Author and columnist Thomas Friedman, and businessman Dov Seidman opened this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival with a discussion of situational versus sustainable values.   Friedman and Seidman argue that over the past decade our culture has lead the business world to relatively consistently [underprice risk, privatize gains, and socialize loss].

Friedman explains that, “if the situation allows me to issue a subprime mortgage to someone to buy a home even if all I’ve asked of them is can you <huff> fog up the knife then I will do it; sustainable values will tell me I shouldn’t. Situationally, I can buy 1000 acres of the Amazon and plant soy beans. Situationally, I can do that; sustainable values would tell me I shouldn’t. . .what we’ve had in the last decade is an explosion of situational thinking and situational values in both the market and mother nature.”  Sustainable values are more driven by the long term effects of decisionmaking and making choices that lead to the best possible outcome for ALL involved.

He’s concerned that our current generation of leadership will align with what Kurt Anderson refers to as the Grasshopper Generation.  “We ate through it like hungry locusts.”

Instead, he hopes that business, government and thought leaders can drive the “Re-generation.”  Accordingly, “the single most important task of the Re-generation is bringing the concept of sustainability, sustainable values, into both the market and mother nature…If we don’t bring sustainability to the market and mother nature, then I believe the next generation will be more unfree than had our parents lost the Cold War.  Because the market and mother nature will each impose on us constraints on how we live that will be worse than had the Communists won.”

Friedman breaks down the two key forces driving human trajectory.  On the one hand, “Mother nature is just chemistry, biology and physics,” as defined by environmental consultant Rob Watson. “She always bats last, and she always bats 1000. Do not mess with mother nature.”  On the flipside, “the market is just greed and fear. Greed and fear…It’s going to do whatever the balance of greed and fear dictate at any given moment. Do not mess with the market.  You can’t spin it. You can’t sweet talk it.”

Friedman argues that the only way to wrangle these ‘the two most autistic forces on the planet (autistic in the sense of feeling no emotion whatsoever)” is through sustainable values, which have grown increasingly important because globalization and interdependency of economy has more tightly linked us to the rest of the human race more than ever before.   Being aware of the social, environmental and fiscal costs of our decisions cannot be understated in world that experiences the pressure of crisis so often.

As Dov Siedman points out, “Used to be that we had a crisis every 20 years.  We’re now so interconnected that crisis every 20 weeks, certainly every 20 months.  Lehmen, Toyota, Greece, BP.”  The moral and ethical implications of the course corrections our leaders choose in the face of these crises need to be recognized.

“If we are connected, the nature of our connections is exposed.  Interconnection leads to moral and ethical interdependence.  For the first time, we have to understand what David Hume said.  ‘The moral imagination diminishes with distance.’ Where do we go when there’s no more distance?”

The BP oil spill created instant awareness for those hidden costs of being an oil dependent society.  Can this travesty provide the collective cognitive liberation needed to begin the transition from the Grasshopper Generation to the Re-generation?  At what point does personal consumer sacrifice become less of a cost than a continuation our insatiable razing of the planet we live on?