Travels in Mexico

Spent last week in Monterey Mexico at a conference about integrating sustainable development into university operations and curricula. It was a good experience with a good group of people.

It seems clear that the Mexican and European universities see the need to act on getting SD into the mainstream to improve their prospects for a better life. While US universities are working, it is not as broadbased an initiative, because there are different driving factors for us.

The other parts of the world see SD as a way to create a better life, but the realities for us in the US, is that SD is viewed as an additional encumbrance or a cost center to be added to an already burdensome group of regulations constraints. What most people in the US are beginning to feel in their gut, is that globalization and the increase in the prospects for the poorer regions of the world are going to impact negatively their future earnings. The data backs this up. The average family income in China in 2002 was $750 USD, in India $450 USD, in Germany $27,000 USD and in the USA, $43,000 USD. Guess what? For development to occur in these less developed regions, we have to pay for it. Within a closed system, the books must balance. If theirs goes up, ours must go down.

This gives us in the USA an interesting opportunity to straighten out some of our societal problems, such as looking at people as something other than consumers, working again within local economies and embracing the uniqueness of each community and building value in that, trying to become locally more independent rather than dependent, making the best use of our natural capital. The list can go on and on.

So we have to give up some income to give to make the world more peaceful and less hungry, but we will have to change our consumerism. If we were to do this, and get something done on sustainable energy, mass transit, and some universal health care, our quality of life would go up, even if we bought less stuff.

The trick is going to be to educate the university student to this consequence. Like it or not, this generation will not have the same opportunities of my generation because this generation will not have the natural capital to freely exploit. This is not to say that they cannot be wildly successful pockets within the local and international markets, but they it will take a new kind of inventiveness and this is what we must teach our students.

One additional note...Sitting on the student union at Monterey TEC and observing... The student's listen to American music, dress like American Students and are studying highly technical and diverse topics with great instructors...At this one university there are 150,000 students. It is not to be underestimated. These folks may out compete us because they are moving up not down.