Losing the edge?

I awoke this morning curiously ambivalent about the election of Barack Obama to the US Presidency as it relates to solving emerging crises like energy depletion and climate change. How much can any individual in that office accomplish, alone or in conjunction with a Congress lacking a supermajority for the Democrats? Or even with it. Of course I wish him and the Nation only the best but the tasks before us are quite immense. Humanity has constantly lacked the nerve to tackle stark issues proactively. Even Cuba's push for a more sustainable society was forced upon that country by circumstances that if it did not occur (see The Power of Community), would not have resulted in the changes that were made.

The Presidency and Congress are still entrenched within the confines of the dominant social and economic paradigms where growth and expansion are good and sustainability remains an elitist academic notion irrelevant to the common working person who holds ever more acute concerns over health, jobs, and housing. While the election offers hope that those who are more receptive to sustainability frameworks will help usher in the tools and policies needed to build a better society, the campaign showed clearly that the rhetoric of the old way of thinking is alive, well, and contributing to identity of the groups right now plotting strategies to regain ideological primacy in America. The tensions between hard right and center left continue to dominate the American political landscape. The range of appropriate policy considerations between these camps does not include a rethink of neoliberal capitalism, growth economics, and sustainability as a societal foundation. It still isn't even appropriate to discuss these issues critically without the usual labels of socialist, communist, or liberal being spit out with venomous contempt.

Yet discuss them we must if our gravest threats are to be addressed, acknowledging that we are behind the curve now and will need to play catch-up even to avert the worst case scenarios predicted by the IPCC and the range of concerns voiced by the Union of Concerned Scientists, ASPO, and others in regard to climate change, peak resources, economic threats, etc. A President Obama will be watched by hard line conservatives for any signs of a "liberal commie pinko" agenda that would certainly include any policy recommendations that would seek to change course on the growth society.

So will we still hear calls to go shopping when the stores are empty this or next holiday season? Will "clean coal" and nuclear energy be seriously considered give their likely short- and long-term damage to the landscape and local water supplies not to mention coal's enormous contribution to greenhouse gasses? I fear so and thus suggest to those who have been on the front lines of climate change policy, peak oil activism, sustainability advocacy, and similar concerns to not lose your edge but to ramp up your rhetoric and energy and ensure that these issues become more mainstream and part of the cultural norms. Your work is only beginning.