The Ecology of Commerce. - book reviews

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1993 by Art Kleiner

According to Paul Hawken's manifesto, restoration of the natural environment isn't possible without a substantial change in prevailing economic attitudes. For instance, corporations have to abandon the profit motive as their central organizing principle. This is hardly news, it's either heresy or o platitude. But Hawken does us the service of testing it against reality. First he considers the ecological state of affairs today, then the ambiance of corporate culture, then the original sins of our current economic structure, and finally the practices that might jump-start a reorientation of the large-scale industrial frame of mind. I haven't read a better overview of such practices as ecological economics, industrial ecology, and radical energy efficiency improvement.

Hawken, a long-time Whole Earth contributor, writer, and the founder and former proprietor of Smith and Hawken Tools, is an occasional Inc. columnist he has apparently aimed his book at the typical Inc. reader, arguing passionately that the money imperative -- the drive to achieve by building up the most stuff -- is fundamentally obsolete. The book will probably piss off a lot of business people by insisting that the world is evolving out from under their values. It will also piss off a lot of environmentalists by suggesting that their greatest leverage comes from helping business people think differently. At least I hope it pisses people off it would be a shame the book's message gets ignored because it's both too uncomfortable and too familiar. --Art Kleiner

Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question all these years, during the many battles between environmentalists and businesspeople. The question as generally proposed is "How do we save the environment?" The right question, as ridiculous as it may first sound to both sides, may be "How do we save business?"

The language of commerce sounds specific, but in fact it is not explicit enough. If Native Hawaiians had 138 different ways to describe falling rain, we can assume that rain had a profound importance in their lives, so important that over many generations they learned to discern the different types of rainfall and then passed that knowledge on to their descendants. Business, on the other hand, only has one word for profit. The extraordinarily complex way in which a company ends up with a profit is reduced to a single concept, numerically neat and precise, but eliminating distinctions as to how the profit was made, whether people or places were exploited, resources depleted, communities enhanced, lives lost, or whether the entire executive suite was in complete and utter turmoil requiring stress consultants and outplacement services for the victims. In other words, it does not discern whether the profit is one of quality, or mere quantity.

The Ecology of Commerce Paul Hawken. HarperBusiness, 1993; 246 pp. ISBN 0-088730-655-1 $23 ($25.75 postpaid) from HarperCollins Publishers/Direct Mail, P. 0. Box 588, Dunmore, PA 18512; 800/331-3761