Undoing the damage - business and the environment - Part 1

Vegetarian Times, Sept, 1996 by Paul Hawken

Most articles on the environment begin with some sort of statement about the degradation of the planet. The facts, so gloomy they send shivers up our spines, couldn't be less motivating. Some predict that humankind is rushing toward extinction, and this may well be true.

But from an environmental perspective, our problems became acute only within the last 150 years--a geological wink of an eye. They began during the industrial revolution, when business harnessed the earth's resources and improved the quality of our lives. Now, as the damage is spiraling out of control, the same force responsible for the damage, business, is the only social force powerful enough to undo the harm.

Industry has transformed civilization and created material wealth for many people. But it only succeeds by generating massive amounts of waste. Our production systems function by taking resources, changing them to products and discarding the detritus back into the environment. This process is overwhelming the capacity of the environment to metabolize our waste, and, as a result, the health of our living systems is slowly grinding down. There are simply too many manufacturers making too much too fast.

On an individual level, humans are wasteful too. But if every family recycled its entire household waste stream--newspapers, food, clothing, water, electronic devices--less than two percent of the waste problem would be addressed.

By focusing on individual behavior and "consumerism," the environmental movement, as well as the media, miss the big picture. The devastation caused by modern industrial systems does not occur on the household level but prior to that. Yes, it is imperative that consumers change their habits. After all, it's individual demand that fuels the manufacturing process. But if we are to really address the problem, it will have to begin at the manufacturing and processing level. By the time you get to the consumer, 98 percent of the problem has already occurred.

While some capitalists claim that environmentalism is an unfair burden on industry, it actually is industry's last, best hope. Industrialism is failing both economically and socially. Although manufacturing appears to be thriving on a global scale, as more and more countries rush toward "development" and its promise of prosperity, industrialism is actually in decline. The problem, ultimately, is that industrialism directly or in directly destroys the living systems that it depends on for raw materials: topsoil, ocean fisheries, the fossil waters of our aquifers, ancient forests and arid grasslands, our air sheds and watersheds and our flora and fauna. In the briefest of moments, geologically speaking, we are witnessing the reversal of tens of millions of years of evolution. Every day we use fossil fuels that required 28 years to produce.

The toll is also human. Globally, 4.5 billion people live on less than $1,000 each per year and nearly a billion go to bed hungry and malnourished. There are massive inequities in the way resources are used and distributed, exacerbating the shortage of material resources and the degradation of the planet. We can quibble over the details, but about this fact no knowledgeable institution, agency or scientist can disagree: Every living system on earth is in decline and the rate of decline is speeding up. The onus is on business to save the planet, because that is the only way it can preserve itself.

The question is: Can we create a workable future where caring for society and the environment are synonymous? To answer yes requires a means that is credible and doable. I will suggest one such way, a way that requires no faith in altruism or a growing environmental consciousness among capitalists.

WE NEED to realign the game of business with the principles of nature. Modern industrial companies are linear, take-make-waste systems that assume there is an infinite supply of resources and an infinite sink in which to flush waste products down. The junk is piling up, the resources are dwindling down, and as the population explodes, more people are arriving to claim their share. Unless we return what we take, or take no more than can be naturally regenerated, the planet will get poorer. The fact that resources are concentrated in rich countries, or that many people are exceedingly better off today than decades or centuries before, does not change the fact that our environmental accounts are way overdrawn. Unless we maintain levels of natural capital--the natural resources that we inherit from nature--we are acting like spoiled brats on a spending spree with Mother Earth's credit card. To rectify this sorry situation, we will have to pay attention to how nature works, not how the stock market works.

The principles of nature are extraordinarily different than the operating principles of present day commerce. On a physical level, the earth is a closed system. Essentially, nothing appears or disappears. All waste generated in nature is reabsorbed in nutrient cycles that feed new life. Nothing is "thrown away" in nature because there is no "away". And no matter how many incinerators or landfills we create, we cannot alter the rules of nature to accommodate the desires of manufacturing. Regardless of our capacity to create gadgets and machines, we all depend on the quality of life that comes from the earth.