In launching Sustainable Greensboro this past January, I asked people to think about what Greensboro should look like 200 years from now. Undoubtedly, the people who settled in Greensboro and incorporated the City in 1808 could not possibly fathom how the city would look today. Could they have imagined a culture that became so distanced from the land upon which it depends? Even in those days, the settlers saw fit to convert marshlands into neighborhoods and civic buildings. This is a pattern we have continued throughout our history as a city - straighten and bury the creeks, cut down the forests, displace the wildlife, pave over the best soils and throw all of our waste products upon this very earth.
We can't change history, but we certainly can change our future...in fact, it is imperative that we do change our future - that we change how we make decisions to think not about tomorrow or the next election cycle or the next meeting, but that we make decisions that consider the future generations that will call Greensboro home. At a minimum - more than jobs - we know they will need clean water, clean air, trees, fertile soil and wildlife. These are the true basic building blocks of any culture -regardless of whether they are developed or not.
Derrick Jensen, in a recent article for Orion Magazine entitled "Playing For Keeps" expands on the idea of looking ahead to guide our decisions and planning and writes the following:
What would a society look like that was planning on being in that particular place five hundred years from now? What would an economics look like? If you knew for a fact that your descendants five hundred years from now would live on the same landbase you inhabit now, how would that affect your relationship to sources of water? How would that affect your relationship with topsoil? With forests? Would you produce waste products that are detrimental to the soil? Would you poison your water sources (or allow them to be poisoned)? Would you allow global warming to continue? If the very lives of your children and their children depended on your current actions—and of course they do—how would you act differently than you do?
This isn't to say we act maliciously towards our own culture on a day to day basis, but I would suggest, as Derrick does in the article, that we've lost contact with the very things - the natural world - that remind us what is most important. We need to begin holding, not only our leaders, but ourselves, accountable for the decisions we make that compromise our future. The future of Greensboro doesn't depend on the climate talks in Copenhagen, nor who is head of the EPA, nor who the mayor of our City, nor how we all decided to get to work each day, but, collectively it all does matter. Maybe if we all took a bit of time to consider urban flooding as much of a concern as a dip in the Dow, or the loss of wildlife habitat as much as reduction in GNP, or the loss of farmland as much as unemployment numbers, we might be able to begin to lend a hand towards providing a Greensboro that future generations can live with.
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