David Bollier

I delivered the following remarks on May 11 as part of The Illahee Lecture Series 2011, "Searching for Solutions:  Innovation for the Public Good," in Portland, Oregon.

This evening, I’d like to get innovative about how we think about innovation itself.  The corporate cliché is to “think outside the box.”  That is such an inside-the-box way of thinking!  I say let’s get rid of the box!  Tonight I want to talk about a new vector of innovation:  how we’re going to manage our dwindling, finite natural resources and arrest the pathological growth imperatives of our economy while recovering a more sane, socially constructive way of life for human beings.  Now there’s a radical innovation challenge!

The subtext of most innovation-talk these days is efficiency and profitability.  Innovation is essentially the bigger-better-faster ethic – the next super-computer or bio-engineered cow or Segue scooter.  But the grim reality is that there are a whole class of societal problems that are not likely to become market opportunities,ever. 

Worse, conventional markets, in the course of creating new wealth, are generating all sorts of illth, in John Ruskin’s phrase – cost, unintended byproducts that must be put on the ledger sheet in any calculation of our supposed wealth.  Our market economy is generating whole new classes of illth such as  global warming, dying coral reefs, biodiversity loss and species extinctions.

In the latest American Prospect, Harold Meyerson tells a good morality tale about how certain types of businesses can succeed only if managed as public trusts, if only in spirit.  He documents the ignominious decline of the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Dodgers after each was taken over by men "so venal, cynical, incompetent, and egomaniacal that they gutted them in just a couple of years.”  Both Sam Zell (who acquired the Times after buying the Tribune Company) and Frank McCourt (a Boston parking lot mogul) treated the revered corporate institutions that they bought as personal piggybanks.  The public was a mere afterthought -- helpless dependents on seemingly impregnable monopolies.

While the idea of running one’s business as a public trust has historically gotten a lot of lip service, at least in the newspaper business, today the barbarians who pass as CEOs and investors virtually go out of their way to flaunt their coarse, selfish personalities.  The schadenfreude at the fall of Zell and McCourt is therefore deeply satisfying.  Writes Meyerson:

Zell installed talk-radio executives who knew nothing about newspapers. He derided the editorial staff at the Timesand the Tribfor not producing the kind of copy that would turn the industry's fortunes around, and made clear that editors and reporters concerned with editorial autonomy and quality journalism were elitists who were no longer to be indulged. He instituted layoff after layoff, so that the Times, which had had an editorial staff of 1,200 in 2000, saw its ranks reduced to roughly 500 today. A little more than a year after his purchase, with the recession clobbering revenues and Zell's executives still clueless about how to run a newspaper, Tribune entered bankruptcy proceedings, where it remains mired to this day.

As the free-market siege of government intensifies, I propose a new index for assessing the desperation of municipalities.  Let’s call it the School Bus Hucksterism Index, or SBHI.  This scientifically calculated number will represent the number of school districts nationwide that have begun selling advertising space on their school buses, multiplied by the aggregate number of ads and the average revenue per bus.   

What was once a bizarre novelty – advertising on school buses – is becoming the new normal in many school districts.  It is an ominous sign of a great decline of our civic identities and commitment to place.  As the NYT reported this week:  

“Cash-hungry states and municipalities, in pursuit of even the smallest amounts of revenue, have begun to exploit one market that they have exclusive control over: their own property. With the help of a few eager marketing consultants, many governments are peddling the rights to place advertisements in public school cafeterias, on the sides of yellow school buses, in prison holding areas and in the waiting rooms of welfare offices and the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

The idea got its start in Colorado in the 1990s, and was picked up by Texas, Arizona, Tennessee and Massachusetts.  Now Utah has begun selling ads on the sides of it school buses and at least eight other states are considering doing the same.

Looking for novel ideas for protecting the environment? Bolivia is way out ahead of any other nation.  In January it enacted the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, to recognize natural resources as “blessings” and enumerate eleven specific rights of nature. As reported by The Guardian (UK), these rights include “the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.”

The law declares, “She [Mother Earth] is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and care for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos. She is comprised of all ecosystems and living beings and their self-organization.” Mother Earth is also granted the right “to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities.”

While such legal language is often seen as symbolic and aspirational, the Bolivian legislature has given some substance to its enactment. The new law establishes a Ministry of Mother Earth and an ombudsman position to advocate the rights of Mother Earth in legal proceedings. Perhaps as significant, communities were granted new legal powers to monitor and control polluting industries.