The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability
by Paul Hawken
About The Author:
Paul Hawken is a bestselling author of six books, including Blessed Unrest, Natural Capitalism, The Next Economy, and has also written dozens of articles, op-eds, and other papers concerning the responsibility of business to the natural environment and our social and ethical obligations to others around the world. His books have been published in twenty-seven languages in more than fifty countries and have sold more than two million copies. His writings have appeared in Harvard Business Review, Resurgence, New Statesman, Inc., the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, Mother Jones, the Utne Reader, Orion, and more than a hundred other publications since 1983. He lives in the Cascade Creek watershed in California.
Praise for “The Ecology of Commerce”:
“When I first read Paul Hawken’s Ecology of Commerce in 1994, he changed my life, my worldview, and my company – all for the better. Read this updated edition with an open mind and gain a clearer understanding of the complex relationship between business – a human invention – and the natural environment.”
Ray C. Anderson, founder and chair, Interface, Inc.
“A daring, urgent vision of a kind of twenty-first-century Canaan that Hawken yet believes we can reach.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“This is, in my view, the first extensive, truly ecological analysis of business: deeply disturbing, yet full of hope. Essential reading for all those who care about our planet.”
Fritjof Capra, author of The Tao Of Physics
“The first important book of the twenty-first century. It may well revolutionize the relationship between business and the environment.”
Don Falk, executive director, Society for Ecological Restoration
“This book, like the vision of capitalism it describes, is gentle, healing, restorative, and quietly eloquent. It will not make you richer, smarter, or more charismatic. It will merely challenge you to re-examine everything you believed about business as it is currently practiced, how we create meaning in our lives, and the fabric of the legacy we are weaving for our children. No doubt some businesspeople will read this book and think it is exhilarating and ennobling. The Ecology of Commerce is nothing less than an economic and cultural masterpiece by the poet laureate of American capitalism.”
George Gendron, former editor in chief, Inc.
It’s sheer volume of new ideas coupled with Hawken’s elegant style of disclosure makes almost all business books pale beside it. The tonnage of new publications on environmental degradation and what to do about it reflects increasing concern, but rarely has that concern been so productively expressed.”
Michael Pellecchia, Dallas Morning News
“The ecology of Commerce is so stunningly visionary yet eminently practical that liberals and conservatives alike embrace it. Hawken looks at things with fresh eyes. His vision is never left or right, but way up front.”
Eric Utne, editor in chief, Utne Reader
“Environmentalists usually assume business is the enemy and vice versa. If Hawken is right, and he’s got a good track record, the environmental perspective is the only way business will prosper, and business may be the only way to achieve a healthy planet. This goes beyond the revolutionary to the essential. Must reading for eco freaks and pinstripes, and anyone else who cares about living.”
Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
Book Reviews:
By Scott London
The fact that the title of this book, The Ecology of Commerce, reads like an oxymoron illustrates how wide the gap has become between the natural world and our commercial lives. Business believes that if it doesn’t continue to grow and instead cuts back and retreats, it will destroy itself. Ecologists believe that if business continues its unabated expansion it will destroy the world around it. In this eloquent and visionary book, Paul Hawken describes a third way, a path that is inherently sustainable and restorative but which uses many of the historically effective organizational and market techniques of free enterprise.
Central to Hawken’s argument are two basic facts: 1) the age of industrialism, as we know it, has come to an end; and 2) we are confronting a global ecological crisis that is considerably more acute than most of us realize. These facts both mean that businesspeople must dedicate themselves to transforming commerce to a restorative undertaking. They simply have no other choice as we are exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet — the maximum level of life an ecosystem can sustain.
Creating a restorative economy means rethinking the fundamental purpose of business, according to Hawken. It is not simply a means of making money or a system of making and selling things. “The promise of business,” he writes, “is to increase the general well-being of humankind through service, a creative invention and ethical philosophy. Making money is, on its own terms, totally meaningless, an insufficient pursuit for the complex and decaying world we live it.” We have the capacity to create a very different kind of economy, one that can restore ecosystems and protect the environment while bringing forth innovation, prosperity, meaningful work, and true security, Hawken says. “If this scenario sounds dreamy and Arcadian it is because we assume that economic forces only exploit and destroy.” But this behavior is not “the inherent nature of business, nor the inevitable outcome of a free-market system. It is merely the result of the present commercial system’s design and use.”
Business has three basic issues to face, Hawken says: what it takes, what it makes, and what it wastes. That is, the harmful way it exploits natural resources; the excessive amounts of toxins and pollutants it produces and the excessive energy it consumes in the process; and the extraordinary wastes it leaves behind. We must develop a system of commerce that is patterned according to basic ecological principles. In nature, waste equals food, all growth is driven by solar energy, and the overall well-being of the system depends on diversity and thrives of difference. An ecological model of commerce would imply that all waste has value to other modes of production so that everything is either reclaimed, reused, or recycled. It would depend not on carbon but chiefly on hydrogen and the sun for its energy. And it would be highly varied and specific to time and place.
Because the restorative economy, as Hawken envisions it, inverts ingrained beliefs about how business functions, it may produce unusual changes in the economy. As he shows with numerous examples and practical recommendations, the restorative economy will be one in which some businesses get smaller but hire more people, where money can be made by selling the absence of a product or service (for instance, where public utilities sell efficiency rather than additional power), and where profits increase when productivity is lowered.
The drive to develop a restorative economy must come from businesses themselves, Hawken insists, for “no other institution in the modern world is powerful enough to foster the necessary changes.” The key is to inspire a willing, uncoerced, and even joyous redesign of the way we conduct business. What is needed are not new government bureaucracies or legislative mandates but incentives that will redefine the basis on which companies make decisions — from short-sighted commercial gain to long-view ecological and commercial sustainability.
Book Review
By Blue and Green Tomorrow
Seventeen years after The Ecology of Commerce was first published, Paul Hawken re-released it in 2010 with updated and revised material. Its themes are now more relevant than ever.
The book examines what big business must do it order in order to create a restorative economy that will benefit both the environment and society. Hawken helps readers understand the key challenges facing businesses as they move towards sustainability and social responsibility and why it is of the upmost importance.
The book highlights that issues concerning big business and the future of the planet are still not being addressed as seriously as they should be. It argues that current business models are limited and as a result widespread change is needed.
It shows readers a number of challenges we are currently facing and then offers possible solutions. The solutions are practical and show how sustainability can be achieved in the real world.
The author focuses on eight imperatives to create a sustainable economy. These are:
-
– Reduce energy carbon emissions by 80% by 2030
– Reduce total natural resource usage by 80% by 2050
– Provide secure, stable and meaningful employment to people everywhere
– Be self-organising rather than regulated or morally mandated
– Honour market principles
– Restore habitats, ecosystems, and societies to their optimum
– Rely on current income
– Be fun and engaging and strive for aesthetic outcome
Hawken presents a convincing case to go green and it’s hard to argue with his logic. Ecology of Commerce links well with one of Hawken’s other books, Blessed Unrest, which examines how the social movement has the potential to benefit the planet and what is in contrast to this, such as large corporations.
The Inestimable Gift of a Future
It is difficult, if not perilous, to propose solutions to global problems. As Wendell Berry put it, “Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible.” In fact, it is the arrogance of that thinking that has created many of the problems we have today. Simply stated, why should any person, group, or commercial enterprise have the right to intrude upon or interfere with the natural and orderly life of other cultures or bioregions? We have operated our world for the past few centuries on the basis that we could manage the earth, if not dominate it, without respect to living systems. We have sacrificed the development of our own cultures for enormous short-term gains, and now face the invoice for that thinking: an ecological and social crisis whose origins lie deep within commercial and economic systems.
These problems are solvable by design, and the basis of that design rests within nature. Many proposed solutions to environmental degradation arise from the same industrial paradigm that caused them – increases growth, better technology, and more money – but most of these solutions tend to be half measures that bring up the rear in terms of innovation and imagination. Historically, the only kind of dramatic action we expect or accept from a national government is the waging of war, yet the ultimate threats to human welfare posed by the environment may someday equal or exceed that presented by any previous conflict.
Solutions proposed in this book are both specific and broad-based. They are not offered because they can be adopted in the next session of Congress, but rather because, given our belief systems and institutions, they are an attempt to describe how we can realistically begin to reverse our down ward environmental slide. Society must recognize that ecological principles apply to human survival and that if we are to long endure as a world culture, or as a group of cultures, we will have to incorporate ecological thinking into every aspect of our mores, patterns of living, and most particularly our economic institutions.
Ecological principles central to our existence are typically presented in the form of environmental factoids, stories that tend to be related over and again, data that can drive the listener into a sort of calloused despair, if not indifference. When repeated monotonously, environmental facts – bearing in mind that some of the facts are just as incorrect as some of the defences to them – take on all of the aspects of a sky-is-falling exhortation, making the recipient feel either powerless or incredulous. Some environmentalists have justifiably been criticized as complainers, focusing too much on excesses and blame. Business has completed this anxious symmetry by only seeing the worst in environmentalism and by oversimplifying issues to play on the fears of the public. Thus, a critical basis for change and consensus is to find a way to introduce and discuss ecological principles in society in a manner that draws people together, rather than repelling or deterring them. This step is crucial, because within ecological principles reside not only the problems and challenges that face us but also the solutions that can be used to transform our economy and society. Confusion or ignorance about these principles will not provide us comfort or protection from their implications. Underlying all ecological science is the fact that, given a chance, the earth will restore itself. The salient question we need to discuss in our communities and businesses is whether humankind will participate in that restoration or be condemned by our ignorance.
Without question, the most important principle is carrying capacity. What is the rate and manner in which the world can sustain the human population that exists and is growing? We don’t know the answer to that question. We do know that species and their habitats are closely and symbiotically related and that changes in one affect the other, making any form of environmental degradation of paramount interest and concern. In all ecosystems, the availability of food and nutrients becomes the ultimate arbiter of population size. But we are humans, not fish in a pond. Because of our diverse and intricate needs, the arbiter of the quality of our life and continued existence extends far beyond mere food and water to include changes in forest cover, cloud formation, topsoil stability, biodiversity, fuel consumption, firewood availability, genetic preservation, heavy-metal contamination, and most especially climate. We have created a civilization of manifest complexity, and thus must attend to the extensive requirements and demands we place upon global carrying capacity. Because the affluent generally don’t see or experience the impact their lives have on other places and other people, it is difficult to imagine that the ecological principle of carrying capacity can significantly affect them. It has in the past, it does now, and will in the future.
From business and government, we are still presented with overly optimistic assessments, a school of thought that biologist E. O. Wilson calls exemptionalist This line of thinking relies on the ability of human beings to overcome ecological laws through invention, ingenuity and technology. For every problem presented by environmentalist, optimists have an answer: desalinization, deep-sea mining, space, bioengineering. Their dreams are easier to swallow than the alarmist voices of environmentalists who say we are outstripping the earth’s means to sustain the human species. Ever since the Reverend Thomas Malthus wrote his “Essay in Population” in 1798, there has been a dispute as to when or whether humankind would exceed the capacity of the earth to provide our daily bread. Early cautionary books such as Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb have enilivened the controversy, not only because they were based on research and science, but because the arguments were made forcefully, dramatically, and in some instances erroneously. The concept of doomsday has always had a perverse appeal, waking us from our humdrum existence to the allure of a future harrowing drama. Yet another view held by a small group of writers and journalists proclaims that we have been unnecessarily frightened, that environmentalism is a hoax, a delusional scam from the political fringes to coerce others into a liberal agenda. This is best typified in the work of Bjorn Lomberg, whose book The Skeptical Environmentalist found an appreciative audience with right-wing conservatives. I think we would all like to wake one morning and find that, much like the cold war, our environmental bad dream is over, the opposing sides have made peace, and we needn’t worry any more. But that is impossible because we are talking about a living system, the planet, and planets do not negotiate.
The view I choose is this: the underlying principles informing the cautionary predictions are correct; the timing of earthly and climatological limits is not. This means that the optimists who say we will be taken care of in the future will be correct for the time being; right up to the day they are wrong, when we will all be in big trouble. The environmentalists, warning of intending catastrophe, will usually be wrong with regard to specific predictions, but they are right in principle. What does this tell us? It suggests we find a path of existence that recognizes limits while using our innovative capacity to invent and re-imagine our world to increase efficiency, decrease harm, and improve our existence. In other words, we need to create an economy and way of relating to our material world that is not an either-or argument but a means to create the best life for the greatest number of people precisely because we do not know the eventual outcome or impact of out current industrial practices. In other words, we need an economy based on more humility. To do that, we must recognize where we overstep limits.
We continue to accelerate the rate that we draw down capacity from the environment. We do this by pumping aquifers that cannot be restored, cutting ancient forests that cannot regenerate for hundreds or thousands of years, destroying soil fertility, depleting fisheries, burning fossil fuels, and overcoming the capacity of the atmosphere and oceans to safely absorb CO2. We are speeding up utilization of resources through the use of fossil fuel servants, machines, and technology that allow us to get more from our environment than was formerly possible.
Second, we take from other ecosystems by importing products and raw materials from different parts of the world. While we have stopped many damaging practices that affect our environment at home, we benefit from the continuation of those practices carried out by companies overseas. In short, we are either buying or degrading other people’s environments and then consuming them for ourselves.
Third, we displace other species by taking over their habitats. Our wants displace other living communities to the point where they retreat or perish. We become invaders. Humans and livestock consume nearly half of the net photosynthetic production of the land environment. As we push other species and occupy new ecosystems, we diminish biodiversity. Not only do we reduce overall ecosystem capacity, but we also create further threats to our own chances of survival, since our fate is inextricably linked with the fate of other forms of life.
We cannot outfox carrying capacity. Our ability to increase production does not increase the carrying capacity of the environment; it only temporarily insulates us from the results of our actions. We confuse our ability to consume with the capacity of the earth to provide. Geneticist and environmentalist Dr David Suzuki entitled one of his speeches “Are Humans Smarter Than Bacteria?” He was not the first to remind us of the analogy of the twenty-ninth day. When algae take over a lake, they grow exponentially, doubling every twenty-four hours, until the thirtieth day, when they effectively remove all oxygen from the water, killing all other forms of life. Since the algae bloom doubles daily, on the twenty-ninth day, it covers only half the lake, a reasonably benign condition as long as one does not take into account the nature of exponential growth.
The moral of all exponential growth is the same: when a species grows exponentially without regard to carrying capacity, it will suffer an ignoble fate. Although we do not know whether the rise in human population and environmental exploitation is an S curve that will level out to stability or a J curve that will climb up in a nearly straight line only to crash, there is little to indicate in resource statistics or demographics that we are as yet any smarter than bacteria. Suzuki addresses the optimistic paradigm in his analogy by theoretically granting that technology may be able to increase our carrying capacity. But in that dying lake, a 100 percent increase in oxygen buys only one more day of life. So even if we can increase food, forest, fuel, and water production by 50 to 100 percent over the next fifty years, we have not truly solved – or even changed – the nature of the problem.
The optimistic, anti-Malthusian scenario does not address the problem of exponential growth, and it certainly does not address the question of quality of life. Between Malthus’s time and the beginning of the twentieth century, approximately 600 million people were added to the world population, an increase of 6 million people a year. From then until 1950, we added another 900 million people, making the annual increase 18 million per year. By 1975, population was nearly 4 billion, an annual increase of 60 million a year. At the original writing of this book, in 1992, the growth rate was around 95 million a year. Since then, the rate of population has dropped to 76 million a year, an exceptional achievement. However, the rate of consumption per capita continues to rise exponentially both at home and in the developing world. This is why scientists hark back to bacteria and reindeer. Since there is no experiential way to grasp exponential growth except by observing other systems, it is better to witness it in a petri dish than a continent.
If you take a basketball and pretend it is the earth, and then paint it lightly with a spray can, the thin emulsion of pigment coating the surface is ten times thicker, relatively speaking, than the band of life that supports our existence on this planet. The definition of carrying capacity is the maximum level of a species or population that can be steadily and consistently supported by the resources on that thin coating. The key word is “consistently,” meaning decade after decade, century after century. It does not mean indefinitely, but it certainly means long into the future. We are doing quite the opposite. When strain is placed upon an ecosystem by a population is greater than it can sustain – a situation we see in Somalia, the Sudan, and Ethiopia – carrying capacity is reduced, starvation can occur, and social unrest is inevitable.
Even as we evoke economic pieties to justify multinational expansion and free-trade policies, the actual result of helping the world raise itself by its bootstraps has been the opposite: in 2000, the lowest quintile in world income was twice as poor as it was in 1960 when compared to the top quintile. The benefits of global expansion are highly concentrated in the countries of the global north, and in the hands of corporations and oligarchies. But you cannot grow out of a problem if it is embedded in the the thing that is growing; or, as Somalis say, you cannot wake up a man who is pretending to be asleep. It makes far more sense to examine the system itself, to slow down and arrest industrialism so that it is redesigned and assembled into a system whose growth enhances human existence.
Increases in population and the decreasing capacity of our ecosystems are two trains speeding toward each other in the night. The tragedy is not that they will collide but that they will pass each other at great speed, leaving a gap that will expand rapidly owing to the momentum of growth. According to Mathis Wackernagel, the co-inventor of the concept of ecological foot-printing, we may have already surpassed the point at which we can sustainably support the world’s population using present standards of production and consumption. That should impel us to seek, as sensibly and quickly as possible, an integration of our wants and needs as expressed and served by commerce, with the capacity of the earth – water, forests, and fields – to meet them.
This book proposes three approaches, all guided by the example of nature. The first is to entirely eliminate waste from our industrial production. Not only does it save resources outright but also it rearranges our relationship to resources from a linear to a cyclical one, greatly enhancing our ability to lead prosperous lives while reducing environmental degradation. Instead of organizing systems that efficiently dispose of or recycle our waste, we need to design systems of production that have little or no waste to begin with.
The second principle is to change from an economy based on carbon fuels from the past, what author Thom Hartmann calls ancient sunlight, to one based on current sunlight, including photovoltaics, solar, thermal, wind, and waves. This is primarily achieved by reversing the historical incentives surrounding the production and consumption of energy, away from the cheapest combustion toward the most enduring production. This is the soft path Amory Lovins described in 1976, but the imperatives for implementation are more compelling now because of our greater knowledge of global warming, the threat and actual losses of water, soil, oceans, and forests. It doesn’t matter how much coal and oil remains, because if we combust it, we raise CO2 levels to a level of civilizational extinction.
Third, we must create systems of accountability and response that support and strengthen restorative behaviour, whether they are in resource utilities, green fees on polluting chemicals, or reliance on local production and distribution. Conversely, we have to look at how our present economic system consistently rewards short-term exploitation while penalizing long-term restoration, and then eliminate the ill-placed incentives that allow small sectors of the population to benefit at the expense of the whole. Ecological restoration can probably be carried out more naturally and surely by smaller enterprises than by larger, unwieldy corporations. The diversity of the economy’s small business sector must be encouraged, not by government loans but through the revitalization and revisioning of incentives that liberate the imagination, courage, and commitment that reside within individuals who truly want to make a difference – “ecopreneurs” dedicated to restoring the world around them for the world that comes after them.
All three recommendations have a single purpose: to substantially reduce the impact that each of us has upon our environment. It is the nature of the human condition that people will not cut back on their possessions and wants on their own. This is particularly true since we have no economic vision of what a country or a world could be like that is both reducing its impact and material possessions while actually increasing work and job security. We are all made anxious by the memories of past economic cycles, experiences that convince us that any type of voluntary reduction is a form of lunacy. But in fact we have to find an imaginative and participative means to lessen our impact. We need to imagine a life where having less is more satisfying, more interesting, and more secure.
A restorative economy is not going to lead to a life of addled convenience. We have to recognize that we’ve reached a watershed in the economy, a point at which growth and profitability will be increasingly derived from the abatement of environmental degradation, the furthering of ecological restoration, and the mimicking of natural systems of production and consumption. Economist Kenneth Boulding described this economy many years ago, on in which an affluent life “ will have to be combined with a curious parsimony…every grain of sand will have to be treasured, and the waste and profligacy of our own day will seem so horrible that our descendants will hardly bear to think about us.”
I believe we are on the verge of a dramatically different economy, one that is more complex than what has preceded it. Like the systems it will hopefully imitate, the economy will become increasingly diverse and differentiated. While certain industrial skills will become less valuable, biological knowledge and understanding will soar in demand because it will provide the means to integrate human needs with the carrying capacity of natural systems. While coalmines will be shuttered, removing the last insult from the lives of men and women who have long suffered for the industrial age, opportunities in solar, wind turbines, fuel cells, and other technologies will expand. We will no doubt try to protect the livelihoods of coal miners, but in this and other dislocations it is critical to have an overall vision for a just and fair transition for others, and for workers, communities, and the country. Only within the framework of a broader perspective can we address the issues of equitability and change, not by arresting the critical process of economic evolution in order to continue outmoded forms of production but by designing ways to recycle lost livelihoods into the jobs of the future.
The changes that these proposals would bring about would be widespread and eventually enormous. But any sober look at the future, at the patterns of decay and disorder that are sweeping across the world, tells us that we can no longer simply talk about change. Just as we can trace back patterns of development and see how much of our lives have been changed by cheap and abundant energy, reversing the historic emphasis on cheap energy would have a direst and powerful impact on our daily lives. Much of the damage we see and experience in modern society is a direct result of inexpensive cars and gasoline. Remove those two factors, and suddenly the suburbs and the post-Le Corbusier downtowns are seen for the forlorn and dehumanizing forms they are. Global integration of the world economy depends on fossil fuel-driven transport systems composed of planes, ships, and trucks. It is not surprising that this energy driven growth is producing cities around the world much like our own urban areas, with comparable crowding, pollution, and crime. Higher energy and resource costs don’t mean we have to stop trade or foreign commerce, but we should be prepared to bid farewell to energy-and resource-consumptive luxuries such as Chilean strawberries and nectarines flown in daily during New York winters.
The purpose of all these suggestions is to end industrialism as we know it. Industrialism is over, in fact; the question remains how we organize the economy that follows. Either it falls in on us and crushes civilization, or we reconstruct it and unleash the imagination of a more sustainable future into our daily acts of commerce. Protecting existing industries because we want to be pro-business and pro-jobs will have the same level of effectiveness as did the Soviet effort to maintain its industries in the 1970s and the 1980s. you cannot protect a system that is rigid and entrenched without sacrificing the interest of the people it intends to serve. The thrust of a restorative economy will comprise two key issues.
The first is to learn how much each of us can humanely take while we are on earth. The more of us, the less we can take, but on the other hand, the better we design our economy and commercial systems, the less we need. The calculus is expressed in the principle of living off current income, solar or otherwise. Since we cannot enforce a regimen on ourselves without political repressiveness, we have to evolve into that state through innovation, design , and cooperation.
The second issue is to restore much of what we have lost. The idea that we can bottom out in the next few decades and achieve sustainable development is a popular but short-sighted ideal. Bottom out, yes. At some time in the relatively near future, we will achieve a balance between what we are consuming and the capacity of the earth’s ecosystems to provide those needs, although under existing models of production and consumption, it is likely to be far different and cause far more suffering than we are presently willing to admit. But rather than look at that balance point as a zero-sum outcome that is distantly achievable, a restorative economy means thinking big and long into the future.
It also means doing something now. It means trying things that will fail. It means shaking up city hall. It means electing people who actually want to make things work, who can imagine a better world. It means writing to companies and telling them what you think. It means never forgetting that the cash register is the daily voting booth in democratic capitalism. We don’t have to purchase products that destroy or buy from companies that harm or people that are unresponsive. If we want businesses to express a full range of values and respond to the presence or absence of principle by how we act in the marketplace. It may mean being resistant or conciliatory and knowing when to be which. To go back to our nature can also mean becoming “sour, astringent, crabbed. Unfertilized, unpruned, tough, resilient, and every spring shockingly beautiful in bloom.” It means a meticulous inventory of our lives and our country. It will mean, in the words of Vaclav Havel, trying harder “to understand than to explain. The way forward is not in the mere construction of universal systemic solutions to be applied to reality from the outside; it is also seeking to get to the heart of reality from the inside, through personal experience.” It is time to clean out the closet, both conceptually and materially, and to re-examine our priorities and beliefs. We can’t wait until the guardians wake up, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to wake them up. We can’t wait for business to set a new course. We have to educate our businesses, and if they fail to learn, it means creating new forms of sustainable enterprise.
When architect James Lerner was appointed mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, in 1973, it was a rapidly growing town of 500,000 with sprawling slums, or favelas. The favelas had many problems, not the worst of which was garbage that could not be collected because of narrow or nonexistent streets. Since trucks could not get in, and because the garbage was attracting rodents and disease, Lerner had to come up with a way to get the garbage out. The solution was to pay people for their garbage by placing recycling bins around the favelas and giving tokens to the city’s transport system for the separated and therefore recyclable trash. For organic waste, which was taken by farmers and made into fertilizer for their fields, he gave chits that could be exchanged for food. It worked spectacularly. Kids scoured the favelas for trash and could quickly spot the difference between polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and high-density polyethylene bottles (HDPE). The tokens gave the poorer citizens then means to get out of the favelas to where the jobs are, while promoting cleanliness, frugality, and the reclaiming and recycling of waste.
The money gained from recycling combined with the money saved by not having to take trucks into the narrow streets paid for the tokens. It is a cyclical, waste-equals-food system implemented at the grass roots. Because of this and dozens of similar innovations, Curitiba is considered a landmark in urban development and thoughtful planning. But it happened, according to Lerner, because he and others were not afraid to try new things. Not everything worked, but so much did that it has bred an innovative atmosphere throughout the city.
Living in a civilization that is violently at odds with the natural world will not end overnight. And if there is to be an economy of meaning and purpose, it must serve and nurture the aspirations of the poor and less educated, and it must protect and restore habitats, ecosystems, gradients, forests, vernal pools, grasslands, reserves, native forests and savannahs, wildlife corridors, and riparian systems. If some of these terms are unfamiliar, it is because Americans are taught to identify types of cars rather than types of birds; we can identify a thousand corporate logos but fewer than ten native plants. We are starkly unfamiliar with the vocabulary of conservation biology or the science of restoration, both of which hold the key to our future on earth. It is not merely a question of stopping the cutting in the remaining ancient forests; it is literally re-creating the ancient forests of the future. Going forward will someday mean replacing what has been lost, as well as returning what should not have been taken, not only in our forests and grasslands but in our inner cities and rural areas as well.
Industry and mainstream economists argue that we don’t know enough about the possible dangers of climate change to warrant wholesale modifications to our economic system. Best leave things as they are until we know more is the reply from the executive suite. What is best to leave alone is the wholesale assault on nature and living systems. More research is definitely needed, more studies on how industries and corporations can conduct themselves so that they do not harm and can reconstruct what has been lost. When visitors gasp at the beauty of their cut stones, Italian quarry workers are known to say, “God never had a bad day.” It is not nature that is the experiment; it is our economic system. Restoration is the conservative, ethical, and economic ethic; laissez-faire capitalism is what is out of control, and it is having a lot of bad days.
We have a thousand years of work ahead of us – brilliant, sustaining, innovative work, a profound act of citizenship and participation that harmonizes the relationship between commerce and nature. “The world that environs us, that is around us, is also within us,” writes poet and farmer Wendell Berry. ‘WE are made of it; we eat, drink, and breathe it; it is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. It is also a Creation, a holy mystery, made for and to some extent by creatures, some but by no means all of whom are humans. This world, this Creation, belongs in a limited sense to us, for we may rightfully require certain things of it – the things necessary to keep us fully alive as the kind of creature we are; but we also belong to it, and it makes certain rightful claims upon us: that we leave it undiminished, not just to our children, but to all the creatures who will live in it after us.” To do this, we must take back our country watershed by watershed, its seas and plains, its valleys, wetlands, and coasts, to reclaim the places that give form to our culture, and that give life to our families.
I imagine, perhaps fancifully, a kind of environmental assembly or congress throughout this and other countries, one that would be representative and consensually based, one that would draw together people from all walks of life, all disciplines, all industries, all aspects of our communities. The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio was less than a success. As the editors of The Ecologist put it so well, “unwilling to question the desirability of economic growth, the market economy, or the development process itself, UNCED never had a chance of addressing the real problems of ‘environment and development.’ Its secretariat provided delegates with materials for a convention on biodiversity but not on free trade; on forests but not on logging; on climate but not on automobiles. Agenda 21 – the Summit’s ‘action plan’ – featured clauses on ‘enabling the poor to achieve sustainable livelihoods’ but not on enabling the rich to do so; a section on women but not on men…The best that could be said for the Summit is that it made visible the vested interests standing in the way of the moral economies that local people, who daily face the consequences of environmental degradation, are seeking to re-establish.”
An environmental congress should not be a forum where people preset the agenda, control the debate, marshal the participants, and then stake out their territory on issues that concern them. This is what happened in Copenhagen in December 2009, at the UN Conference of the Parties (COP 15), a climate summit that produced nearly nothing. After years of preparation and two weeks of meetings, the result was a non-binding three-page memo dashed off at the last minute by the United States, China, Brazil, south Africa, and India, the G4-1/2, without the inclusion of any country from Europe, including Russia, and the exclusion of Japan. A meaningful environmental summit should be a place where we can create a deliberative process that brings to the fore the concerns, observations, fears, and doubts that we all share. On all sides of the issue, from island nations who ill soon be overrun by higher seas, to displaced and unemployed workers, to the poor who are downwind and downstream from toxins from the middles classes, to the deeper fears of our children, we are not hearing what the people are saying. The noise of those in power is drowning out the plaints of those who are not. While people grieve for climate stability, working families fear for their livelihood. There is a mutuality and causality to those anxieties, as there is to all of our fears and doubts; they are not necessarily as opposed to each other as special-interest groups would have us believe.
Writing in his book The Fate of the Earth, which he then perceived as the danger of nuclear holocaust, Jonathan Schell concluded with this description of our numbed lack of participation:
“At present, most of us do nothing. We look away. We remain calm. We are silent. We take refuge in the hope that the holocaust won’t happen, and turn our back to our individual concerns. We deny the truth that is all around us. Indifferent to the future of our kind, we grow indifferent to one another. We drift apart. We grow cold. We drowse our way toward the end of the world. But if once we shook off ur lethargy and fatigue, and began to act, the climate would change. Just as inertia produces despair – a despair often so deep that it does not even know itself as despair – arousal and action would give us access to hope, and life would start to mend: not just life in its entirety but daily life, every individual life. At that point we would begin to withdraw from our role as both the victims and the perpetrators…We would no longer be the destroyers of mankind but, rather, the gateway through which future generations would enter the world. Then the passion and will that we need to save ourselves would flood into our lives. The walls of indifference, inertia, and coldness that now isolate each of us from the others, and all of us from the past and future generations, would melt, like snow in spring. By restoring severed links with life, we will restore our own lives. Instead of stopping the course of time and cutting off the human future, we would make it possible for the future generations to be born. Their inestimable gift to us, passed back from the future into the present, would be the wholeness and meaning of life.”
The trappings and arcane of government proceedings have convinced us that we are underequipped as citizens to participate in or mould the debate over critical issues. If people formed ad hoc groups to question or challenge existing or proposed government policy, they are referred to as “loose-knit”, “sprawling” or “kitchen-table”, as if we should be ashamed that the original democratic process that takes place on a grassroots level is not well-coiffed and shod. Linguist Noam Chomsky has commented on the disparity between the high level of knowledge on sports-talk shows and the superficiality of the contribution people make when addressing national or international issues, as if we have already decided that we cannot know enough to make a worthy response to those issues. Chomsky disagrees:
“It seems to me that the same intellectual skill and capacity for understanding and for accumulating evidence and gaining information and thinking through problems could conceivably be used under a different system of governance, one that included popular participation in important decision-making areas, in areas that really matter to human life. It does not require extraordinary skills or understanding to take apart the illusions and deception that prevent understanding of contemporary reality. It requires the kind of normal scepticism and willingness to apply one’s analytic skills that almost all people have.”
If our programs to save the environment are hatched up by experts, attested to in hearings on Capitol Hill, and voted on by a Congress that receives billions in campaign contributions form corporations and lobbyists, they will create divisiveness and never work. The patterns of healing and design must arise from all levels of society, not from the top down. While it is true that certain issues with respect to the environment must be imposed nationally or internationally – green taxes, certainly, lest they fail by the back door – their origins must reside deep in the longings of peoples to live fruitful lives.
It was Henry Wallace, in 1936, who first called for a “Declaration of Interdependence.” We need that as surely as we need the first Declaration of Independence. It could guide and teach us, just as did the first Declaration, how to change our systems and practices so that we become an improved and better nation. Our environmental assemblies should result in such a declaration and should arise from the people, as did the first. There are new truths that we hold self-evident, and they must be heard and spoken. Such forums should feel fair; they should honour differences and not feel partisan; they should proceed in a manner that embodies the qualities we want to see in our government and in our companies; they should not be about power but about aspiration, needs and knowledge; and they should establish broad bases of agreement. These gatherings should include all people, from our children to our elders. They should enliven and give hope; they should not be politicized; they should be councils that build consensus, recognize diversity, and encourage constructive change. Such a congress would be tantamount to creating a natural constitution, with attendant rights and responsibilities made clear to all. The creation of a new story for America, a recovery of the commons, would ensure that once again life is celebrated on earth. Such conventions are ultimately an endless discussion by people on how to say grace, knowing that we do harm and take as we live; that life is always a moral question that lies before us sweetly, depending on our gratitude and constant struggle to cause as little suffering as possible to all and everything around us.
Eliot Coleman, a skilled truck farmer who coaxes luscious red tomatoes out of the rocky soil of Maine in June, once said that the problem with the United States is that it usually hits exactly what it is aiming at. And for decades now, we have aimed for money and possessions. We got it. It was not evenly distributed and is now highly concentrated, posing as great a threat to democracy as any foreign power ever did, but that is what this country made – money. In the process we completely forgot that success and failure, when measured by currency alone, are imposters, and our lives, the transience of which often becomes evident all too late, can have little meaning unless we feel in our passing that we were able to serve the nature and humanity that gave us our breath and soul. W.S. Merwin, the poet and naturalist reminds us that we have one story, and only one story, to tell in our life, and that “when there is no story / that will be our story / when there is no forest / that will be our forest.” We are asked to believe over and over again by culture and television, by politicians and movie stars, that our story is the story of money, finance and wealth we will leave the children, the partnership at the law firm, the jewel of the house in the suburbs with its pool and radar dish. These are impoverished, small tales and whispers that have made us reckless and craven, not stories at all. As author and garlic grower Stanley Crawford writes: “The financial statement must finally give way to the narrative, with all its exceptions, special cases, imponderables. It must finally give way to the story, which is perhaps the way we arm ourselves against the next and always unpredictable turn of the cycle in the quixotic dare that is life; across the rock and cold of lifelessness, it is our seed, our clove, our filament cast towards the future.” It is deeper than anything commercial culture can plumb. And it is there waiting. As writer Pam Houston put it, “ It is a difficult story to tell because what’s right…is only as wide as a tightrope, and what’s wrong yawns wide, beckoning on either side.”
If hope is to pass the sobriety test, then it has to walk a pretty straight line to reality. Nothing written, suggested, or proposed is possible unless business is willing to embrace the world we live within and lead the way. As long as business sees the environment as a rearguard action, it will constantly be in a reactive mode, fighting off social concerns as if they were uninvited bill-collectors. It is time for business to leapfrog the debate and take the initiative, not in self-serving and gratuitous pronouncements about how green it is but in a genuinely open process of dialogue, collaboration, reflection, and redesign. By being dominant, business is bringing woe and tribulation upon itself, and society must submit, not to any demand but to a process that is meditative, healing, and imaginative. There are literally thousands of ideas and means to improve and change how we do things. They await a receptive ear, an open heart on the part of commerce.
0 thoughts on “The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability”