This past month I've read:
Thom Hartmann's The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Waking Up to Personal and Global Transformation (1998; Mythical Books),
Paul Ray's and Sherry Ruth Anderson's The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (2000; Harmony Books), and
Paul Hawken's, Amory Lovins', and Hunter Lovins' Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (1999; Little, Brown and Company).
My brain feels overloaded, so much so that I have been having difficulty writing this column. Where to begin, what to pick out to share with you? How to emphasize strongly that the information and ideas in these books can energize you, if you are remotely environmentally concerned, to speak out on the issues surrounding our over-use and abuse of non-renewable energy and other non-renewable resources?
My gut reaction is that the much-vaunted Vice President of the United States and the members of his energy policy committee and every member of the US Congress should be force-fed Natural Capitalism until they "get" it and stop pressing the idea of drilling the US out of its so-called "energy crisis." (Notice that I am not bothering with our erstwhile President: I don't think he reads books, only tele-prompters, much as his wife may be promoting literacy…maybe that's why.)
There are many examples in Natural Capitalism of how companies and people have discovered ways to increase efficiency in the use of energy and ways to drastically reduce or eliminate the need for virgin materials, water, and energy in manufacturing. And the authors illustrate in many ways that the economics of efficiency is far more profitable than the economics of profligate use of resources.
It is written to be read by non-economists, so if you are remotely interested in learning how an engineer designed a plant so that pipes ran in straight lines, thereby reducing the size of the motors needed to pump fluid through the pipes and the energy to run said motors (just one example) and how the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado, grows bananas in their office building at 8,000 feet altitude, I invite you to dive into the book.
In their chapter on markets, I thought the following a powerful statement:
[Markets] make a good servant but a bad master and a worse religion. They can be used to accomplish many important tasks, but they can't do everything, and it's a dangerous delusion to begin to believe that they can — especially when they threaten to replace ethics or politics. America may now be discovering this, and has begun its retreat from the recent flirtation with economic fundamentalism. That theology treats living things as dead, nature as a nuisance, several billion years' design experience as casually discardable, and the future as worthless....
Natural capitalism recognizes the critical interdependency between the production and use of human-made capital and the maintenance and supply of natural capital.
And what is natural capital? It's "water, minerals, oil, trees, fish, soil, air, et cetera. But it also encompasses living systems, coral reefs, riparian corridors, tundras, and rainforests." And it's not just the natural things and systems, but, more importantly, the "services" provided to humans by them. For instance, multi-species forest ecosystems and native prairie ecosystems soak up and hold water, reducing floods and allowing the slow seepage of water through soils, replenishing aquifers.
The authors arrived at a conservative estimate of the value of the world's natural capital at "somewhere between $400 and $500 trillion" but point out that "anything we can't live without [try oxygen and water and soil] and can't replace at any price could be said to have an infinite value."
Yes, the fact that clean air and clean water and healthy soils are irreplaceable should be enough keep them invaluable. And all of our artificial systems should be oriented to keeping them inviolate. But the artificial systems don't, and air, water, and soil are constantly being violated with toxic materials and toxic practices.
Hartmann's "ancient sunlight" refers, of course, to the ancient sunlight captured by the carboniferous plants of millions of years ago which have been buried and compressed into the carbon fuels of coal and oil and natural gas. The "last hours" refers to the fact that our unrelenting and burgeoning use of these carbon fuels during the last 150 years (only 150 years!) is using a non-renewable supply, whose finiteness is real.
After describing the dilemma, Hartmann turns to describing actions which we can take, bringing personal transformation to this global problem:
He suggests making our lives ones of "practicing small acts of mercy, performed with compassion. … No matter how overwhelming the problems of the world may seem, you do have an effect, even if nobody ever knows what you've done." He reminds us that "the dominant story can and does get changed. Then reality changes."
For instance, segregation, endemic in American society forty years ago, was considered right and proper by many whites. It took the consciousness-raising of the civil rights movement and the spiritual power of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the thousands of people who demonstrated and voted to turn that reality around.
Which brings me to The Cultural Creatives. Ray and Anderson spent thirteen years doing survey research on more than 100,000 Americans, along with over 100 focus groups and dozens of in-depth interviews. You know how many things are blamed on "the '60s?" That time of free love, anti-war, and high-flying? It's true…at least, they have found that
"[t]he emergence of the Cultural Creatives is rooted in the provocative education that our society began to receive in the 1960s. As thousands of young Americans became active agents of social change, they forced our nation to confront the most basic moral questions and set in motion changes that we are living out today.
The movements of that time…civil rights, anti-Vietnam, no nukes, environmentalism, women's rights…to name the major ones, have redefined what Americans believe in, in many ways. They led to further outcomes by changing the cultural mindset prevalent in the '40s and '50s, a mindset whereby whatever the government said, you believed.
You believed to the extent that you watched nuclear bomb tests in Nevada and Utah and played in the radioactive fallout, where children are still dying from high rates of cancer. You believed that DDT was the best thing since sliced bread because it killed all those nasty mosquitoes and your children played in the spray as it came from the trucks passing down your street, never imagining its carcinogenicity. You believed that drugs to prevent miscarriages or morning sickness wouldn't contain chemicals that would harm your baby, resulting thalidomide-truncated limbs and diethylstilbestrol-initiated cancers in your daughters.
We don't believe anymore in the truthfulness of government agencies, although we should be able to. We question "by whose authority."
We don't believe that western medicine has the only answers, as the holistic and alternative health care systems are moving more and more into the mainstream.
We want, or should want, foods that are grown in healthy soil from seed stock with intact species barriers, foods which have the vitamins and minerals that they have been naturally genetically programmed to store.
We should not have to court death in the forms of the tens of thousands of toxic materials surrounding us in order to live decently and in a manner which can be sustained without undue harm to the earth.
We desire to know who we are and what living on this planet means to us, individually and collectively.
Toward the end of their book, Ray and Anderson ask if the "visions, concerns, and values of the Cultural Creatives [can] really become a permanent, ordinary, taken-for-granted part of social life—in other words, a new culture?" They see it happening just as it seems to be happening: not from the top down but from the bottom up: with people taking it upon themselves to burst forth with a new way, such as Karl-Henrik Robért who founded The Natural Step. Robért got a group of scientists to look at the whole system of creating a sustainable future, rather than attacking individual problems. The basic premise is "the ethical insight that destroying the future capacity of the earth to support life is wrong."
They came up with four "system conditions":
Nature cannot withstand a systematic buildup of dispersed matter mined from the earth's crust (e.g., minerals, oil, coal, etc.), therefore, we must recycle all minerals and fossil fuels from under the earth's crust, or cut their use to zero. Nature cannot withstand a systematic buildup of long-lasting compounds made by humans (e.g., PCBs). We must recycle all long-lasting "unnatural" man-made substances or cut their use to zero. Nature cannot take a systematic deterioration of its capacity for renewal (e.g., harvesting fish faster than they can replenish, or converting fertile land into desert). We must stop causing the deterioration of Nature, whether it is by depleting fish and forests, or polluting, or making deserts, or creating extinctions of other species Therefore, if we want life to continue, we must (a) be more efficient in our use of resources, and (b) promote justice.
Sweden has been the first country to undertake "the natural step." An American business, the carpet manufacturer Interface, has been working diligently at becoming totally efficient and using no virgin resource. What it has accomplished and its goals are described in both Natural Capitalism and The Cultural Creatives.
I will leave you with this last bit from Ray and Anderson:
[F]ocus tens of thousands of individuals on the creative fire and let them move independently but with a common purpose, and the life-giving energies will be beyond belief.
That's you and you and you and you and me. Let's do it.
More about The Natural Step
and The Cultural Creatives
and Thom Hartmann's Home Page
and Rocky Mountain Institute
Table of Contents
Letter to the Author: