Eaarth by Bill McKibben

Author:Bill McKibben
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307399205
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2010-11-26T23:00:00+00:00

But now it’s done. There’s really nowhere plausible left to run a highway. And not only that; almost everything else is done, too. The last real National Projects were putting a man on the moon and crushing the Soviet empire. They shared the genetic traits of such enterprises: they were wildly expensive, the money for them couldn’t be privately raised, and they more or less required a central government. Vermont wasn’t going to send a man to the moon; Delaware couldn’t make Moscow quail. These projects pushed and expanded our vistas: we lifted men beyond the bounds of gravity; we stretched the borders of democracy. You couldn’t work these wonders with Jefferson. We love to talk Jefferson—small-scale democracy, yeoman citizen, all that. But Jefferson couldn’t build the highways. If you wanted to beat the Soviets and walk on the moon, you needed Hamilton and the big-money big-government schemes. And so Hamilton is what we’ve had.

Now, though, the list of National Projects has dwindled. Fighting Muslim terrorism turns out to require small, careful strikes, not massive weaponry. Theoretically we’re committed to sending a man to Mars, but I know very few people who either believe we will or care. The only likely candidate for a new National Project is some version of Thomas Friedman’s vision—the smart energy grid, an array of high-tension lines stretching out across the horizon. In fact, though—as I shall show in chapter 4—it makes more sense to think about energy locally and regionally. (The very physics of electricity, the juice lost in transmission, works against long-range strategies.) We’ve got a lot of work to do if we’re going to survive on this Eaarth, but most of it needs to be done close to home. Small, not big; dispersed, not centralized.

And so we’re left with a big national government and smaller national purposes. Which is the worst place to be, because conservatives are correct about the inherent inefficiency of big government. When Jefferson took over as president, the Treasury Department had grown to eighty employees. “For its critics, it was a monster in the making,” the historian Ron Chernow wrote. The new president promised “the employment of the pruning knife.” And now? Now government “has never had more layers of leaders or leaders per layer,” writes the pol itical scientist Paul Light. “The towering hierarchy diffuses accountability for what goes right or wrong, weakens command and control, and reduces communication to a childhood game of telephone in which messages are distorted at every stop in the chain of command.”26 It’s a Monty Python world. “The fastest-spreading titles in the hierarchy involve chiefs of staff of one kind or another … the latest innovation in layering,” explains Light. “First created at the Department of Health and Human Services in 1981, the title has been spreading laterally and horizontally ever since. The first deputy chief of staff to a secretary appeared in the hierarchy in 1987, followed by the first chiefs of deputy secretaries, administrators, and assistant secretaries in the early 1990s.

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