Subject: RACHEL #354: SUSTAINABILITY
From: [email-masked] (David Dickerson)
Date: 10 Sep 93 19:44 PDT
Newsgroups: fido.econet

Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1993 22:19:50 -0400
From: [email-masked] (Peter Montague)
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Rachel #354: Saving the Whole Enchilada

=======================Electronic Edition========================

               RACHEL'S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #354
                     ---September 9, 1993---
          News and resources for environmental justice.
                             ------
                Environmental Research Foundation
               P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD  21403
          Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: [email-masked]
=================================================================

A MAJOR NEW STATEMENT ON SUSTAINABILITY

An important new statement on sustainability has just been
published by the UTNE READER.[1]  Here we summarize and excerpt
it, skimping on the details.

The author is Paul Hawken, a businessman (founder of Smith and
Hawken, which sells upscale gardening implements, furniture and
clothing).  He starts by discussing the "socially responsible
business" movement --some 2000 or so U.S. companies that aim to
do good while doing a brisk business.

Hawken immediately confronts a hard truth: if every company on
the planet were to adopt the environmental and social practices
of the best companies--of, say, the Body Shop, Patagonia, and Ben
and Jerry's Ice Cream--the world would still be moving toward
environmental degradation and collapse.  Therefore what we have
here is not a management problem but a design problem.

If the fundamental problem is overconsumption (people simply
using up too much of the Earth's bounty), then
socially-responsible businesses are contributing to the decline
of the planet as quickly as other companies because they too
promote consumption.

In order to approximate a sustainable society, we need to
describe a system of commerce and production in which each and
every act is inherently sustainable and restorative.  Businesses
will not be able to fulfill their social contract with the
environment or society until the system within which they operate
undergoes a fundamental change, a change that brings commerce and
government into alignment with the natural world from which we
receive our life.

A system of sustainable commerce would involve these objectives:

1) It would reduce absolute consumption of energy and natural
resources among developed nations by 80 percent within 40 to 60
years.  2) It would provide secure, stable, and meaningful
employment for people everywhere.  3) It would be self-actuating
as opposed to regulated, controlled, mandated, or moralistic.  4)
It would honor human nature and market principles.  5) It would
be perceived as more desirable than our present way of life.  6)
It would exceed sustainability by restoring degraded habitats and
ecosystems to their fullest biological capacity.  7) It would
rely on current solar income.  8) It should be fun and engaging,
and strive for an aesthetic outcome.

What is needed, says Hawken, is a conscious plan to create a
sustainable future, including a set of design strategies for
people to follow.  He suggests 12:

1) Take back the corporate charter; reassert legal control by
state legislatures over the issuance of corporate charters.  Bad
actors should lose their charter to do business.  "This is not
merely a deterrent to corporate abuse but a critical element of
an ecological society because it creates feedback loops that
prompt accountability, citizen involvement, and learning," says
Hawken.

2. Adjust prices to reflect costs.  The market presently gives
consumers bad information.  For example, it tells us that flying
across the country on a discount airline ticket is cheap when it
really is not.  It tells us that our food is inexpensive when its
method of production destroys aquifers and soil, the viability of
ecosystems, and workers' lives.  Market economies are excellent
at setting prices but lousy at recognizing costs.  It is
surprising that conservative economists do not support or
understand these ideas because it is they who insist that we
should pay as we go, have no debts, and take care of business.
Let's do it, says Hawken.

3. Throw out and replace the entire tax system. The present
system taxes what we want to encourage--jobs, creativity,
payrolls, and real income--and it ignores the things we want to
discourage--degradation, pollution, and depletion.  The entire
tax system must be replaced over the next 20 years by "Green
fees," taxes that are added onto existing products, energy,
services, and materials so that prices in the marketplace more
closely approximate true costs.  Under an enlightened and
redesigned tax system, the cheapest product in the marketplace
would be best for the customer, the worker, the environment, and
the company (rarely the case today).

4. Turn resource companies into utilities.  An energy utility is
an interesting hybrid of public-private interests.  A utility
gains a market monopoly in exchange for public control of rates,
open books, and a guaranteed rate of return.  Because of this
relationship, and the pioneering work of Amory Lovins, we now
have markets for negawatts. Negawatts are the opposite of energy.
They represent the collaborative ability of a utility to harness
efficiency instead of hydrocarbons. This conservation-based
alternative saves ratepayers, shareholders, and the company
money--with the savings passed along to everyone.

All resource systems, including oil, gas, forests, and water
should be run by some form of utility, creating markets in
negabarrels, negatrees, and negacoal.

Oil companies could form an oil utility and "invest" in
insulation, super-glazed windows, conservation rebates on new
automobiles and the scrapping of old cars.  Consumers would pay
them back a return on their conservation investment equal to what
utilities receive, a rate of return that would be in accord with
how many barrels of oil they save, rather than how many barrels
they produce.  A $60 billion investment in conservation will
yield, conservatively, 4 to 10 times as much energy as drilling
for oil.  Imagine a system where the resource utility benefits
from conservation, makes money from efficiency, thrives through
restoration, and profits from sustainability.  It is possible
today, says Hawken.

5. Change linear systems into cyclical ones.  Our economy has
many design flaws but the most glaring one is that nature is
cyclical and industrialism is linear.  In nature no linear
systems exist because they exhaust themselves into extinction.
Because industrialism is linear, Americans produce six times
their body weight every week in hazardous and toxic waste water,
incinerator ash, agricultural wastes, heavy metals, and waste
chemicals, wood, paper, etc.  This does not include CO2 which if
it were included would double the amount of waste. Cyclical means
of production are designed to imitate natural systems in which
waste equals food for other forms of life, nothing is thrown
away, and symbiosis replaces competition.

6. Transform the making of things.  There are three categories of
products: consumables, durables and unsalables.  Consumables are
products that are either eaten or when they are placed in the
ground turn into dirt.  We should be designing more things so
that they can be thrown away into the compost heap.  Heretical as
it sounds, designing for decomposition, not recycling, is the way
of the world around us.

Durables should not be sold but merely licensed.  Cars, TVs, VCRs
and refrigerators would always belong to the original
manufacturer so they would be made, used, and returned within a
closed-loop system. Unsalables are toxins, radioactivity, heavy
metals, and many other chemicals.  No living system treats these
as food, and they can never be thrown away.  These must always
belong to the original maker, but must be safeguarded by public
utilities that store them in glass-lined barrels indefinitely and
charge the original manufacturer rent for the service.  The rent
ceases when a scientific panel confirms that there is a safe
method to detoxify the material.  All toxic chemicals would carry
molecular markings identifying them as belonging to the
manufacturer so that if they are found in wells, rivers, soil, or
fish the manufacturer must retrieve them and clean up.

8. Restore the guardian

There can be no healthy business sector unless there is a health
government sector.  There are two overarching and complementary
syndromes permeating our society: the commercial and the guardian
(business and government).  They need each other.  At present our
guardian system has almost completely broken down because of the
money, power, influence and control exercised by business and, to
a lesser degree, other institutions.  Business is preventing the
economy from evolving, so business loses, workers lose, and the
environment loses.

9. Shift from electronic literacy to biologic literacy.  We are
moving not into an information age but a biologic age, and
unfortunately our technological education is preparing us for
corporate markets, not for the future.  Understanding biological
processes is how we are going to create a new symbiosis with
living systems (or perish).

10. Take inventory.  We do not know how many species live on the
planet within a factor of 10.  We do not know how many of these
species are being lost.  We do not know what happens to 20
percent of the CO2 that is off-gassed each year (it simply
disappears).  We do not know how to calculate sustainab--- TBBS v2.1/NM

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