks are the one's living in fantasy world.

Going back to the pencil, do you think that the company that clears the forest to extract the wood to sell to the pencil maker is paying the true costs of the wood? Sure, that company is paying the labor something (we won't even get into the topic of a fair wage here), and is paying for the oil that runs the chain saws and trucks and stuff, and is paying an accountant to track it all. That's the part of the system that works. But, that company is not paying the local population for the fact that their water is now polluted because it is NOT being filtered by the wood that is now a pencil and no longer a tree. That cost falls to the poor individuals who get sick, the local government, and international aid agencies (who get most of their money from us, by the way).

Eventually those costs cost someone a lot of money, but the pencil was used up years ago.

I was inspired to write this post by an op-ed in the TheWashingtonPost that makes this same case regarding the comparison of green energy and oil energy. Check it out.

Finally -- I am listing Friedman among my heroes of this blog for his theorizing that has inspired as much good as bad. That's sustainability.

Yay Frederick Community Garden!

The Frederick Community Garden has a website. Community gardens rock!

Unsung Heroes

Those that have worked to protect our environment deserve a lot more respect than they receive. If you want to think on how things might be without our history of environmental activism, consider that right here in the U.S. the Cuyahoga River was so polluted in 1969 that it actually burned. For a less epic but closer to home example, those of us old enough to remember the brilliant PSA with the Indian crying over the littered landscape, also remember the littered landscapes.

The fact is that environmentalists are heroes. They have worked to clean up rivers and the landscape, to protect important habitats from development, to get the word out about global warming, and to stop us from from polluting with DDT and CFC’s. They looked around at the destruction we are wreaking on the world and correctly noted that it has to stop. And these heroes did something about it.

I grew up here in Frederick. I know that a big chunk of our population assumes all of these so called heroes are skanky tree huggers who never had to work for a living, and sometimes they’d be right. They’ll also be quick to challenge the tactics of "eco-terrorists," which is a fair point of discussion.

I also went to business school. I know that business types will want to argue that these actions I praise harmed our economy. That also is a fair point of discussion – we have to have an economy that produces jobs.

These fair points of discussion miss the point of this discussion.

A river caught on fire. How much worse can it get than our water burning? What would this world be like right now if no one stepped up and did something about it? I don’t want to know.

So in lieu of a “Hug a Tree Hugger Day”, what can we do to thank these heroes?

Here’s a good way to appreciate the hard work of environmental heroes – enjoy nature! That’s what they want, that’s why they did what they did. You might also think kindly on environmentalists when you hear someone disparage them and maybe speak up with a moderating comment. Maybe you can take some time in your day to learn about how you might live more sustainably, and then do it.

Or best yet, take up the torch. Get active.

William McDonough is a hero.

I’ll paraphrase to give you a sense of what William McDonough offers to the world:

If we, as a people, wanted to design a system that mines the poisons of the Earth and efficiently distributes them all over the world, if we wanted to inhibit the ability of our planet to regulate and maintain the environment that supports our life, and if we wanted to create dirty wasteful technologies that lead to things like a swirling mass of plastic bags the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean – if this is what we have wanted to design and create, then we have been wildly successful.

As an architect, McDonough sees the world through the lens of design. We humans identify needs and problems and design solutions to meet them. He asks, "what do we want to design?"





What I love most about his message is its optimism. Of course it's important that we acknowledge the truth in the Malthusian doom and gloom that embodies environmentalism. Then, fully informed of our risk, we can turn and embrace the optimism so well articulated by Mr. McDonough.