If printing, please conserve by doing so on the front and back of each sheet.  Reduce font size if necessary.

Montebello E-News

June 8, 2010

"Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail", Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we started to take that line seriously, would Emerson be banned in American high schools?

1. Your Priority in College
 2. Announcements
3. About Montebello E-News and “My Montebello”

Is your priority to get through college as quickly as possible and get into the workforce? Here is a disconcerting thought: your required and elective courses in college probably would not prepare you for life; rather, they probably would prepare you for a job, perhaps a high-skilled job, but not for life. There is a difference between preparing for a job and for life. Spend the summer learning the difference—that will be the best use of the next three months.

1. $10,000 for your college expenses? “Starbucks Sponsors Contest To Create Green Coffee Cups”, via The Consumerist by Marc Perton, May 22, 2010. ... The contest was organized "to reduce the number of non-recyclable cups that are thrown away every year by creating a more convenient alternative to the reusable coffee cup," though the competition's web site states that coffee cups are just the beginning ... Paper cups are just part of the problem. The amount of waste resulting from consumer packaging every year is mind-boggling. If you’re reading this and you live in the North America, then you’re contributing to the 250 million tons of garbage thrown away every year. "Reducing the number of paper coffee cups consumed is our initial attempt and reducing this overall figure. ..."  Entries are being accepted through June 15th; if your idea is picked as the best, you'll get $10,000. You retain ownership of your idea ... http://www.thebetacup.com/ 

2. A commencement speech which you will not hear―unfortunately. “The Great Disruption and the Need for Meaning”, via Worldchanging: Bright Green by Alex Steffen on March 9, 2009.

Thomas Friedman makes his play to popularize the coinage "the Great Disruption" for the combined ecological and economic crisis we're seeing:

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall ― when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”  [Emphasis mine.]

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...

We can’t do this anymore.

This general sentiment is not unique these days, and I suspect many Worldchanging readers would agree. Certainly most of us would agree that we need a realignment of our material civilization with the physical realities of our planet:

One of those who has been warning me of this for a long time is Paul Gilding, the Australian environmental business expert. He has a name for this moment ― when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once ― “The Great Disruption.”

“We are taking a system operating past its capacity and driving it faster and harder,” he wrote me. “No matter how wonderful the system is, the laws of physics and biology still apply.” We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.

But the crisis we face is more than a merely ecological or economic crisis. It's also a geo-political crisis, one which is demanding that older concepts of national sovereignty and international law stretch in new directions to accommodate the need for global responses our truly global problems; it is a social crisis, which itself demands new understandings of our interconnectedness, and of the stake each of us has in the lives of one another's children; it is, as well, a cultural crisis, where we are being forced to confront the emptiness that is so often found at the core of our new prosperity.

I increasingly think that the crisis we face can't be solved by tinkering with the parts of the systems on which we depend. It is going to take, instead, a fundamental rethinking and redesign of those systems -- and that process is going to demand that we start to ask ourselves what, exactly, it is that we want from the life those systems will be designed to deliver. I think we will find that, at its core, our crisis today represents above all else a need for greater meaning, for purpose, for depth.

Last week I participated in a podcast by the Guardian in the UK. One issue we debated was the idea of a women-run investment bank. I was highly supportive and put my name forward to sit on its (mixed!) Board. My thinking was that our investment banks need more balance, considering that an excess of testosterone and an absence of diversity have nearly destroyed the western economic system.  [Emphasis mine.]

These are tricky issues to address in print; one feels on a cliff edge in doing so, but this seems important. There is much research which suggests that women are better equipped at exhibiting balance―at being aware of and acting in accordance with a wide-range of conflicting objectives. In a financial meltdown caused by a lack of balance, are these not sound arguments for a more feminine approach to the economy―or simply more women in more senior places?  [Emphasis mine.]

* Do we need to encourage this further? If so, how?

* Could we be going too far in this direction? If so, what are the risks?

To learn about this newsletter, Montebello E-News, and the accompanying, growing Web site, “My Montebello”, visit www.mymontebello.com.  Also, you will find instructions and contact information for submitting announcements for publication in this newsletter, and for submitting stories to “Montebello Memories” at the Web site.