Life's Work

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of speaking with Julie Urllaub of Taiga Company. We discussed some of the parallel and overlapping vision of Taiga and Build2Sustain and explored ways to work together to better serve the business community, while making it more sustainable. Something powerful dawned on me during the course of our conversation. Bringing sustainability to American business, especially, small businesses is a life’s work. The urgency of the climate crisis is very real. The problem we face is downright enormous. There have been calls for rapid action to address these problems. But reshaping something as large and dynamic as the American economy is a life’s work. I know for those on the left, we should have done all of this yesterday. We’re already behind, we’re losing the battle. This kind of language, prevalent in the blogosphere and on twitter does nothing to persuade. It’s sets up a defeatist paradigm in which no action, save a whole sale swap out for the way things are to the way things should be, is acceptable. We cannot expect small businesses looking to survive today to think this way.

When your mission is to bring sustainability to the whole of the American commercial real estate, you don’t have a problem you solve overnight. You have a life’s work.

What’s your life’s work?

The End of American Exceptionalism?

Much has been made lately of the end of "American Exceptionalism." For the uninitiated, the basic idea is that after the second world war America rose to become the leader of the democratized world, then after the fall of the Soviet Union the world's lone super power, both militarily and economically. We effectively became the exception to the rules of economic and geopolitical gravity that bound all other nations. 

Fast forward some 25 years and America is grappling with the idea that we will soon no longer be the world's biggest economy. Moreover, in the wake of the recent economic melt down we were shown just how dependent we are on the performance of other world economies to thrive. Soon the nations of China and India will have military power on par with our own. 

So that means the end of American Exceptionalism, right? Maybe not immediately, but it's down the road. Not far in the distance, when our kids will speak mandarin and the US will struggle like the other empires of old just to maintain parity with the growing powers around the world. I mean what self-respecting greeny hasn't read Hot, Flat, and Crowded ?

Well let me tell you, the end of American Exceptionalism is still far far away. I've been to Milan and Japan twice each over the last 4 months. Do you know the Japanese favorite lunch spot? McDonalds. Know where I had coffee every morning? Starbucks. Know what hotel I stayed in? A Marriot. The Japanese carried iPhones and wore Abercrombie hoodies. My point is that American cultural influence around the world is as potent and powerful as ever. 

American exceptionalism isn't born solely out of our military or economic might. It's born out of who we are as a people.

That's not to say we are better than any other nation or that we are entitled to bully or run the world as we see fit. It's to say that America is special in the world, not because of how we see it, but because of how the it sees us. We are exceptional because the world asks greatness of no other nation the way it does of ours. 

The power of our ideas and the influence of our culture is inescapable and precious. 

That is why it is the US that must lead the charge when it comes to launching the age of sustainability. American soft power can be a tremendous cause for good in the world. That's why I reject the idea that if the US reduces carbon emissions without China no good will come of it. There is a false choice being presented, a choice that presupposes China is the new center of gravity and if we cannot convince the Chinese environmentally responsibly action is not worth taking. I reject that. As the enduring political and cultural leaders of the world, the United States government and it's citizens (which are, remember, one and the same) is responsible for presenting the example for how a superpower behaves. This is not something to shy away from, it's not something to lament. It is to be embraced. For if we do, all of us from those in political office to those in board rooms, to those in small businesses all around this nation, there will be no end to American Exceptionalism, only an extension of true American ideals.