Too Busy Reliving History to Watch Lunar Eclipse

Okay, I admit it: I neither stayed up nor got up to see the lunar eclipse this morning. When I looked out the window last night at 9 p.m., the sky was clear, the moon was full, and I thought what a perfect night it would be for the eclipse—for other people. A few years back, returning from a visit to friends at Walloon Lake, we drove south along the east side of Grand Traverse Bay accompanied by a lunar eclipse and a comet. I was almost afraid to look in the rear-view mirror, because if we’d seen Northern Lights that night, too, why go on living? How could there be more after a night like that?


Why? Because life always has more to offer, and right now, in mine, books are so exciting that it’s hard for me to sit still in my reading chair! I want to rush to share the wonders! First, I’m nearing the end of Julie Altrocchi’s 1940 novel, Wolves Against the Moon, with a setting that ranges from Quebec and the Great Slave Lake to Mackinac Island, through the Michigan territory, the Indiana dune country and Checagou, and down the rivers leading to the Mississippi and Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The story begins in 1794 and ends in 1835. The main character, Joseph Bailly (real man, part of history), was French by birth and a British citizen by virtue of his family’s immigration to Canada. He traded furs throughout the Michigan territory and eventually settled his family in northern Indiana, under the mistaken impression that the land he chose for their home was in Michigan. I could go on but am reining myself in, because there’s too much to go into this morning with this novel.


Then, before I’ve reached the end of Wolves Against the Moon, Monday’s mail brought me the long-awaited advance reader’s copy of Loreen Niewenhuis’s A 1,000-Mile Walk on the Beach: One Woman’s Trek on the Perimeter of Lake Michigan. Do you think I could set this new book calmly aside and finish my novel first? No, indeed! I had to open it and read the introduction and then, like a lake trout, I was hooked! Loreen begins her walk in Chicago! Oh, wonderful coincidence! Chicago, the Calumet River, Gary, the railroads and steel mills, and on to the beautiful beaches and the Indiana dunes—this was the Lake Michigan of my childhood. It was also—log cabins of Checagou, the Little Calumet River, Marquette Spring, the Sauk Trail, Parc aux Vaches--the Lake Michigame of the Indians and fur traders many years before, in the time period covered by Altrocchi’s novel.


In my own life, for years after the expressways came, I could still escape them on trips from Kalamazoo to visit my family in Illinois by taking the back roads of the old Sauk Trail through small towns and countryside. That’s all over--now it’s subdivisions, shopping malls and multilane, stop-and-go traffic--but I have traveled this part of the Midwest all my life, earlier and later following the lakeshore north to what has been my home for many years. The country of Altrocchi’s novel, later my life’s landscape, is the country of Niewenhuis’s true-life adventure, too, so I will have the thrilling satisfaction of exploring twice in one month, with two different authors, two centuries apart, land and water that I know and love, learning from both books aspects of the beloved geography that I never knew before.


Do you wonder I am so excited?!

Meanwhile, at the bookstore, thank heaven for the little tabletop trees and their brightly colored ornaments brought in by Marjorie Farrell this holiday season because cheap, nonworking electric holiday lights have been my Grinch issue of 2010. Shoddy consumer goods isn’t a very festive topic, but those strings of lights from last year that wouldn’t work at all this year, plus the one string that worked for a few days and then died a gradual death, bothered me a lot.

“Can’t you just get more at the hardware store? They don’t cost very much, do they?”


Yes, the hardware has plenty, and no, they are cheap as dirt, and that’s a big part of the problem. Like disposable everything-else, they are made to be thrown away—but as McDonough & Braungart in Cradle to Cradle, Paul Hawken in The Ecology of Commerce and many others have noted, there is no “away.” It all goes into someone’s backyard. Now here's a new book on what we can do about the problems.

Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our Daily Choices, by Julie Clawson (IVP Books, 2009, $16)

Julie Clawson addresses exactly the question asked by one of my commenters recently, i.e., “What can I do—me—in my own life to change the world?” Clawson’s perspective is Christian, and her theme is that while not everyone can be a designer, we are all called upon to live justly and that justice demands we take responsibility for the consequences of our choices, however remote. On the other hand, she doesn’t want her readers to freak out and say, “It’s too hard! It’s too complicated! I can’t change my whole life completely!” So chapter by chapter, Clawson takes on justice issues involved in coffee, chocolate, cars, food, clothes, waste and debt. A little scenario begins each chapter, followed by hard and difficult truths (including child slavery overseas, and you don’t want to be part of that, do you?), but then she winds up with concrete suggestions for changes we can make in our everyday lives, some of them very small.

Electric and electronic waste, e-waste, my bête noir of the season, isn’t just strings of dead lights. It’s dead cell phones, dead computers, dead microwave ovens, dead television sets and, soon, dead e-readers.

Theoretically, recycling electronic waste should be a money saver for corporations. Reusing heavy metals like lead is far easier and cheaper than mining them. But the infrastructure for safe recycling isn’t widespread in the United States, and the government generally subsidizes virgin-mining operations [my emphasis added]. Until structures are in place and systems change, these expensive and precious, yet toxic, metals will continue to be thrown away—or else sold overseas to countries eager for easy and cheap access to expensive metals.

Nearly 80 percent of electronic waste that is recycled [sic] in the United States ends up being sold overseas. While the idea of recycling this metal is good on one level..., problems arise because of the lack of environmental laws in many of those countries. As electronic waste gets recycled (smelted down) in these countries, the toxic byproducts of that process spread into the surrounding environment.

Investigation into one rural area of Peru where metal recycling had contaminated soil in farmers’ fields found 99 percent of children suffered from lead poisoning. That’s just the metals, too. What about the plastics encasing those metals and the gases released when those plastics are heated?

In light (yes!) of all this, I’ve regretfully decided to boycott the product in question until some environmentally responsible company offers strings of holiday lights with a good, solid 10-year guarantee, price fully refundable. I don’t expect to get them for a dollar a string but am willing to pay for a durable, quality product.

Please note that I am not criticizing or condemning anyone who has working strings of holiday lights, even if they were bought new this season! Each of us makes different choices, and my life is no more environmentally blameless than anyone else’s. This is just one place I’ve decided to dig in my heels and say, “Enough’s enough!”

Something else strikes me here: Judaism always stressed justice and mending the broken world (a figure of speech Clawson uses early in her book), while the just society was a major concern of the ancient Greek (pagan) philosophers. “Christianity” is not one religion but many, with great differences across the spectrum, but if Clawson’s arguments can reach that large, diverse population, then more power to her. Our world needs to have this message coming in on as many channels as possible.

It’s Official: We’re Downsizing Our Environmental Footprint

There, did I get your attention? I think my headline makes a true statement, although there are many factors to consider in comparing the two scenarios: highway miles vs. home heating bills, motel nights vs. driveway plowing, etc. Do you see where I’m going with this? Yes, our pack is staying in Michigan this winter rather than fleeing for the sunshine of Florida, a decision we made over the weekend after considering it for almost five minutes.

Believe it or not, we are experiencing great relief and anticipation over the change in plan. Sound crazy? Well, for starters we won’t have to close up our house and pack for three months and worry about getting our mail. We don’t have to face that long drive and all those meals on the road. I won’t be fretting over not being able to let Sarah off her leash for a good run but having to walk her on a busy highway with a narrow shoulder for three months. And finally, we won’t be leaving behind all our dear Michigan friends.

True, we’ll have to deal with cold and snow, but we’ll have the Up North comradeship of others facing the same challenges. Besides, we’ve gotten through long, hard, cold, serious Michigan winters before. And it’s only one week now until the shortest day of the year, so how hard will it be for us to travel once more from winter solstice to vernal equinox under northern skies, hunkered down on home ground?

Here’s the plan: I’ll be at the bookstore three days a week—Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Bruce will cover Wednesday. Bookstore hours from Wednesday through Saturday will be 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and we’ll be closed Sunday through Tuesday.

One thing our staying means for Dog Ears Books customers is that I will, after all, be able to fill special requests over the winter for new books (all you have to do is get those requests to me in person, by phone or by e-mail), and what the shortened week means is that I’ll process orders on Monday or Tuesday so deliveries arrive on Thursday or Friday. What it means for the blog is that I’ll probably cut down to a couple of posts a week.

And now, back to the present. Wednesday was a busy day on “Books in Northport,” with more visitors than ever to the blog, though not many left comments. The unusual activity was due to “Shelf Awareness” having picked up part of my Dec. 9 post, “I Am Not a Luddite,” for their “Quotation of the Day.” Ah, fame! The fleeting aspect of its nature is probably as much blessing as curse, in this case because quotations by their very nature are lifted out of context, and the only comment I had from the SA link was, I fear, a response only to the quote rather than to the entire piece.

So I’d like to take a moment here to clarify and amplify my thinking about new physical books, which is where I think most if not all of the environmental argument needs to be directed. The book I’m currently reading was a new book when it was first published in 1940. How many people have read this copy before it came into my hands? That is the defense for used books, but doesn’t it naturally carry over into new books? That is, does anyone buy a new book planning to read it once and throw it in the trash (or, in the case of paperbacks, recycling bin)?

Here are some of the various fates met by books purchased new:

➢ They become part of the purchaser’s permanent home library, read by other family members and passed on to children.
➢ They are read and passed along to a friend or relative.
➢ They are read and donated to a library, usually going into the library’s next sale.
➢ They are read and donated to a thrift shop or other charitable organization.
➢ They are read and brought back to a bookstore as used books.

Have I left anything out? My point is that a new book quickly becomes a used book, and therefore the Life Cycle Analysis of a new book must take into account these multiple lives! The same cannot be said of an e-book, the “purchase” (really, rental) of which rules out sharing and passing on.


Again, I also see (1) the development and use of new materials to replace paper and (2) the abolition of returns as taking care of most of the very legitimate objections to resource use and waste involved in printed books. I feel bad enough about the four strings of Christmas tree lights I bought last year and the year before, all of which are now dead as doornails. Electronic waste is a nightmare! Do we really want to make that mountain grow faster?

When it comes to reading, this moment in history is a time for decision. Different readers will decide in different directions, and eventually the results will get sorted out. Another fascinating and exceedingly complex issue of print books vs. e-books has to do with human brains. If you are interested in this tangled nest of question, knowledge and speculation, here's a site where different experts bring to the table diverse points of view on the books-and-brains issue. Fascinating! You'll want to read the whole thing, including all the comments, which themselves range all over the map in terms of likes and dislikes.

It occurs to me here that I should add a personal note to my new correspondents out in the wilds of New South Wales. Dear Grahame and Kathy, if it makes sense for anyone to download e-books to read on a screen, it makes sense for you! It’s kind of the way I think about snowmobiles: there are places where they are appropriate transportation. I hope this analogy makes sense to folks who live where there is no snow!

Where do the rest of you stand? What do you like and dislike about the different ways of reading? Are you ready to make and own a decision?

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