Page 28 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

NARRATING VALUES, SHAPING VALUES, CREATING VALUE 7

nental United States designated as wilderness. It takes twenty-four acres to service the
needs of one American, five times the global average.
The social consequences of our economic growth are similarly troubling. Health
care? Approximately fifty million Americans are without health insurance. Sense of
community? Forty-seven million Americans live in private or gated communities,
with some speculation that such housing arrangements will become the dominant form
of community by 2050. Commuting time from our suburban enclaves to work and
back are up, the time we spend on civic involvement is down, and the time we now
spend outdoors as opposed to thirty years ago has been reduced by 75 percent. Our
sense of being unmoored, of being adrift has never been greater. Those now leaving
college can expect to change jobs eleven times and change basic skill sets three times
in the ensuing forty years. The very flexible, dynamic nature of business today leads
the vast majority of Americans feeling that work has become emotionally illegible.
Mobility is validated, “success” is oftentimes associated with frequent job changes,
and yet most of us find these are lateral changes with very little substantive difference.
Work provides little in the way of developing complex skills over an extended period
of time, less a sense of accomplishment and achievement for one’s craft and more
about shared superficiality among teammates at work, jumping from one diverse task
to the next. Our feeling of overall happiness is down, our overall sense of failure high:

Failure to make one’s life cohere, failure to realize something precious in oneself, fail-
ure to live rather than merely exist....The short-term, flexible time of the new capital-
ism seems to preclude making a sustained narrative out of one’s labors, and so a career. 6

Such is the narrative of indifferent capitalism. It is a narrative of economic effi-
ciency, drawing upon rules and regulations business itself has had an active hand in
shaping to provide subsidies for and minimize costs of its operations, to open new
markets and maintain its profitability in existing ones. It depends on a constant fur-
thering of technological innovation, on free and fast exchange of information, and
unfettered flow of capital. Its sole focus is the financial bottom line. To the extent that
it is attuned to the social and environmental consequences of its performance, it looks
to externalize them as costs that business, in the interest of market efficiency, should
not have to bear.

THE NARRATIVE OF CAPITALISM WITH A DIFFERENCE

The narrative of capitalism with a difference, like the narrative of indifferent capital-
ism, also begins with the Protestant reformation and the liberating opportunities
afforded by a new theology centered on the primacy of the individual. It too highlights
the transformation in commerce played by the Industrial Revolution and the critical
role played by coal in fueling a new economy and liberating humankind in so many
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disparate ways. And finally, the narrative of capitalism with a difference also grounds
its story in the writings of Adam Smith as the intellectual forebear of the modern eco-
nomic era. But at this point, the two narratives part company.