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Thursday Dec 10, 2009

Making the environment profitable

The way to get the environment to figure in the minds of society is to make it profitable. This is the important lesson I learned today in a meeting with Hackney council.

Hackney is a very young borough. Great, you may think: more vibrant...that's what I thought. Right but wrong.

Due to a massive migrant influx in the last ten years, 29% of Hackney's population is now under 19. That means almost 1/3 of Hackney's residents are in education, which needs funding. If this isn't adequately funded, young people have poor job prospects, which leads to unemployment, which leads to crime. In my borough, youth crime and worklessness are the key council spending priorities, due to Hackney's demographic.

It is hugely important that young people have a chance to make something of themselves, as joblessness in young adults can leave lasting scars and end up costing society, too. This really drove home to me how and why the environment can get sidelined.

But then I thought: this could be a great opportunity for the environment, too.

I felt frustrated that the government bailed out the car industry when they should have taken the brave step of investing in green technologies. Why not help the clean industry of the future, not the dirty ones which use too many resources and frankly haven't made much of an effort to move with the times. The new VW Beetle, for example, does the same miles per gallon as the original model, made in 1945. That's the car industry's progress for you.

What we should be doing is putting our money where our mouth is and saying: 'Goodbye old dirty industry, hello new greener, cleaner, happier way of living.' Kapow. And why shouldn't we? It's our planet, after all, and as far as I can judge, the self-interested big business of the past should have no part in that.

Why not use all those young people needing work to provide a workforce to get a new green scheme off the ground? We need to start our green economy now, if it's going to work.

I attended this meeting out of sheer speculative interest, after the council advertised for community representatives from the voluntary sector.

This was a training day on how to successfully lobby the council to forward the interest of community groups. When I look around Hackney, I see a lot of dirty streets clogged with dirty traffic, but that also means there's a lot of room for improvement. The environment here does need a voice. It's just a case of whether it can be made profitable on a community scale.

Hackney wasn't prepared for the sudden influx of a young population,. This caused a massive spending deficit which the borough is only just recovering from. If we can be prepared and use this demographic to our advantage somehow, we would be laughing.

Posted by Laura ( 4:46 PM )
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