A Teasing Irony
I have come to believe that we in America and in the rest of the industrialized West do not know what business
really is, or, therefore, what it can become. Perhaps this is a strange remark, given that free-market capitalism
is now largely unchallenged as the economic and social credo of just about every society on earth, but I believe
it's correct. Despite our management schools, despite the thousands of books written about business, despite the
legions of economists who tinker with the trimtabs of the $21 trillion world economy, despite and maybe because
of the victory of free-market capitalism over socialism worldwide, our understanding of business--what makes for
healthy commerce, what the role of such commerce should be within society as a whole--is stuck at a primitive level.
The ultimate purpose of business is not, or should not be, simply to make money. Nor is it merely a system of making
and selling things. The promise of business is to increase the general well-being of humankind through service,
a creative invention and ethical philosophy. Making money is, on its own terms, totally meaningless, an insufficient
pursuit for the complex and decaying world we live in. We have reached an unsettling and portentous turning point
in industrial civilization. It is emblematic that the second animal ever to be "patented" is a mouse
with no immune system that will be used to research diseases of the future, and that mother's milk would be banned
by the food safety laws of industrialized nations if it were sold as a packaged good. What's in the milk besides
milk and what's suppressing our immune system is literally industry--its by-products, wastes, and toxins. Facts
like this lead to an inevitable conclusion: Businesspeople must either dedicate themselves to transforming commerce
to a restorative undertaking, or march society to the undertaker.
I believe business is on the verge of such a transformation, a change brought on by social and biological forces
that can no longer be ignored or put aside, a change so thorough and sweeping that in the decades to come business
will be unrecognizable when compared to the commercial institutions of today. We have the capacity and ability
to create a remarkably different economy, one that can restore ecosystems and protect the environment while bringing
forth innovation, prosperity, meaningful work, and true security. As long as we continue to ignore the evolutionary
thrust and potential of the existing economy, the world of commerce will continue to be in a state of disorder
and constant restructuring. This is not because the worldwide recession has been so deep and long, but because
there is a widening gap between the rapid rate at which society and the natural world are decaying and the agonizingly
slow rate at which business is effecting any truly fundamental change.
This turbulent, transformative period we now face might be thought of as a system shedding its skin; it signals
the first attempts by commerce to adapt to a new era. Many people in business, the media, and politics do not perceive
this evolutionary step, while others who do understand fight it. Standing in the way of change are corporations
who want to continue worldwide deforestation and build coal-fired power plants, who see the storage or dumping
of billions of tons of waste as a plausible strategy for the future, who imagine a world of industrial farms sustained
by chemical feed-stocks. They can slow the process down, make it more difficult, but they will not stop it. Like
a sunset effect, the glories of the industrial economy may mask the fact that it is poised at a declining horizon
of options and possibilities. Just as internal contradictions brought down the Marxist and socialist economies,
so do a different set of social and biological forces signal our own possible demise. Those forces can no longer
be ignored or put aside.
That the title of this book, The Ecology of Commerce, reads today as an oxymoron speaks to the gap between how
the earth lives and how we now conduct our commercial lives. We don't usually think of ecology and commerce as
compatible subjects. While much of our current environmental policy seeks a "balance" between the needs
of business and the needs of the environment, common sense says there is only one critical balance and one set
of needs: the dynamic, ever-changing interplay of the forces of life. The restorative economy envisioned and described
in this book respects this fact. It unites ecology and commerce into one sustainable act of production and distribution
that mimics and enhances natural processes. It proposes a newborn literacy of enterprise that acknowledges that
we are all here together, at once, at the service of and at the mercy of nature, each other, and our daily acts.
A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, it did not seem urgent that we understand the relationship between business
and a healthy environment, because natural resources seemed unlimited. But on the verge of a new millennium we
know that we have decimated ninety-seven percent of the ancient forests in North America; every day our farmers
and ranchers draw out 20 billion more gallons of water from the ground than are replaced by rainfall; the Ogalala
Aquifer, an underwater river beneath the Great Plains larger than any body of fresh water on earth, will dry up
within thirty to forty years at present rates of extraction; globally we lose 25 billion tons of fertile topsoil
every year, the equivalent of all the wheatfields in Australia. These critical losses are occurring while the world
population is increasing at the rate of 90 million people per year. Quite simply, our business practices are destroying
life on earth. Given current corporate practices, not one wildlife reserve, wilderness, or indigenous culture will
survive the global market economy. We know that every natural system on the planet is disintegrating. The land,
water, air, and sea have been functionally transformed from life-supporting systems into repositories for waste.
There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world.
Having served on the boards of several environmental organizations, I thought I understood the nature and extent
of the problems we face. But as I prepared to write this book, I reviewed much of the new literature in the field
and discovered that the more I researched the issues, the more disquieting I found the information. The rate and
extent of environmental degradation is far in excess of anything I had previously imagined. The situation was like
the textbook illusion in which the viewer is presented with a jumble of halftone dots that reveals the image of
Abraham Lincoln only when seen from a distance. Each of the sources I worked with was one such dot, not meaningless
in itself, but only a part of the picture. The problem we face is far greater than anything portrayed by the media.
I came to understand well the despair of one epidemiologist who, after reviewing the work in her field and convening
a conference to examine the effects of chlorinated compounds on embryonic development, went into a quiet mourning
for six months. The implications of that conference were worse than any single participant could have anticipated:
The immune system of every unborn child in the world may soon be adversely and irrevocably affected by the persistent
toxins in our food, air, and water.
A subtler but similarly disquieting development was reported by the New York Times in 1992 in an article entitled
"The Silence of the Frogs." At an international conference on herpetology (the study of amphibians and
reptiles), while 1,300 participants gave hundreds of official papers on specialized subjects, none had focused
on the total picture. Pieced together informally in the hallways and in the lunch lines at the conference was the
fact that frogs are disappearing from the face of the earth at an inexplicably rapid rate. Even more disturbing
was the conclusion that these populations are crashing not merely in regions where there are known industrial toxins,
but also in pristine wilderness areas where there is abundant food and no known sources of pollution. The implications
of such a die-off go beyond frogs. The human endocrine system is remarkably similar to that of fish, birds, and
wildlife; it is, from an evolutionary point of view, an ancient system. If endocrine and immune systems are failing
and breaking down at lower levels of the animal kingdom, we may be similarly vulnerable. The reason we may not
yet be experiencing the same types of breakdown seen in other species is because we gestate and breed comparatively
rather slowly. On complex biological levels such as ours, bad news travels unhurriedly, but it eventually arrives.
In other words, something unusual and inauspicious may be occurring globally at all levels of biological development:
a fundamental decline that we are only beginning to comprehend and that our efforts at "environmentalism"
have failed to address.
Review
"The first important book of the 21st century. It may well revolutionize the relationship between business
and the environment."
--Don Falk, Executive Director, Society for Ecological Restoration
HarperCollins Web Site, August, 2001
Summary
A visionary new program that businesses can follow to help restore the planet.