Panelists included, from left, Joan Fitzgerald, Lou Leonard, Janelle Knox-Hayes, Julie Silva, and Christian Binz.
A greener future is possible if we know where to look and learn, panel says
We may think we face a bleak future under climate change, but there is still time to take effective action if we reconsider our economic and social approaches and develop alternative solutions.
That was the message from a panel of scholars in the presentation “Toward More Sustainable Futures and Economic Geographies” held in early June at the 7th Global Conference on Economic Geography at Clark. The conference, hosted for the first time in the United States, featured a series of roundtables over several days.
Moderated by James T. Murphy, professor and director of Clark’s Graduate School of Geography, the sustainability roundtable brought together Joan Fitzgerald, professor of urban and public policy of Northeastern University; Lou Leonard, Clark’s inaugural D.J.A. Spencer Dean of the School of Climate, Environment, and Society; Janelle Knox-Hayes, Lister Brothers Professor of Economic Geography and Planning at MIT; Julie Silva, professor of geography at University of Buffalo; and Christian Binz, a group leader in the cluster of sustainable transitions and business innovations at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology.
A Marshall Plan for green investments
Fitzgerald spelled out the challenges of finding local solutions to climate issue. She described an example from her book, “Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development.” Solar panels grew out of research at the University of Toledo in Ohio, a natural extension of the city’s auto glass industry. First Solar opened the United States’ first and largest solar manufacturing plant in the area in 1999, “and it was a great success story,” she said.
But within a decade, First Solar moved its plants to Indonesia, and then to Germany. Now, “China has pretty much taken over the whole solar industry,” according to Fitzgerald, with 72 percent of solar panels produced there — or 95 percent, if you include electronic components necessary to make them.
“ You see the problem here with the local strategies for economic development; what goes on in the world economy and how quickly one area’s competitive advantage can be completely obliterated,” she said. “Yet, I’m still an optimist about making those connections between economic development and climate action.”
In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu proposed a Green New Deal plan focused on the creation of green jobs. Fitzgerald led a panel to analyze the type of jobs, skills, and education needed to achieve Wu’s plan. But the solution does not lie entirely in green jobs, according to Fitzgerald. “It’s hard to categorize a job as green,” she said. Instead, the solutions lie in “investment in green technologies, investment in climate action in general.”
According to Damon Silvers, director of policy and special counsel for the AFL-CIO and a visiting professor of practice at University College London, “at its most conservative, the gap between global decarbonization investment levels needed to meet the Paris (Climate Agreement) targets and the actual global decarbonization level is about $6.5 trillion annually,” Fitzgerald noted. “So we’ve really got to step up investment dramatically … something on the order of the Marshall Plan or the New Deal.”
Focusing on local communities to achieve global solutions
Leonard described how the past century, which saw global reorganization after World War II, became “the first period in human history where we’ve truly begun to act globally.”
As a result, he said, “we naturally began to engage in ecological problems with a planetary systems view and approach. We developed global agreements with global goals” and “then built a set of expectations for countries that they would develop national targets.”
Although many of the efforts have been successful, this global approach has also been limiting, according to Leonard.
He suggested that scholars need to “authentically co-create learning and strategies” focused on local communities, “connecting more of the work that has been going on at the community level” to solving global problems. “I think this is a scale that where we can relate better to each other.”
Integrating Indigenous knowledge: ‘Think about the things that we would learn’
Knox-Hayes urged economic geographers to adopt an “evaluational, practice-based model for integrating Indigenous knowledge, leadership, and pedagogy,” an approach she uses in her scholarship and leadership of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “It’s not just a justice model, it’s also incredibly innovative.”
She took the audience through a primer on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, foundational works “laying out the conditions under which social systems and economic systems can thrive.” The philosopher spelled out an “ordered system that begins to establish the foundations of the nation state that acts through reason and flourishes in the pursuit of individual reason. And in that idea, knowledge itself is structured into a hierarchy.”
This hierarchy of social order exists today in families, communities, and nations, and has been “fundamental in colonialism,” which has assimilated and often sought to erase Indigenous languages, knowledge, and practices, according to Knox-Hayes.
But that Western knowledge system is “incredibly threatened and insecure,” she said. “We’re not realizing the dangers. It’s basically like having one monocrop. We have one way of creating knowledge and we hide and erase everything else.”
Knox-Hayes urged her peers to “think about what we could accomplish if instead of trying to erase … we brought all of these different knowledge systems into dialogue,” on “an international scale. I think about the things that we would learn.”
Learning from Mozambique: mineral extraction and migration
Silva described her work in local communities in Mozambique, where sea-level rise threatens a coastline that is twice the length of California’s. In the south, the country has experienced drought and cyclones; in the “forgotten north, considered the breadbasket,” natural gas production and terrorist activity abound.
“What’s happening there merits more attention than it gets,” she said. “There’s an interesting irony to the fact that critical minerals are supposed to help us with the energy transition,” but mineral extraction is leading to degradation and inequalities in such environments.
The United States and other richer countries are increasingly banning migration from countries that face instability, in part due to climate change. People in Mozambique and other parts of Africa are leaving rural areas that lack economic opportunities for urban areas. But “the next step, if you think about migration in stages, it will start to become more international, and there are a lot of forces pushing against that, but I don’t think they will be successful,” she said.
She sees “pathways forward,” ranging from green financial investments to case studies of “community-led sustainability initiatives.”
‘We really stand at a historic inflection point’
Binz remains optimistic about the world’s future.
“We really stand at a historic inflection point. It’s our generations that are tasked with creating the economic institutions of more sustainable civilization,” he said. “I always tell my students it’s a real privilege to live in this time of human history because we will be in the history books for sure.”
Over the past decade, he points out, there have been “hopeful developments,” with extreme poverty declining to 8 percent of the world’s population and greenhouse gas emissions “almost peaking globally” and soon declining. Meanwhile, low- and middle-income countries are leading efforts toward greener development.
“It’s the first time that humanity can actually argue that we have the tools in our hands to create this huge, more sustainable civilization,” Binz said. “It’s not like 20 years ago, where we asked the question, ‘Could we somehow create this?’ We have so many powerful tools in our hands now to do it if we make the right decisions moving forward.”
However, he also outlined three challenges in creating a more sustainable future, including limited economic growth and declining populations; unharnessed technologies that will eliminate good jobs; and the new “multipolar world order,” where “there will be at least three political blocks that will fight for dominance — the U.S. and its allies, China and its allies, and then maybe Europe and its allies, and maybe even more.”
Overcoming these challenges will take more than increased technological capabilities, products, and services, according to Binz. It will take “a mix of technical, institutional, and social innovation.”
That means we need to adapt conceptually, he said, moving “from economic material prosperity as the end goal to inclusive human wellbeing as the end goal.”
With their “global, multiscale outlook,” Binz concluded, economic geographers are “perfectly positioned” to “think about how the global economy could be reorganized.”
Summing up the panel session, Leonard urged participants to work together to forge a more sustainable future. “We are the ones who have to do this,” he said. “We have to think of new ways of connecting knowledge and connecting local-scale work into something that allows us to have an impact more quickly, instead of just relying on our isolated work.”
