from April 1st, 2009
by Lucia Athens
Rovereto, Italy (near Verona)
Jeremy Rifkin is a name I have been familiar with since way back in the 80’s when I read WorldWatch papers. These have always been an authoritative source of sustainability information. He now heads the Foundation on Economic Trends which has created campaigns including “Beyond Beef,” “Civil Society Education,” Biotech genetic commerce, and now a campaign called “Hydrogen Economy.” Rifkin’s name has now taken on an almost mythic quality as a green economic guru. He has written 17 books, including one called The European Dream. The book description from his website reads: The American Dream is becoming ever more elusive. Americans are increasingly overworked, underpaid, squeezed for time, and unsure about their prospects for a better life. One third of all Americans say they no longer even believe in the American Dream.
I was lucky enough to be invited to a small session with Rifkin and about 20 other people, mostly Italian businessmen who were, of course, impeccably dressed in their gorgeous Italian suits. This was part of the Innovate to beat the Crisis conference at which I had been invited to speak. See http://www.dttn.it/wp/ Rifkin spoke about the recent unprecedented and profound global crisis we are now experiencing, and presented his opinion that it has been misdiagnosed, and in fact is not a credit, banking and financial crisis. He said that all those problems are the result of the real crisis, which is all related to peak oil. Well, NOW he had my attention. He went on to say that the 2nd industrial revolution, based on oil, suburban development, and internal combustion engines, all peaked in 1988. The 1989 recession was the result of overbuilding of infrastructure to support all the transportation technologies that were already on their way out. That’s why all of the US car companies are failing. (They acted like it was a surprise that gas prices went up and the demand for gas guzzler cars crashed. We have known this was coming for many years, it’s just that some people chose to pay attention.) And Mr. Rifkin noted that we did not have a 3rd industrial revolution coming out of that recession that created a sustainable replacement economic engine. Instead, we issued credit cards and started living off the savings of the 2nd industrial revolution, based on the assumption that everyone would keep buying, and we based our entire global economy on credit. Once all of our credit got used up, we started using our homes as ATM’s, creating truly bizarre financing tools such as the subprime mortgages. The irony is that we are now paying the entropy bill for the 1st and 2nd industrial revolutions. Rifkin talked about 2 more crises: energy and climate, and the fact that they are creating positive feedback feeding that is serving to amplify one another. Fossil fuels are feeding everything: clothes, food, and most importantly for those of us in the architectural industry, our buildings. So the question for us as design professionals is: what are we going to do about this? How are we going to educate our clients about it, and how are we going to create smarter designs that recognize the fact that we can no longer to live off of credit based on unsustainable economic and resource-consumption systems.
