Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

governance S 41
secrecy, and incompetence. We will need governments at all levels,
as Peter Senge says of business, with “a more robust organizational
ecology . . . that is in tune with the larger living world and
more capable of confronting the host of Industrial Age imbalances
threatening our biosphere and our societies” (Senge, 2008,
p. 356). We founder, however, in the effort to reform governments,
mostly because of the power of vested interests and the lack of
a sense of urgency. As a result, dozens of blue-ribbon commissions
over many decades have made recommendations to improve
the performance of various aspects of the federal government, to
little lasting effect. They mostly gather dust on the shelves of the
Library of Congress.
Even with a more rational and better-informed citizenry and
improved means by which its will is expressed, is it possible to
improve the performance of government? For many raised on the
ideas of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, and inclined to believe
campaign slogans promising to lower taxes and get government
off our backs, the answer is no, mostly because of the alleged
incompetence of one government agency or another or because
of stories about the behavior of an obscure overbearing bureaucrat.
Some of this is pure fantasy and some is the result of self- fulfi lling
prophecies, but most of it is, in economist Eban Goodstein’s words,
“a self-consciously manufactured, anti-government ideology that
has paralyzed our nation” (Goodstein, 2007, p. 141). Over the last
two decades, the upshot is that some agencies and functions of
government, like the congressional Offi ce of Technology Assessment,
were abolished. Others deemed inconvenient but politically
popular were put on starvation rations and staffed with people
who did not believe in government. But other parts, notably the
military and surveillance functions, were force-fed. Unsurprisingly,
with less money and leadership, morale in many agencies
plummeted and much of the federal government performed dismally
as predicted, justifying still more budget cutting. As a result,