What Is Green Work? some green economic concepts the evolution & transformation of work work & life: whats the relationship? work & consumption: whats.

What Is Green Work?

some green economic concepts

the evolution & transformation of work

work & life: what’s the relationship?

work & consumption: what’s the relationship?

Questions

The Green Economy

• A Historical Transition: …from Quantity to Quality

• A Question of Potentials …not simply limits

• Key to Sustainability: Redefining Wealth

Redefining Wealth

Quantitative: Money & Material

Accumulation

Qualitative: Well-being

Regeneration

Principles of a Green Economy1. The Primacy of Human Need, Service, Use-value,

Intrinsic Value & Quality 2. Following Natural Flows 3. Waste Equals Food4. Elegance and Multifunctionality5. Appropriate Scale / Linked Scale6. Diversity7. Self-Reliance, Self-Organization, Self-Design8. Participation & Direct Democracy9. Human Creativity and Development 10. The Strategic role of the Built-environment, the

Landscape & Spatial Design

A Green Economy

1. The Service Economy“Hot Showers and Cold Beer”

Nutrition, Illumination, Entertainment, Access, Shelter, Community, etc. “People production”

2. The “Lake Economy”Flowing with nature, Every output an input,

Closed-loop organization, Let nature do the work. “Biomimicry”: integrate with and imitate

natural systems.

Human Development in the Green Economy

• Production: human creativity the key

• Consumption: “end-use” Direct targeting of human need = massive resource savings

• Regulation: participation at all levels.

Energy: The Soft Energy Path

• A flexible diverse mix of energy supply • Primacy of Renewable energy sources • Focus on End-use, on Conservation, and on

efficiency of use • Energy matched to the task at hand in both QUALITY

and SCALE • Participation-oriented structure--in both production

and consumption • People-intensive development and Job-creating

Note: this is a system design perspective, not simply one of substituting renewable energy for fossil fuels.

Materials: Beyond ‘Waste Management’

• necessary to meet real ‘service’ needs for nutrition, access, entertainment, etc.?

• waste as a resource: reusable, compostable?• design for reusability, durability and compostability• proximity & multi-dimensional design

The Centrality of the Landscape

“The industrial age replaced the natural processes of the landscape with the global machine…while regenerative design seeks now to replace the machine with landscape.”

…John Tillman Lyle

Efficiency & Spatial Organization

• Energy & the Landscape Eco-infrastructure: going with nature• The Eco-system Model: eco-infill• Integrating the Divided Economy Every place a locus of eco-production Buildings as producers not just consumers of energy• Vast Potential for community empowerment

via decentralized green energy work: “Green Jobs, not Jail.”

“The greatest misallocation of resources in human history.”

…James Howard Kunstler

Industrialism: The Divided Economy

Invisible Visible Use-value Exchange-value “Consumption” “Production” People Things Unpaid Paid Women Men Informal Formal Private Public

Invisible Economy (1) Total Productive System of an Industrial

Society(layer cake with icing)

GNP-Monetized

½ of CakeTop two layers

Non-Monetized

Productive ½ of Cake

Lower two layers

GNP “Private” SectorRests on

GNP “Public” SectorRests on

Social Cooperative

Love EconomyRests on

Nature’s Layer

“Private” Sector

“Public”Sector

“underground economy

“Love Economy”

Mother Nature

All rights reserved. Copyright© 1982 Hazel Henderson

2

The Post WW II Waste Economy

Permanent War Economy

The Suburb Economy: Oil / Autos /

SubdivisionsNote gender and racial subtext of sprawl

Fordism: the new importance of Consumption

• Post-depression capitalism can’t depend on consumption to take care of itself.

• Landscape fragmentation & materials-intensity

• In reality, a whole new sector of “domestic consumption management” is created for suburbia, with women pushed back into the home (JK Galbraith; Delores Hayden)

• Women are central--as both unpaid consumption workers and as Objects of Consumption in advertising’s sexualized commodity world.

• Murray: Fordism was based as much on the de-skilling of consumption as the de-skilling of mass production.

Evolving Work• early worker power: based on craft skills or key sectors

like railroads in 19th century. • early/mid 20th century: rise of industrial unionism: filling

organizational space in new mass production. Power based in solidarity across whole industries.

• rise of intellectual and white-collar work: public education and rise of bureaucracy (hierarchies of white-collar work). – increasing dominance of big organizations: the corporation as

“industrial government” (Bazelon)

• Fordism & women as domestic consumption managers.• chronic problem of job-creation: technological

unemployment, “surplus populations”,

Evolving Work-2• 50s Industrial unionism: the peak of working class power

within production– 60s: emergence of new social movements for quality of life

outside the factory gates: peace, feminism, ecology, human & civil rights, counterculture, human potential, etc.

• 1973: beginning of long decline in real wages for North American working class.

• 1979-81: economic growth now dependent on polarization of income and wealth.

• 1980’s: empty financialization begins displacing mass material production and consumption as key capitalist driver of development.

Evolving Work-3• work polarization: growing sector of financial producer

services, along with an even greater explosion of McJobs.

• intensifying evaporation of middle class in North America.

• economic bubbles accessible mainly to the rich or upper middle-class: tech boom of the 90s. Housing bubble of 2000s actively exploited the poor & disempowered.

• 70s through 90s: gradual evolution of green development movement—from energy efficiency and appropriate technology movement of the 70s to breakthroughs in green building and local-sustainable food systems recently.

• 2000s: increasing connection of marginalized communities with green economic regeneration; growing interest of hard-pressed organized labour in people-intensive green development; rise of an anti-corporate community business movement.