Guest Blogger: Laurie Attends a Video Conference in Spain

My friend Laurie in Kalamazoo writes as follows:

All--

Here are notes I took on a video of an excellent Master Class speech given by Chilean economist and environmentalist Manfred Max Neef.  The talk was given at the International University of Andalucía (Huelva, Spain), on December 1, 2009. Says Wikipedia,  

Max Neef, in 1982, won the Right Livelihood Award, known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, for his work in poverty-stricken areas of developing countries. He has worked with the problem of development in the Third World, describing the inappropriateness of conventional models of development that have contributed to poverty, debt and ecological disasters for Third World communities.

Here’s a link to the video of the conference http://cuva.uta.cl/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1042:600-a%C3%B1os-de-un-mundo-sin-hambr

Below are the notes I jotted. (I apologize for any glaring errors – I was listening in Spanish and jotting in English.) Well worth reading. 

Laurie Kaniarz

THE WORLD ON A COLLISION COURSE


Manfred Max Neef


(Laurie’s Notes)



When FAO (Food & Agriculture Organization) announced in October [2009] that 1 billion people around the world are hungry, and it would take $30 billion in aid annually to save these lives, at the same time, 6 Central Banks (US, EU, Japan, Canada, England, Switzerland) injected $180 billion into financial markets to save private banks, and have continued to do so, so that, as of September 2009, they’ve injected $17 trillion into the private banks.  $17 trillion is enough to save the world from hunger for 600 years. Where is that money now?



(Regarding the law of supply and demand: there’s much more demand for bread than plastic surgery, more need for a cure for malaria than haute couture dresses.  We need a referendum: do we want to save lives or banks? There’s never enough for those who have nothing.  Always enough for those who have everything.)

This is the most repugnant news I’ve ever heard.

There’s a 4-way convergence:


1. Exponential climate change


2. The end of cheap fuel


3. Diminishment of genetic natural resources: fresh water, energy, forests, fishing, wildlife, subsoil, coral reefs


4. Gigantic speculative bubble – 50 times greater than the real economy (interchange of goods and services)



The causes of this convergence:


1. The predominant paradigm of present-day economics is that we tend toward economic development at any cost, and this stimulates corporate greed.


2. Devouring fossil fuels propels that economic greed


3. Promotion of consumerism as the road to happiness


4. Destruction of traditional cultures and values to improve the industrial economic model


5. Scorn for the planet with the production of waste



There is danger in this for the environment and society.  Global warming implies the loss of productive soils, storms, hurricanes, desertification – all having implications for the poorest people on the planet. All systems are dependent on fuels.  There will be a further diminishment of species by 50% in the next decades.

 We have to accept the limits of what the earth can handle.

 We must move from “efficiency” to “sufficiency,” and solve inequality, because without equality, peaceful solutions are not possible.  We must replace the dominant values of greed, competition and accumulation with solidarity, cooperation and compassion.  Adjust ourselves to lower levels of production/consumption, favoring local economies. LOOK WITHIN once again, rather than outward.



We’re in the 21^st century, trying to solve our problems with 19^th century economics, even though we no longer use 19th century physics, biology, anthropology, medicine, etc.

 Economic “neo-liberalism” is a pseudo religion.  It conquered the world in a few decades, which religion [Christianity, Laurie?] couldn’t do in 2000 years.



Myth 1: Globalization is the only way to development.  Between 1960-1980, “don’t import what you can produce at home.” Between 1980-2000 this was replaced by deregulation, privatization, elimination of international trade barriers, and full openness to foreign investment.  Between ’60-’80, the poorest developing countries grew 2%.  Between ’80-’00, they had declined 0.5%.



Myth 2: Greater integration in the global economy is good for the poor. But it causes the poor countries to look outward rather than at their own people’s needs.  The 7 richest countries are 50 times richer now than the poorest 7.



Myth 3: Comparative advantage is the best way to ensure prosperity – “free world trade.” Prices can be lower, but 
costs to society & environment are enormous.



Myth 4: More globalization + more jobs. There are fewer jobs in countries of origin, more sub-employment in the outsourcing countries.



Myth #5: Globalization is democratic and transparent. Decisions about world commerce are made by unelected bureaucrats who work behind closed doors in Geneva [World Monetary Fund - WMF].  Their decisions cannot be appealed.  If a country that receiving translational investment has an inconvenient law, it must abolish the law. This affects the very idea of democracy if it has to adapt to the interests of the corporation. 

The WMF has no rules about child labor or labor rights.  All rules benefit the corporations.  Poor countries are prohibited from producing their own generic drugs, for example: they’re obligated to buy from transnationals. Africa has the resources, but can’t produce its own drugs.  The WMF is dedicated to ensuring that corporations govern the world.  Imports and exports are not between countries but between corporations.

Myth #6:  Globalization is unavoidable. ANYTHING arising from politics is reversible. What needs to be done is to take back local decisions that bring consumption back to the local market.  A human-scale economy.

New rules could be: 

- Profits flow back as much as possible to their place of origin.  Unsustainable – taking up huge amounts of resources – is transport over huge distances. In Chile, in the huge, state-of-the-art dairy producing region of the country, I unwrapped a butter packet that came from New Zealand.  It’s cheaper if you look at it from the point of view of an economist, but prices never tell the truth.  The cost of the environmental impact of shipping, to economists, has a value of “0.” Plus, the shipping was subsidized by New Zealand – also a value of “0.” The fact that local producers will go bankrupt – “0.” Same with energy: “This type of [alternative] energy is more expensive.” End of story.

But it’s only “more expensive” depending on how you make the calculation.  If you give value to the impacts, that which is deemed “more expensive” becomes cheaper. 

- Bring back safeguards to local economies with tariffs and quotas to avoid monopolies.

- Ecological taxes.  Taxes on energy use that causes pollution and negative impacts.  We’ve created a “fun” society and we pay taxes on that.  We should pay taxes on the bad, too. They tax you for working, for investing, but not for dirtying, polluting, destroying – you get to do that for free. You should be taxed for how many kilowatts you use rather than on how much you earn.  This would have a formidable impact on world economy.  They are doing this in Scandinavian countries.

- In Sweden, eco-municipalities receive the benefits of income tax, not the State.  You pay your tax and immediately see – and have influence on – how it’s used, in the place where you live.



I propose this new economy for the 21^st Century, with 5 principal postulates:



1.  The economy should serve the people – the people should not serve the economy.


2. Development has to be with/for people, not objects


3. Growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily need growth.


4. No economy is possible at the exclusion of the services provided by ecosystems.


5. Economy is a subsystem of a great system – the biosphere – and so permanent growth is impossible.



A fundamental principle value I propose to sustain the new economy:

 No economic interest, under any circumstance, should ever be held above the reverence for life on the planet.

 But what we have today is exactly the opposite of what I have postulated:



- We’re in a world in which each of us is at the service of economic interests, not the opposite.


- We identify economic development as who has the most cellphones, computers, etc.  The human being disappears in the process.


- There is an obsession with growth as the only measure, but growth is a quantitative measure, and development is a liberation of creative potentials.

 All living systems grow until they stop growing, but they don’t stop developing. We’ve all stopped growing, but we’re in this room [at the conference] because we haven’t stopped developing – more ideas, more information.  Growth has limits, development doesn’t.



My hero, a man I consider the greatest thinker, Kenneth Boulding, said, “Anyone who thinks permanent growth is possible on a finite planet is either crazy or an economist.” [Kenneth Ewart Boulding (January 18, 1910 – March 18, 1993) was an economist, educator, peace activist, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher. He was cofounder of General Systems Theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. - Wikipedia]

No economy is possible at the exclusion of the services provided by the ecosystem.  The economy is a closed system that doesn’t relate to families or nature.  Economists think they don’t need to know about pollination.
 Growth can’t be infinite on a finite planet.  If I want to blow up a big balloon, I can’t blow it up bigger than the room I’m in.

There is a need for reverence for life. Too many people say, “Life doesn’t mean anything … as long as I can do business.” Millions of children are slaves. According to UNICEF and other organizations, in the 21^st century, there are more slaves in the world than when slavery was abolished in the 19^th century. Tens of millions of slaves, two-thirds of them children.  It doesn’t show up in the news.  “With so many kids in the world, who cares?”  Why doesn’t it show up?  SLAVERY IS GOOD BUSINESS – YOU CAN MAKE GOOD MONEY AT IT.

Don’t expect the solution to come down from Mt. Sinai.  It’s up to us.  It starts with each one acting according to his/her belief system and loves.  Don’t ask yourself, “But what can I do?”  That’s defeatist.  ANY ONE OF US can do something at any moment that could change history.

 Examples:  Gandhi got sick of being discriminated against as “colored.” He started out being a nobody, a lawyer, but defeated the most powerful nation on earth. Rosa Parks sat in the white section of a bus and said, “I’m too tired to move.” She was [considered] less than nobody, but sparked the civil rights movement.  They both acted according to their beliefs. 

This won’t happen to you if you always adapt to what you don’t believe in.  Don’t act according to what’s best for you – advice we all get – but what’s best for all.  We all get this bad advice – I’ve given it myself, and I apologize to anyone I’ve ever given it to: “You’ve got to see your goals clearly to know where you want to go.” If you look toward one fixed goal, you won’t see the people you trample on to get there.  It’s a miserable life if you do what you “should” rather than what you MUST do.  The way you can have a happy life is living according to your beliefs.



Here’s some better advice: Drift and steer in a state of alert/attention.  This doesn’t mean you’re at the mercy of the current.  Life is like surfing: you can’t decide where you’re going to end up on the beach because you can’t predict what the waves will do.  But if you’ve got all your antennae up, if you make judgments about what to do as each condition comes up, you’ll end up somewhere along the beach. 

Creativity encourages us to create a world in which we are all relatively happy.

People who know where they’re going never discover anything because they’re obsessed with where they’re going.  But “obstacles” are all the adventure.


Manfred Max Neef’s bibliography includes:

0.Max-Neef, Manfred A (1992) (pdf). From the Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics. Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. pp. 208. ISBN 1-85649-188-9. http://www.max-neef.cl/download/Max_Neef_From_the_outside_looking_in.pdf. Retrieved 2011-02-15.

0.Max-Neef, Manfred A; Antonio Elizalde, Martin Hopenhayn (1991) (pdf). Human Scale Development. The Apex Press. pp. 114. ISBN 0-945257-35-X. http://www.max-neef.cl/download/Max neef_Human_Scale_development.pdf. Retrieved 2011-02-15.

0.Max-Neef, Manfred A; Paul Ekins (1992). Real-Life Economics: Understanding Wealth Creation. Routledge. pp. 432. ISBN 0-415-07976-4. http://www.gettextbooks.co.uk/search/?isbn=9780415079761. Retrieved 2011-02-15.

Laurie Kaniarz is a graduate of Kalamazoo College. She has lived and traveled in Spain and South America and is currently employed by Foods Resource Bank in Kalamazoo. FRB is not an emergency aid organization but works to move people in poor countries toward long-term, sustainable food security.

...old photo of Laurie and me in Leland's historic Fishtown....

All “Stuff” Is Not Equal, Part II

(1) The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, by Paul Hawken (NY: HarperBusiness, 1993)

(2) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough & Michael Braungart (NY: North Point Press, 2002)

If you only want to read one of these books and want an exciting, fun approach and don’t have the patience for a lot of depressing detail supporting the argument for necessity (and who would pick up these books if not already convinced of the necessity for change?), I recommend McDonough & Braungart’s 2002 contribution. Cradle to Cradle is only 186 pages, its tone is very upbeat, and the physical book itself is an example of what the authors are talking about. In their “tale of three books,” they first compare a traditionally printed and bound book with one using soy ink on recycled paper. The first is handsome, a pleasure to hold and easy to read, while the second is flimsy and hard on the eyes. But why should these be our only choices? Let’s rethink the design, say the authors, and here is a description of book that breaks out of the false dilemma:

The pages are white and have a sensuous smoothness, and unlike recycled paper, they do not yellow with age. The ink won’t rub off on the reader’s fingers. Although its next life has already been imagined [the materials are fully recyclable], this book is durable enough to last for many generations. It’s even waterproof, so you can read it at the beach, even in the hot tub. It celebrates its materials rather than apologizing for them. Books become books become books over and over again, each incarnation a sparkling new vehicle for fresh images and ideas. Form follows not just function but the evolution of the medium itself, in the endlessly propagating spirit of the printed word.

Holding an example of good design in your hands while reading about good design makes the idea come alive.

Cradle to Cradle came out eight years ago, before the popularity of e-readers, and for some the new technology may seem a better solution. I wonder. I wonder not just because I sell books but because I love them (which is why I sell them). I also wonder about e-books because a future that doesn’t allow me permanent ownership of what I’ve “bought” (rented, really) seems like a future without books, and that scares me. What if the book I want becomes unavailable? There’s no way I can insure being able to read it again! Another reason? The real, physical book I choose now, to keep and love for the rest of my life, requires no batteries and (unlike the laptop I'm composing this post on) will generate no e-waste, so even with traditionally printed and bound books, I feel pretty good about what it is I sell, and I don’t see how I could possibly have the same good feelings about having my own business if I were selling electronic gadgets or cheap, imported, battery-operated plastic toys.

I said that Cradle to Cradle has an upbeat tone. I would love to see this book as required reading for high school seniors across the country, because it doesn’t send a message to young people that the “good old days” are over and that their future, because they were born too late, will have to be lived in dark caves. The inspiring, exciting, uplifting and spirit-freeing feeling this book imparts comes precisely from the fact that its authors have taken the big environmental questions and problems out of the field of ethics and framed them as design problems.

The old Industrial Revolution designed products with assumptions we now know to be false: that natural resources are in “endless” supply, that Nature can always restore itself, etc. Products were designed to last from “cradle” (the resource pile) to “grave” (the waste pile). Now that we see so clearly that our natural resource capital pile is shrinking and the waste pile growing, we cannot afford to continue designing on false assumptions. Designing for the life of the materials, assuring that everything used can be returned to the resource pile for future use, is designing from cradle to cradle, and the authors offer a challenge to creativity rather than a scolding.

Environmental ethics all too often boils down to using less and recycling. (Hawken put the recycling argument bluntly: “If the items used in households in America were all recycled, this would reduce our solid waste by only 1 or 2%.”) But recycling, buying less, using less—none of that alone changes the overall, linear, cradle-to-grave paradigm. (You might think of it like vowing not to tell lies seven days a week but cutting back to three or four.) And for every virtuous ecological decision I hold up over my neighbor, my neighbor can show some other way I am at fault and he isn’t, so the finger-pointing becomes tedious, and people end up sticking their fingers in their ears.

McDonough and Braungart are clear early in their book about the way they don’t want to approach the problem:

The environmental message ... can be strident and depressing: Stop being so bad, so materialistic, so greedy. Do whatever you can, no matter how inconvenient, to limit your “consumption.” Buy less, spend less, drive less, have fewer children—or none.

Bill McDonough writes of his own early work in design: “I was tired of working hard to be less bad.” What he wanted was to do good work.

Don’t we all? And don’t we want our children and grandchildren to have opportunities to do good work? The examples given in this book, from books to carpets to the renting and recycling (rather than purchase and disposal) of solvents, paint a vision of what the future could be, given intelligent design.

“Nature doesn’t have a design problem,” McDonough and Braungart write. “People do.”

Here are some of the important issues on which McDonough & Braungart agree with Hawken:

• Our supply of natural resources is finite but can be replenished given more intelligent production processes.
• Most bad consequences are not intended, and no one wants them. They are a problem for all of us. “In planetary terms, we are all downstream” (M&B).
• “Less bad” is not good and not nearly good enough.
• It is the nature of business and commerce to be creative.
• Production must shift from a linear process to a cyclical process.
• There is no universal, one-size-fits-all solution to any design problem. Good designs depend on specific location and use local materials wherever possible.
• Human beings have the ability to design processes that mimic nature, producing “stuff” that will not end up as waste.
• This is an exciting challenge!

They differ on at least two major points:

• Hawken sees overpopulation as a problem and takes the idea of “carrying capacity” seriously. McDonough & Braungart consider this gloomy and negative thinking, and they don’t buy it. They seem to think that good design will overcome natural limits. An indication of the distance between the two books on this point is B&M’s dismissal of sustainability as an unexciting goal. B&M want a lot more fun out of life than that.
• Where Hawken would have society, wortld-wide, design systems of fees and taxes to motivate internalization of all costs, McDonough & Braungart see any regulation at all as a signal of design failure, the issuing of a “license to harm.” Hawken agrees that existing attempts at fining polluters has amounted to “licensing to harm” but believes that is because the fines did not fully reflect costs. If all costs were accounted for, companies would be financially motivated to work toward better and better designs. B&M are confident that because we can build self-regulating systems, we will do it--without stick or carrot. Or rather, the carrot will be our own pride in accomplishment.

Both of these books contain bad news and good news. All three authors express more optimism than is usually heard from environmentalists. All three authors (of the two books) are very optimistic and excited about design challenges, and all believe in the creativity of business and commerce. Hawken is not as optimistic about a “limitless” world as McDonough & Braungart, nor does he see the “re-evolution” taking place without financial motivation coming at corporate concerns from the outside.

What do you think? The changes are imaginable, but do we have the will to make the changes?

One problem is that each individual human life is lived only in the short term, and there will always be people content to rob and pillage and destroy to enrich themselves for the short span of their own lives, little caring what happens when they’re gone. A more subtle motivation problem appears in an article in this week’s New York Review of Books, in a review of two books on happiness research. The reviewer is philosopher Thomas Nagel, the subtle problem that people don’t just want stuff, and they aren’t necessarily happy when they have as much stuff as other people. For some people, having more than other people is the whole point. Might there even be people (this would be the “dog in the manger” syndrome) who crave the luxury of wasting what no one else can use?

I don’t have answers to these questions, but they are things I wonder about. Readers determined to be pessimistic will resist even Hawken’s program, while the radically, radiantly sunshiny will go along with McDonough & Braungart all the way. (I tend to think more like Hawken, sustainability is plenty exciting for me, and yet I appreciate B&M's insistence on fun, too.) Whatever your personal inclinations, these are important books. These are important ideas. And both offer a positive vision for the future, challenges to be undertaken in a spirit of exploration and discovery. Isn’t that worth quite a lot?

All “Stuff” Is Not Equal, Part I

Books discussed in this post and post to follow (Part II):

(1) The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, by Paul Hawken (NY: HarperBusiness, 1993)

(2) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough & Michael Braungart (NY: North Point Press, 2002)

I’ll ask you to picture an old-fashioned construction site, the kind my friends and I used as playgrounds on summer evenings, a scene dominated by big, exciting piles of dirt to be run up and down, the “king of the mountain” remaining at the summit. See in your mind three such piles. All right, now instead of dirt see them composed of (1) natural resources, (2) “stuff” people have made, and (3) discarded waste.

The earth itself and everything on it and in it constitutes the first pile. Additionally, coming at us every day and adding to that pile, is energy from the sun. A star’s decay is our source of life.

Next the “stuff.” Everything in pile #2 was made from contents of the resource pile, but while the sun keeps coming at us every day, it can’t make oil fast enough to keep up with our use, and precious minerals aren’t formed quickly, either, so in general the resource pile gets smaller as the stuff pile gets bigger. But keep that “in general” in mind, because whether or not the resource pile shrinks depends on how and out of what we make our stuff. The best “stuff” we make and use can be returned to the resource pile for future use.

And before we go on to pile #3, we need to say something about the many ways we take away from the resource pile without adding anything to the stuff pile. Travel is a big category of resource use that doesn’t add to the stuff pile. Yes, trains and cars and planes are all manufactured and count as stuff, but more resources are used up in moving the vehicles and us from place to place. Frequent fliers don’t pile up miles in closets, but flying, like driving, makes heavy demands on the resource pile. By the end of the 20th century, Americans were consuming fuel for travel 40 times faster than they had done in 1900. Follow this link to read about changes in modes of travel through our history, where gains in efficiency were made and how different modes compare to one another. I’ll quote the bottom line here for those who don’t follow the link:

The increased travel (and increased population) in the 20th century not only canceled out the 5-fold gain in fuel efficiency but increased fuel consumption for travel 40 times. Thus, in addition to striving to increase fuel efficiency, it's even more important to strive to reduce the need for travel as well as to reduce population.

Moral of this part of the story: All use does not result in “stuff,” and all “stuff” is not equal.

Now, finally, on to the third pile—and here this whole mental exercise suddenly strikes me as a tour of Dante’s Divine Comedy in reverse, with the resource pile (wonderful gift!) as heaven, the stuff pile (glittering temptations!) purgatory, and the waste pile as pure hell, a horror growing even as we gaze. The waste pile is built up of stuff that was used and discarded, along with (perhaps an even greater portion of the pile) unwanted byproducts of the making of stuff. Some waste could be recycled and returned to the resource pile but hasn’t been. Other parts, tragically, are not recyclable at all and can never again in our lifetimes become resources.

Now, the Big Question (BQ): Is there any way to halt the ongoing depletion of the resource pile and to stop the waste pile from growing and still enjoy stuff? Put another way: Is the only way to achieve these goals to stop making and buying stuff? And does that mean that people already lucky enough to have plenty of stuff just kick away the ladder and tell the rest of the world to do without for the sake of the planet? This is the question of two books I want to highlight in today’s post and the one to follow. These books answer, basically, as follows: The problem with how we have been making things since the Industrial Revolution is a design problem. We need new designs. We need to design products for the life of their component materials, recognizing that (as my friend on Throwaway Blog says) “nothing ever really goes away, does it?”

McDonough and Braungart are in agreement with Hawken on many important points, and I’ll focus on those in this post, discussing mostly Hawken’s book. In Part II, spending more time on McDonough and Braungart, I’ll also highlight their differences from the Hawken view.

We Americans pay a smaller percentage of our income for food than people in other countries. We pay less for gasoline than any Western European country. As a nation we flock to big box stores to buy television sets produced overseas. But we get all this stuff “cheap” because—like maxing out credit cards or taking Incompletes rather than getting term papers written on time—we’re postponing true accounting, and future generations (not far down the line) will be handed the bill.

Markets are the place at which production becomes consumption, but at present they do not recognize the destruction and waste caused by that production. Because markets are a price-based system, they naturally favor traders who come to market with the lowest price, which often means the highest unrecognized costs.

Hawken gives cigarette smoking as an example, with lost wages and high health care costs not included in the price of the pack (though how anyone can still be smoking cigarettes when a single pack costs between $5 and $8 is completely beyond me) and goes on to say that

...this is true for almost all production/consumption systems, whether they involve the steel in your car, the wood in your house, or the food on your table. The problem is that these costs are shared unevenly, just as the profits from selling them are garnered disproportionately.

As a species, we human beings (unlike any other life form on earth) are spending the earth’s capital, eating our own and other species’ seed corn—use whatever metaphor makes it most vivid to you. Between the resource pile and the stuff pile, as we all know, comes transformation and reorganization of materials, but unfortunately most of what we transform ends up in the waste pile. Designing for the life of materials rather than for product life would create cycles of recovery and reuse in place of a dead end mountain.

Toxic waste is the worst, but disposal of toxic waste, as Hawken sees it, is not the root problem. Rather, it is the root symptom. “The critical issue is the creation of toxic wastes.” And that’s what we need to stop.

In the natural world, all processes, directly or indirectly, result in food for other species. Rot, rust, ants, worms, skunks, toads, pikas, voles, bats, moles, mites, alder, gentian, lichens and several thousand other plants, invertebraves, birds, reptiles and mammals make up a forest. ... In the forest, there is a competitive yet yielding relation....

The most sustainable agricultural practices mimic nature, returning “waste” (there is no true waste in nature) to the soil, whereas the least sustainable methods require heavy financial debt, reduce biodiversity and speed soil erosion. Other writers I’ve written on recently pointed to the industrial ideal of “efficiency” as a distraction from what really goes on in farming, and Hawken is in complete agreement:

What we call “efficient” in agriculture is usually a process that substitutes fossil fuel in its myriad forms for human labor, displacing workers and families while causing widespread and lasting ecological damage to soil, water and wildlife. ...The most truly efficient farm is the one that most effectively internalizes all of its costs. This is a farm that builds up topsoil, that uses water sparingly and thriftily, that uses pesticides rarely if at all, that understands that the secret to healthy plants is healthy soil, not deadly chemicals.

If price were reflective of all costs, Hawken says, you would not pay more for locally grown, organic produce than you pay now for chemically grown fruits and vegetables transported hundreds or thousands of miles. Set that “If” to one side for a minute. We will come back to it shortly.

Again, a BQ: Must an economy involve limitless growth, or can it be healthy without expansion? Classical economists answer the question one way, Hawken differently, by means of a distinction borrowed from Herman Daly, who puts it like this: “A growing economy is getting bigger; a developing economy is getting better.” Hawken describes the developing, or restorative, economy in this way:

Growing implies size for the sake of size, while the idea of development implies that the product or service supplied will actually help people use fewer resources in the long run, and at the same time will serve or improve their lives. In the restorative economy, a company is based on the idea that its products or services will improve people’s lives qualitatively, not quantitatively. It should provide a product or service that helps people develop their lives, and not merely increase the amount of their possessions. The smaller the business, the easier it is to internalize this distinction.

Two huge issues lurk here. One is jobs, the other motivation. Internalization of all costs in the production process, Hawken argues, would recreate jobs and put people back to work. Sounds good. Sounds great! But—and here we come back to that earlier “If”--what would bring about such a revolutionary change in our economy? What would motivate manufacturers to internalize all costs, to hire more workers, to redesign commerce so drastically that it would be paying its way in the world?

Hawken’s answer begins by noting that design is not limited to products. Systems and ways of doing things can also be designed. So prior to redesigning products we would design systems that would encourage new and better products to emerge. Motivation would come in the form of green taxes or green fees. More resources might be managed as public utilities. The whole idea is to design a marketplace that makes destruction of resources and creation of waste very expensive and that rewards ecologically restorative acts. From this would come “environmental restoration, economic prosperity, job creation, and social stability.”

End of Part I