Working For Jobs

by Scott Carlson.

This
story is the second of two pieces excerpted from a feature story in the
Chronicle of Higher Education. Read the first piece here,
and the full Chronicle story here.

Environmental studies
professor David Orr has set out to turn the aging rust belt town of Oberlin,
Ohio, into a laboratory for sustainability. In the process, he has drawn
interest from unlikely places: Experts from the military and in national
security see the Oberlin Project as a compelling plan to focus on
vulnerabilities in the nation’s food, energy, and socioeconomic systems. They
and others, including leaders of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan
Washington research group, see it as a model that communities across the
country could follow.

One of Orr’s most vocal advocates is
Col. Mark “Puck” Mykleby of the U.S. Marines, who just retired as special
strategic assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Over the
summer, Mykleby received national
attention for a paper he wrote with another military strategist, Capt. Wayne Porter of
the Navy, which argued that America’s future lay not with its robust military
force but with strategies for sustainable energy and agriculture, fair social
policies, and a strong educational system.

Earlier this year, Mykleby and Orr were in Washington, D.C., meeting with agencies, think tanks, and
foundations, and the professor and the wiry Marine made an unusual couple. But
as they sat together in the bar of a stylish hotel on F Street, it made sense—especially as Mykleby started talking about the power of campus
communities and his doubts that solutions would flow out of the nation’s
capital.

“The structures here, the
organizations here, are all about trying to control the uncontrollable and
about placating Americans,” Mykleby said, his voice rising with
frustration. “We need to have an adult conversation with Americans about
the problem: We have a lot of work to do, and we better stare it straight in
the eye and frickin’ get it on.”

When the Oberlin Project was just
getting started, Orr invited city council members to sit down with Mykleby at the Feve, Oberlin’s watering hole, for a kind of scared-straight
session. Decked out in his military ribbons, the military strategist talked
about the country’s vulnerabilities to so-called black-swan events,
unanticipated threats from outside and in.

In some ways, the Oberlin Project resembles
the Transition Towns of England—a new movement to relocalize food
production, goods, and services (and even create local currencies) in response
to worries about “peak oil”—the inevitable decline in oil supplies—and the breakdowns in social, economic, and other systems that peak oil will
entail. Richard Heinberg, a journalist who has written several sobering books
about peak oil, depleting resources, and, most recently, the flaccid economy,
sees the Oberlin Project as “the most important thing we could be doing
right now.”

“David has painted the project in
glowing, positive terms—as something inviting, as something preferable to
what we have now,” Heinberg says. “But from my perspective, it’s an
insurance policy against the economic contraction that we are likely to see in
future years.”

Patrick C. Doherty, a national-security
expert at the New America Foundation, doesn’t consider himself a
“doomer,” a label applied to Heinberg and some of his colleagues.
But he does think the nation needs a new way of organizing itself. He is
working with Orr and Mykleby on a “national sustainable
communities coalition” that will attempt to replicate the Oberlin Project
in other parts of the country—possibly around military bases that are
striving for sustainability.

In the 20th century, says Doherty,
the United States coordinated its political and economic power to meet great
global challenges, in what was called “grand strategy.” We did it in
World War II in orienting the nation’s industrial base to ramp up and
outperform the Axis powers. And we did it again in economically and politically
outperforming and outlasting the Soviets in the cold war.

Doherty and his colleagues believe
that the nation needs grand strategy once again to meet a new global challenge.
“We think that the core global challenge is global unsustainability,”
he says—a convergence of major problems, including a persistent middle-class
recession, ecological systems in decline, a vast population of the world’s poorest
people cut out of the global economy, and a core infrastructure susceptible to
shock and disruption.

Part of the nation’s grand strategy in
the cold war was to build suburbia, to satisfy a major housing demand and stoke
the economic engine. But those suburban communities are now both unsustainable
and undesirable, Doherty says. Research shows that the majority of both
retiring baby boomers and up-and-coming millennials want to live in walkable,
affordable communities, rich with amenities and connected to mass transit.

In short, it’s called “smart
growth”—and it’s the way many college towns are already designed and
oriented. In fact, Doherty points out, college towns (including, even
recently, Oberlin) have been the sites of new retirement communities, because
that older generation wants to live close to institutions of higher education
and the cultures they foster.

Top-down policy can drive this new grand
strategy, he says, but given the political climate and the doubts people have
about the effectiveness of government, it may have to start with small efforts
like the Oberlin Project. Either way, he says, higher-education institutions
would be “essential” to pulling it off.

The Rust
Belt, Orr believes, is an ideal laboratory for this experiment. It has an
abundance of resources that will be even more valuable in the future, including
water and prime farmland. “It’s not going to have to get a whole lot
hotter in Texas before we see Texans coming up here,” Orr says.

And
institutions of higher learning should lead the charge, he believes. “What
colleges and universities can do, it seems to me, is serve as genuine anchor
institutions,” Orr says. “Intellectual leadership is going to be
really important for moving forward in an era that is going to be radically
different.”

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