Change to survive | It's time we confront reality, welcome change and use our resources effectively
“Charting the Course” is written by GrowSmart Maine, a Yarmouth nonprofit that promotes and encourages new ways of thinking about Maine’s future. This issue’s column is written by Alan Caron, GrowSmart’s president and CEO.
The next few years will be critical to Maine’s future and will undoubtedly shape the next few decades. At stake is Maine’s ability to prosper and grow without losing the unique character of the state, and our ability, and our children’s ability, to stay here.
Mainers can be forgiven for being skeptical about our chances of adapting to this rapidly changing world. Adaptability hasn’t exactly been our strength in the past. But timing is everything. What was virtually impossible yesterday suddenly becomes essential today, as issues that have languished for decades, simmering just below the surface of public consciousness, suddenly burst upon us demanding a flurry of overdue action.
Maine is in one of those moments in which change is becoming essential to our survival; when old habits and the well-honed skills of protecting turf and engaging in impassioned ideological combat suddenly seem dangerously out of touch. In times like these, the ability to adapt and find common ground increases in value. Those who learn to adapt will not only survive, they’ll flourish. Those who don’t will fall.
These are revolutionary times we’re experiencing, with one revolution stacked upon another: There’s the global redistribution of economic strength; leap-frogging technologies expanding communications and mobility; shrinking public resources at all levels of government; and steadily advancing climate change with consequences we can’t yet fully understand.
This is no time for ostriches on the beach, heads firmly in the sand, promising a return to the good old days.
Focus on the future
Maine must not only endure, but master, transformative change. We need to become far more efficient in everything we do, whether in energy use, in the workplace, or in how we use public dollars. We need to learn again what past generations knew well: to lower our expectations for government, to waste less, fix it first and buy it new only as a last resort.
In government, we can no longer afford the luxury of having one of everything in every community. The cost of that aspect of local control threatens to bankrupt us. At the same time, we can’t simply milk wealthy businesses and individuals as though resources and people can’t just pick up and leave.
We also need to understand that nothing is guaranteed to us in the economic sphere. Everything must be earned — we can’t have good jobs and benefits without educating ourselves and constantly adapting to the changing demands of the 21st century.
We seem to want three things that cannot coexist in the same space: a strong economy, lower taxes and all the government services to which we’re accustomed. But the simple reality is the status quo and the resources that sustained those comforts have vanished, and aren’t coming back.
For that reason alone, we also need to learn to use our limited public resources to stimulate a stronger economy in much more targeted and focused ways. Putting an industrial park in every community isn’t the solution. Spreading our limited resources around based on geography and political districts won’t somehow bring about a stronger economy. Instead of chasing yesterday’s jobs, we need to focus on tomorrow’s green economy, and to cultivate and encourage new ideas and products that will drive our economy 10 years from now.
Enhance what we do well
In 2006 we commissioned a report from the Brookings Institution called “Charting Maine’s Future.” Among other things, it urged us to focus on a few things that we can do better than most, and find the discipline to say no to the rest. Those things include lifelong education, protecting the Maine brand and our quality of place, and focusing on building a bottom-up, innovation-driven economy through continuous investments in research and development.
The greatest challenge we face is in how to bring about these changes. Government may be good at many things, but reinventing itself is hardly one of them. The citizens of Maine need to play a more active role in shaping a new prosperity. Some of that is already happening, through the many organizations and networks like GrowSmart Maine that raise tough questions, bring people together, present new visions of a brighter tomorrow and do the hard work to make Maine’s economic garden grow.
But more must be done. Major change in Maine requires dynamic leadership, to be sure, but even the most skilled leaders can’t steer us through these boiling waters without a bottom-up change in attitude and expectations and a willingness to make change our salvation, rather than our foe. That is the only way major steps forward have ever been taken in Maine. And it is our best and perhaps our only hope for a brighter tomorrow.
Alan Caron can be reached at acaron@growsmartmaine.org.
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