Civil Engineering Reference
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complete their education, they'll have to take out loans, and… well, you get the
idea.
Should I then avoid all borrowing?
I cannot guarantee that I won't compromise the future. Should that be an
excuse for doing nothing—taking no risk—now?
Obviously, no. A green future depends on innovation. Innovation needs to be
financed via debt or equity. And that implies risk. In fact, abjuring risk compro-
mises the future. We dither about the ''value'' of space exploration, for instance,
when resources plentiful unto the nth generation are no farther away than the
asteroid belt.
The US now has a nine trillion dollar debt. If that doesn't compromise future
generations, I can't guess what does. Even fiscal conservatives admit that the large
part of the nine trillion spent on bank bailouts was necessary, to keep the economy
from death-spiraling.
Yet we continue to talk about sustainability. So I think we don't really believe a
definition that emphasizes not compromising future generations. We do care about
future generations, but we also have confidence that they'll be smart and com-
passionate enough to do what we do: Try to fix the broken things we've inherited;
innovate boldly; and do what we can to create a better future.
Past generations have done this for us, thus proving that there is such a thing as
a free lunch. Using a telephone is free, for example. (If you deal with certain
mobile providers, you'll argue with that, but bear with me.) Your sixteenth-century
ancestors had no phones. You did not personally have to invent the telephone. Yet
you get to use a phone—solely by virtue of your luck in being born in the twentieth
century.
4
Phone calls substitute for polluting transportation, so they're green. Free,
green lunch.
We want to give our descendants more free green lunches. But that part about
not compromising their ability to meet their needs—where did it come from?
It echoes injunctions of the Abrahamic religions:
• ''Do not charge your brother interest, whether on money or food or anything else
that may earn interest'' (Deuteronomy 23:19).
• Jesus driving moneylenders from the temple (Matthew 21:12).
• The Koranic prohibition on the charging of interest, which it characterizes as
oppressive and exploitative (Qur'an 2:279) (Institute of Islamic Banking and
Insurance
2009
).
One wonders whether the Brundtland report's slant on sustainability was
underpinned, perhaps unconsciously, by the religious feelings of its writers. And,
with our current economic mess having been driven by mortgage loans, one cannot
call such an underpinning totally wrong-headed (Incidentally, the three Abrahamic
traditions do not prohibit equity investment—equity is in fact the central principle
4
Apologies to any 8-year-olds who may read this chapter.
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