Paul Hawken: Blessed Unrest

       
    Nature recycles not only information, nature recycles everything; nothing is wasted, nothing is thrown away because there is no "away." All natural processes are cyclical, and every scrap of matter, atom, and molecule is reused and repurposed into new flows of life. Industrial society behaves like a spoiled child casting away its unwanted toys in every direction, the only creature that leaves a wake that cannot be recycled by nature or industry. The movement doesn't merely advocate recycling, it actively imagines a system of human production that is as elegant, frugal, and abundant as what we observe in nature. One of the first people to have discussed human production in biological terms was economist Kenneth Boulding, a native of Liverpool who became a brilliant acameician on two continents. In 1965 Boulding introduced the concept of "spaceship earth" in a lecture as a trope to help people understand that our prowess in development and subduing nature was changing our perception of a limitless earth into one that was a "tiny sphere, closed, limited, crowded, and hurtling through space to unkown destinations."
     In his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, published four years after Boulding introduced the trope, Buckminster Fuller commented that spaceship earth had been so extraordinarily designed that human beings, who had been traveling on it for at least two million years, had yet to recognize they were on a spaceship. And indeed, how would one design a spaceship to support biological life for two million years, or four billion?

     This is a question I have sometimes posed to the corporate managers who could not see the practicality or necessity of transforming their business practices into ecological ones. One event at a large company that specialized in agricultural chemicals was particularly instructive, because it was pre cipitated by a vice president's sharp retort to a colleague's statement that there needed to be equitable distribution of resources as a prerequisite for moving toward a more sustainable world. His exact reply: "That is communism, socialism-- it has nothing to do with ecology or the environment." Sixty of the company's chemical engineers were then divided into four teams, each with the same taask: in two hours, design a spaceship that could leave earth and return in one hundred years with its crew alive, healthy, and happy. A biome was called for-- an ecosystem that would provide food, clean water, medicinal plants, and fiber for a century. Each team also had to design the entire culture of this society-- who would be on the ship, what they would do, the lines of authority, and all the messy details of creating and maintaining a society. The spaceship could be as big as necessary, and it could recieve light from outside. But it had no escape hatches, and what happened on the spaceship stayed on the spaceship for a century.

       All four proposals were sophisticated, but one stood out as the preferred ship for the long voyage out and back. The winning designers set up some unsual features. Instead of bringing caches of DVDs and display screens for onboard entertainment, they decided that a significant proportion of the passengers should be artists, musicians, actors, and storytellers. To endure for one century, the passengers needed to create a culture rather than simply consume one. They brought onboard a large variety of weeds, not just "useful" seeds, to enliven the soils and bring minerals to the surface. They brought mycorrhizae and other fungi, bacteria, insects, and small animals-- everything their company poisoned on the earth for profit. (The company's number one product was pesticide.) Of the several thousand products this company made, none were invited along on the trip. The designers realized they were too toxic to be released in a small environment, that being a spaceship five miles in diameter. Essentially, the winning team created a diverse ecosystem within which a socially just and equitable society practiced organic agriculture and designed all objects for disassembly, reuse, recycling. When the participants were asked it if was fair that 20 percent of the passengers received 80 percent of the fruits, vegetables, and medicines produced onboard, all of them, including the vice president who had been disgusted with the idea of equity, shouted the idea down and agreed that it would be unacceptable. Then the VP realized what he had said. After the exercise, a group of employees began an organic garden at the headquarters, and several engineers quit their jobs.

        The power of the spaceship model is not only metaphorical but also pedagogical. It reaches systems thinking, a holistic approach to the interaction and interdependence of constituent parts and how they function together over time. How we came to believe that the earth could support disposables, heavy-metal contamination, Superfund sites, and nucleaer testing is a question I leave to cultural historians. Despite centuries-long practices of despoliation and pollution, almost every resposonsible corporation in the world is moving away from destructive practices and trying to institute more sustainable ones, and all of them have turned to NGOs to assist, teach, inspire, and urgen them on. The stereotype of civil society is groups resisting corporations, and that is true as outlined in previous chapters. What is also true, however, is that nonprofit groups have formed productive relationships with corporations to help them develop in more benign ways. Wal-Mart, which has been in the crosshairs of nonprofits for just about every possible issue for more than a decade, has made a commitment to sustainable practices in every aspect of its business. These include tripling the efficiency from 6 to 18 mpg in what is the biggest truck fleet in the world, converting to 100 percent renewable energy, and going to a zero-waste system in which nothing is thrown away. To achieve these goals, Wal-Mart actively consults doezens of NGOs on topics tht include seafood, organic food and farming, textiles climate change, China, electronics and waste, jewelry, chemicals, green chemistry, logistics, forest products and certification, green buildings, trasportation, packaging, and renewable energy. (It is important to note than an equally large group of NGOs continues to oppose Wal-Mart's siting, labor, and business practices).