Is Sustainability Inevitable?

What if Martin Luther King Jr. had given a speech called “I Have a Nightmare” instead of “I Have a Dream”? Do you think “I Have a Nightmare” would have accelerated the civil rights movement in the same way? While we still have a long way to go until people judge others by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, we have made great progress.

According to Shellenberger and Nordhaus's book Break Through, on August 28, 1963, hundreds of thousands of people assembled near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. to hear King speak. President Kennedy had recently returned from Germany where he had called for freedom for those living behind the Iron Curtain. Yet prior to King’s speech, Kennedy had asked King to call off the demonstration, saying “We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol”

This put King in a bad mood. He asked gospel singer Mahalia Jackson to open with the song “I Been ‘Buked and I Been Scorned." Then he started off his speech with a metaphor about the debt America owed African Americans. At one point in the speech Mahalia Jackson interjected: “Martin, tell them about your dream.” King paused and then said “But let us not wallow in the valley of despair. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.”

Which part of this speech echoes today in the hearts of Americans? Which part motivated people to think that suddenly integration seemed… inevitable: the negative or the positive part? Was it both?

There is a struggle going on currently in the environmental movement for the movement’s soul. Is the best way to save the planet to tell people to stop destroying it OR to try and inspire them to create a more sustainable future?

Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t the first American visionary to have a great dream. Henry David Thoreau, who inspired King, also encouraged those of us who dream of a more sustainable future. In Thoreau’s book entitled Walden, he wrote:

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him… If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

Let us walk the middle path between knowledge of how much things need to improve and the possibility of how good things could be so that a sustainable future seems… inevitable.