RECOGNIZING THE SHAMEFUL OSTRACISM OF ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS DURING AMERICA'S ECONOMIC CRISIS

On December 19, 2008, Brian Dickerson published a piece in the Detroit Free Press, called "How Wall Street execs turned air into gold", commenting on how domestic autoworkers were the targets of an undue share of the wrath unleashed by America's economic crisis. He rightly points out that at least as much, if not more, blame should be aimed at the extravagant greed of leaders in the financial industry. However, I felt he missed a chance to point out another broader target that deserves its own share of the blame and sent him this letter:

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Brian,

Don't forget to blame the corporate media, which systematically refuses to air more than a handful of token true ecological and economic sustainability experts who have LONG seen what was coming in all of these areas.

Ariana Huffington has a great piece at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/will-the-madoff-debacle-f_b_151219.html

It's called

"Will The Madoff Debacle Finally End The 'Who Could Have Known?' Era?"

It is incredibly disingenuous when people keep saying nobody saw this coming. They did. But they simply aren't part of the national dialogue on the mainstream media.

Take, for example, these folks:

http://www.steadystate.org/

I guarantee you Brian Czech from this group could have warned of the coming collapse of these delusional ponzi schemes. But someone like that isn't invited on CNN and MSNBC and the major network news shows.

We're in the midst of an economy that is a massive house of cards. It's typical that everyone inside the house will point fingers at everyone else. But it's ultimately our failure as a whole culture to recognize and appreciate those who have been screaming at us for decades about what's in the kool aid. And unless folks like the Steady State Economy folks become regular guests on mainstream media and serious voices in the national dialogue, I don't see the culture changing as fast as it should.

Best,
Howard Ditkoff

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We as a culture desperately need to reckon with the fact that our entire economy is unsustainable in ways much larger than the ones this current crisis is leading us to focus on, as well as the fact that - far from being a situation where nobody knew - there are many who have been trying to explain this to us for decades. Crises like these take place in a larger context that is addressed by the field of ecological economics and make little sense when seen outside of the context of that larger perspective. Dr. Brian Czech is an articulate voice on ecological economics, president of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) and the author of Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop them All.

I sincerely hope that voices like those of him and his organization will become appreciated and valued more in the coming years as they are the voices that, had we listened to them earlier, could have helped us move toward a path of ecological sustainability and possibly mitigated - or at least made more constructive - some of the economic suffering taking place now.

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