To Rally Discussion - - ReTooling

ReTooling Daniel Solomon History granted to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt a clear and unambiguous sense of national purpose, first to recover from the Depression, then to win World War II. Some of us remember our mothers and grandmothers receiving the same simple explanation for the abrupt actions of train conductors, gas station attendants, dry cleaners, grocers, and many others, “Lady, there is a war on.” In the early months of the Obama administration, the conversation about a new sense of national purpose has begun, and there is much in it that starts to define a similarly clear and unambiguous mission. Two articles in the New York Times at the end of 2008 (David Brooks’s December 9 op-ed piece, “This Old House,” and Michael Pollan’s October 12 magazine essay, “Farmer in Chief”) reinforce one another, and we would like to add to their arguments. From different per- spectives, their articles point toward a single idea that can shape policies in fields from agriculture to housing to transportation to science policy to banking and education. The idea that is emerging from many sources in different forms is to retool America—its cities, its industry, its infrastructure, and its landscape—so it can flourish in the post-oil economy of the mid-twenty- first century. The new economy will bring changes as profound for this century as those brought by the railroad in the nineteenth or the auto- mobile in the twentieth. Addressing them will require a ringing sense of purpose that simultaneously addresses global warming, public health, economic recovery, and our quality of life. It will give new mean- ing to many forms of work—not least to architecture, town planning, and the design of landscapes. New Deal Precedents The stunning successes and the equally stunning failures of New Deal programs during an earlier time of crisis provide many les- sons for the present. The National Parks, libraries, bridges, dams, and schools executed by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration represent some of the most enduring and Solomon / ReTooling