The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability
by Paul Hawken
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NY: HarperCollins 1993.
Our planet is threatened on the one side by pressures of overpopulation and on the other side by pressures of nearly exhausted natural resources and pollution that are threatening to make our world uninhabitable. Paul Hawken does a masterful job of explaining the problems we face and suggesting creative solutions to these problems.
Hawken points out that our pursuit of material gain has grown to be such an accepted goal and one that has been so successful for the industrial nations of the world, that it is difficult for most people to realize that the western standard of living cannot be sustained much longer. Writing in 1993, he observes that in North America we have used up 97 percent of the original forests and are consuming more wood and wood products than we can produce domestically. Our farmers and ranchers pump out an excess of 20 billion gallons of water daily from underground reservoirs than can be replaced through rainfall.
Whatever possibilities business once represented, whatever dreams and glories corporate success once offered, the time has come to acknowledge that business as we know it is over. Over because it failed in one critical and thoughtless way: It did not honor the myriad forms of life that secure and connect its own breath and skin and heart to the breath and skin and heart of our earth. (p. 6)
Limits of sustainability have been reached and in most of the world have been exceeded.
Having expropriated resources from the natural world in order to fuel a rather transient period of materialistic freedom, we must now restore no small measure of those resources and accept the limits and discipline inherent in that relationship. Until business does this, it will continue to be maladaptive and predatory. In order for free-market capitalism to transform itself in the century to come, it must fully acknowledge that the brilliant monuments of its triumph cast the darkest of shadows. Whatever possibilities business once represented, whatever dreams and glories corporate success once offered, the time has come to acknowledge that business as we know it is over. Over because it failed in one critical and thoughtless way: It did not honor the myriad forms of life that secure and connect its own breath and skin and heart to the breath and skin and heart of our earth. (p. 6)
Hawken suggests that it is entirely possible to create companies that are profitable but do not destroy the environment - either directly or indirectly. The problem in most Western countries is the limited vision of environmental proponents. They are doing a good job addressing recycling and reducing pollution, but are missing several important principles.
The economics of restoration is the opposite of industrialization. Industrial economics separated production processes from the land, the land from people, and, ultimately, economic values from personal values, in an industrial, extractive economy, businesses are created to make money. Their financing and ability to grow are determined by their capacity to produce money. In a restorative economy, viability is determined by the ability to integrate with or replicate cyclical systems in its means of production and distribution. The restorative economy would invert many fundamentals of the present system. In such an economy, there is the prospect that restoring the environment and making money would be the same process. As in nature, business and restoration should be part of a seamless web. Environmental protection should not be carried out at the behest of charity, altruism, or legislative fiats. As long as it is done so, it will remain a decorous subordinate to finance, growth, and technology. (p. 11-12)
Currently, the public is bearing the brunt of costs of recycling, cleaning up pollution, and slow development of cheaper and alternative energy resources. ("The single most damaging aspect of the present economic system is that the expense of destroying the earth is largely absent from the prices set in the marketplace." (p. 13) In Germany, a green business ethic has been promoted by the public, now widely adopted by businesses. Businesses design their products to minimize disposable residues. Product design includes plans for recycling of worn out parts. Degradation of the environment (as in foresting) should be redressed through actions (such as reforestation) that exceeds the minimal level of sustainability - "restoring degraded habitats and ecosystems to their fullest biological capacity." These changes place the burden of costs of ecological responsibility, dealing with pollution and recycling on the companies - which they may pass on to customers for their products - but not to the general public.
Hawken also recommends taxation on pollution.
The purpose of integrating cost into pricing is not to provide a toll road for polluters, but a pathway to innovation. The incentive to lower costs is the same one that presently operates in all businesses, but in this case the producer's most efficient means to lower them is not externalizing these costs onto society, but implementing better design...
Also, the concern about higher costs to consumers ignores the fact that we consumers are already paying the costs in the form of higher health costs, both individually and through higher insurance premiums; in the form of mitigation costs to clean up toxic waste sites; in the form of lost economic output; and in the form of environmental degradation, which drives up the cost of resources. Integrating cost with price does not "raise" the over-all expenditures of the consumers of the society, but rather places them where they belong, so that the consumer and producer can respond intelligently. (p. 83)
Pointing out that the public tends to blame business for the environmental problems we are facing, Hawken quotes Wendell Berry, "There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people." (p. 15) Each of us must do our own part to address these problems!
Hawken cautions that the public must stand vigilant guard on issues of protecting the environment, because our government is run by those who have vested interests in corporate profits rather than in the general good of all.
In the business realm, democracy as the founders envisioned it is now in abeyance. All that's left are the mechanisms, the rituals, the all-important image of democracy that is invoked by the very power brokers who would subvert it. In Washington, D.C., corporations act as they do in the marketplace: They play to win. The problem is how they win, for their usurpation of political power destroys the democratic process. Perhaps most disturbingly, we as citizens have become inured to these incursions and accept them as part of the rough-and-tumble of politics. (p. 114-115)
This is an outstanding book about healing our environment, the conduct of business, governmental management of both - and most importantly, about healing our indifference to the crises of planetary pollution and our limited healing of these problems. This book is very highly recommended - despite its publication a dozen years ago.
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