PlacerSustain: Voices of Placer County's Sustainability Community

Immanuel Wallerstein is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University.  He recently wrote an article in "Foreign Policy Magazine," the 40th Anniversary Special Issue.  The title of the article was "The Global Economy Won't Recover, Now or Ever."  His basic position is:

• The "conventional" wisdom is that we are operating in the "normal" business cycle, that we are going to recover from the Great Recession in the same manner that we have "recovered" from past business cycles, and that in fact such a recovery is occurring. Wallerstein says this proposition is wrong.
• Our existing system has functioned well for some 500 years, but like all systems, it has a shelf life, and its time is coming to an end as evidenced by structural disequilibrium in the form, among other things, of the current financial system disruptions, and eventually by insolvency in the public sector.
• The basic problems are reflected in the rising cost of production, the increasing demand for governmental  support services (education, health care, income guarantees, etc.), and to meet these demands, a significant increase in levels of taxation of all kinds.  The costs have risen to the point that precludes significant capital accumulation. 
• We are witnessing "chaotic" fluctuations of all kinds, economic, political, and socio-cultural, fluctuations that cannot be easily controlled by public policy.  "The result is ever greater uncertainly about all kinds of short-term decision-making, as well as frantic realignments of every variety."
• The remarkable expansion of the world economy during the post WWII period (1945-1970) has been followed by long periods of economic stagnation in which the basic source of gain has been "rank speculation." 
• The latest financial crises didn't bring down the financial system, it revealed long standing structural problems.

His conclusion, the present system is coming down, and the choices now are about what will replace it.  That is the "real action," the struggle over what new system will be created, action that Wallerstein says is occurring "elsewhere," i.e. not in the effort to repair the existing system.

Dr. Glenda Humiston, the USDA State Rural Development Director, in her recent Nevada City, California, presentation, pointed to a graph that illustrated unemployment trends and the job loss in the current recession.  Her comment, "these lost jobs are not coming back." 

Most of us sense that we are in the midst of economic difficulties that are about something fundamental.  In fact, this perception is not limited to the economic domain.  Something equally fundamental is happening in social and environmental conditions.  There is much disagreement about what is happening, why, and what should be done about it. 

It is not clear that the evolution of social systems occurs in the form of the termination of the old--more likely that the old is integrated into and transcended by something new--a transformational shift.  Part of the shift we are in is the emergence of "Localization" in the face of Globalization.  In sustainability initiatives worldwide, there is a growing consensus that a major part of the solution is strengthening the ability of local communities to create their own future in all three sustainability domains--Community, Environment, and Economy.  This is part of the foundation upon which the architecture of a "new system" will be built, an architecture that requires a re-structuring of local, regional, national, and global relationships,roles, and allocation of resources.