I just took my dog for a walk and stopped in at the corner coffee shop for a cup and a quick scan of the paper. But I didn't get to the paper; instead I had a conversation with the barrista, a young woman who finished a B.A. in political science and Spanish, and who is applying for graduate school in Social Work. And I realized I had a strong opinion about that: if she goes for an MSW, she's probably headed for a dead-end career.
If you saw my diary yesterday, you might have read the great posts from G2Geek talking about sustainability and the number of people the planet can support. The number depends, of course, on the average resource use per person. G2Geek tells us:
if we want to live like Western Europeans, the sustainable world population level is about 3 billion.
At 4 billion, the sustainable standard of living is Eastern Europe.
And at the present American standard of living, the sustainable world population level is about 960 million.
Anyone who knows a bit about peak oil, and who reflects a bit on how cheap energy is thoroughly encoded into the physical, institutional, and conceptual structures of our system, has got to recognize that culturally we are headed for big changes. James Howard Kunstler lays out what we're going to face in his book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastropes of the Twenty-First Century.
Talking to the young barrista at the coffee shop, I realized this: while the demand for social work is probably going to increase in the next few decades as we experience serious social dislocations, and as increased energy costs transform work life and social life and peoples' ability to achieve their (current) ideas of the good life, the funds to pay for social workers are going to go seriously south.
Most social work is funded by communities--government--as a public good. (Just in case there are any neocons out there: the benefits that accrue from social services do not accrue solely to the clients, but also to the neighbors and fellow citizens of those clients; this makes social work a public good, and a fit object for subsidy from the community at large. Those who get benefits ought to help pay for the service.) BUT: as the price of energy goes up, government at all levels is going to be squeezed, just as the citizens who fund government through their taxes are going to be squeezed. Need goes up, ability to meet the need goes down.
When the cost of providing public services goes up, what gets cut first? If the past is any guide, it's going to be things like education and social services and capital investment (streets and bridges and sewers and infrastructure repair).
I told the young barrista that the growth field for the next couple of decades, at least, is going to be "Sustainability Studies." If you do a google search on that phrase, you get 17,000 hits; many colleges and universities now offer degree work in the field, and there are "Green MBA" programs springing up all over. (Not at my institution, but that's not because I didn't tell the Dean that he ought to make it happen.)
One of the foremost schools in this field is the University of Vermont, thanks to its Gund Institute for Ecological Economics and its Department of Community Development and Applied Economics. I told the barrista that she ought to check out the opportunity for graduate study there. The DCAE has a strong commitment to service learning and internships as well as classroom theory stuff. The point of degree work there is to get out into the world and help build the infrastructure we'll need as we move toward sustainability.
(And let me add: I'm not just dreaming that we're moving toward sustainability. The deal with an unsustainable system is that by definition it's going to change. It's changing now. The only issue is whether the changes will be something we manage and plan for, in order to minimize human pain and suffering, or whether the changes will be imposed on us by ecosystem failure and its consequences for human culture. Check out the Kunstler links for more on that.)
As I walked home from the coffee shop I was mulling over this idea--that social work will be what we might euphemistically call a "declining employment opportunity," and how rising energy costs and the loss of ecosystem services will affect the ability of government at all levels to maintain expected services. There's going to be a huge budget gap between what governments need and what citizens can afford to pay. (Sure, we need to start taxing the wealthiest Americans at a more realistic rate; but even so, there's going to be a problem.) And I hit on this idea:
As energy prices rise, and as the costs of providing all kinds of government services go up, even as people have less and less money to pay taxes, maybe local governments should start accepting tax payments in kind.
The street I was walking down has a bit of landscaping on it, and at some point a city truck comes along and some guys with day-glo orange vests pick up litter and broken tree branches. In the nearby park, someone must have planted the flowers and the trees that are part of the landscape, and someone recently replenished the bark mulch around the trees. In the summer someone is going to mow the grass. These are all things that ordinary citizens could do. So I'm thinking: one possibility for closing that budget gap that local governments will face is to have community work days--days when ordinary citizens get out there and do this kind of work--and their taxes would be reduced proportionally to how many work days they participate in.
Some of the work that would be done on this kind of community work day is work that residents of healthy neighborhoods already do for themselves. Back when I lived in a little village on an island in the Hudson River (true!), there was a guy who was the self-appointed groundskeeper. When he rode his bike up and down the island, he always took along a bag and picked up any litter he saw. And you know, there wasn't that much, because his example led others to do the same. The village was a community, and community members took care of their public space together.
The island was a community in part because it was insular, with a relatively low turnover in housing occupancy. (There were people in the village whose grandparents lay in the island's cemetery.) Unfortunately, as some of Kunstler's earlier work discusses, oil has lubricated the dissolution of American communities in the past one hundred years. With cheap energy, we moved into the suburbs and set up lives that have us inhabiting cars more than communities, and we have become more transient than rooted. As oil goes away--as cheap energy no longer structures our collective lives and our ideas of what is and isn't possible, socially, economically, geographically--we can expect to see that change; we can expect to see a revitalization of communities. The idea of in-kind payment of local taxes works better if there are healthy, self-aware communities, but it's also one way to start reconstructing that kind of community.
And here is a strong connection between the "values" ticket that voters punch when they vote for conservatives, on the one side, and a progressive, green agenda on the other. Progressives don't have to cede the values vote to conservatives. From a green perspective, the neocons pander to the legitimate desire people have to enjoy the benefits of healthy communities (low crime rates, a sense of social and moral rootedness, a rejection of the anonymity of mass society) even as they promote privatization and the engines of economic development that increasingly destroy healthy community. The conservatives give us the sickness, then sell us the band-aids that don't do much to treat it.
What do you think? Anyone got any other visions of getting from here (cheap energy, dissipated communities) to there (revitalized neighborhoods and sustainable energy use)? Or on rehabilitating "values" as a key element of the progressive, green agenda?