Green Collar Jobs

The Guardian today has a short article on "green collar jobs" -- manual-labour jobs in the new ecological economy, from mending bicycles to cladding buildings in solar panels.

Pat Thomas, the editor of the Ecologist, is quoted as saying that:

"A sustainable society won't be able to provide full employment because in a world where we don't produce more than we need, there is less to buy and there are fewer services required."

This is the elephant in the room that we need to talk more about.

If we buy less, and we do more ourselves (growing and cooking our food, making and repairing our clothes, building our own buildings, or creating healthcare that does not rely on petrochemical-based pills), we'll have less consumption. We equate a booming economy with vigorous consumption. If we have a decline in consumption, current common sense dictates that output will drop, jobs will be lost, and incomes will fall.

The existing economic structure (which the main three political parties accept) operates as a major disincentive to sustainable consumption.

So, we have a choice. Do we stick with putting endless growth in consumption at the heart of our society, or do we think about things in a different way?

If economic consumption can be decoupled from material consumption, if people purchased high-value services instead of resource-intensive artefacts, if consumer commodities become value heavy and materially light, then we could preserve economic stability and still meet environmental and social targets. If people accepted higher taxes and invested more in the future, we might even be able to preserve economic stability without a massive growth in private consumption. But these are all big ‘ifs’.