With all the news about the financial market's meltdown over the last two weeks, most people have been worrying more about the greenback than going green. This makes a lot of sense, considering you can't have one without investment of the other. And will the "spiral" downward on Wall Street ever end? Of course it will because this kind of thing always does, but nobody knows when or how.
This is being called the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. Perhaps it is, but we live in a very short-sighted era. The Great Depression was triggered by the stock market collapse of 1929, but it wasn't the sole reason this country entered an era of 25 percent unemployment, agricultural failure, and a myriad of other economic maladies. Herbert Hoover's administration believed that a laissez-faire approach would ultimately solve the nation's and the world's ills. History, however, proved him wrong. In many ways some of FDR's quick-fix approaches also didn't work out. Yet, it was the idea that he was actually trying various policies as a way to move us through this terrible time that are remembered more than their actual success.
What this administration does with the little time it has left will leave the next president with the tremendous burden of handling a new era of financial management. And once again, what does this have to with going green? In the short run, nothing. In the long run, the policies adopted today will have long-term implications for whatever the economy looks like in the future, green or not. Let's hope careful stewardship gets us there.
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