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Yesterday’s Boston Globe featured an op-ed by UMass Lowell Amy Perlmutter and Joel Tickner (fellow and associate professor at the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production) that promotes exploiting the connection between environmentally friendly technology and future economic strength. The authors say, in addition to efforts around renewable energy, Massachusetts has “a leading edge in four other key areas”: green chemistry, green buildings, materials reuse, and emerging materials. They urge state power brokers to “take advantage of…the Commonwealth’s competitive advantages to become a world leader of the green economy of the future.” Contrast that message to James Carroll’s column on the same page where he discusses the “nice coincidence” of the government’s $700 billion Wall Street bailout costing about the same as the Pentagon’s yearly budget. Carroll’s point: “One need not be an economist to know that spending money on war planes, missiles, and exotic weapons systems, not to mention combat operations, creates far less social capitol than spending on education, bridges, mass transit, new forms of energy—even the arts. The genius of this nation’s most brilliant minds has been yoked for more than half a century to the invention of ways to kill and destroy.”

How’s that been working for us so far? The United States is a major exporter of weapons worldwide, which has aided the growth of terrorism and destruction of our environment; we desperately need leadership with a new vision for employment for our people and our role in the world. We must rethink our focus and put our best creative minds and resources to developing green technologies that will reinvigorate our economy and sustain our future.