I keep hearing a lot about how the system is broken. How everything is broken – from politics to food to health care to energy to infrastructure to cars to well you name it. That we need to hit the reset button.

Last year when the levees collapsed and the bridge near Minneapolis broke – not that long after the debacle with Katrina in New Orleans – I saw these events as metaphors signaling decay from within.

And few in the mainstream media are writing about the real implications of this. Few are talking about re-naming the problems, looking at them in new ways, and few are finding ways to talk about solutions with new language. Some who are include Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, Matt Miller and James Howard Kunster – see his latest article at alternet: “Everything Still Looks the Same, But We've Become a New Country.”

We need new solutions. We need a new paradigm. We need to be thinking in new ways and looking at new solutions. We need to develop a new language. Let me use green jobs as my example.

I’ve been researching green jobs as part of my role as Green Jobs point person for the Job Forum here in San Francisco. People who attend our sessions are interested in green jobs – because they believe there will be increasing numbers of them and because they want to do something meaningful that contributes positively to the sustainability of our planet, our nation, and our economic well being. So, I’ve been looking into where they are and how we can get them.

What I am finding is we need to define them first – and that is surprisingly difficult. If we believe green jobs will increase the number of jobs, then we are looking at new jobs that are green. If we are looking at green jobs as jobs that contribute positively to the sustainability of our future, then the definition gets murky. And if we want to measure green jobs – the number of them, who has them – it gets even murkier because the government definitions of jobs do not include anything green or even sustainable.

This is not to say there aren’t green jobs and that you can’t find them. There are green jobs and you can not only find them, you can define them.

Last week I attended the State of Green Business Forum here in San Francisco. It was a one day event that covered several broad topics – water as the new green, the politics of green, what are some big guys doing about green, as well as the green job opportunity. This event was created and hosted by Greener World Media, which has several media outlets for facets of green business, and they put on these forums and conferences regularly to tap into prevailing knowledge and to stimulate conversation around key issues. Their next conference is Greener by Design to be held here in San Francisco in May

To reiterate what I had written in a previous post, I believe, there are several ways to define green jobs:

1)    New green jobs in expanding and new industries such as energy generation or new food systems. Any job in these new industries (solar, smart grid, wind, organic food) would be a green job.

2)    New green jobs in companies that recognize some investment in this area is good for business and long-term sustainability. Management level sustainability jobs and sustainability departments – think Wal-Mart – would be new green jobs.

3)    New jobs in existing sustainable businesses such as my web host, pair networks, or Seventh Generation could be defined as green.

4)    Greening your new job in a non-green business could also be considered a green job.

5)    Greening your exiting job or adding sustainable responsibility to an existing job or changing a job function to one that is more sustainably focused are also green jobs.

But how we measure these is difficult. And sometimes an organization goes completely green and in the process eliminates some title green jobs but the organization as a whole becomes more sustainable and every job becomes green. The Presidio Trust here in San Francisco is a good example.

So, as we move toward a new paradigm, we need to pay attention to the language we use and the definitions we create.

We are building a new system and the communications change as we do this. When we look at Wall Street, none of this new recovery package changes anything fundamental. And somehow I am not seeing better oversight. Perhaps transparency is the first step. If we can begin to see what is actually happening and who gets what, and how the monies are being spent, perhaps we can then begin to understand the process and begin to name things – actions, processes, and causes, results – and once we can begin to name things we can begin to compare them, see how they interact with other elements… and we can then begin to think about them in new ways and play with ideas around them.

But to just tinker with the old, let the politics of the old shape the ideas – well that’s just scary. Just as we are beginning the debate about news, newspapers, the media, the role of citizen journalism and the need for trusted editors (or curators) to filter the valid and relevant from the lies and trash, we need a debate about all our other systems as well: food; transportation; density and land use; health care; the built environment.

I look forward to these discussions, but Obama is missing an opportunity to think in new ways and it’s a major disappointment.