A Teasing Irony

Paul Hawken

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, there fore, 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 win 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, meaningffil 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 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 ninetyseven 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 wheat fields 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 begining to comprehend and that our efforts at "environmentalism" have failed to address.
From this perspective, recycling aluminum cans in the company cafeteria and ceremonial tree plantings are about as effective as bailing out the Titanic with teaspoons. While recycling and tree planning are good and necessary ideas, they are woefully inadequate. How can business itself survive a continued pattern of worldwide degradation in living systems? What is the logic of extracting diminishing resources in order to create capital to finance more consumption and demand on those same diminishing resources? How do we imagine our future when our commercial systems conflict with everything nature teaches us?
Constructive changes in our relationship to the environment have thus far been thwarted primarily because business is not properly designed to adapt to the situation we face. Business is the practice of the possible: Highly developed and intelligent in many respects, it is, however, not a science. In many ways business economics makes itself up as it progresses, and essentially lacks any guiding principles to relate it to such fundamental and critical concepts as evolution, biological diversity, carrying, capacity, and the health of the commons. Business is designed to break through limits, not to respect them, especially when the limits posed by ecological constraints are not always as glaring as dead rivers or human birth defects, but are often expressed in small, refined relationships and details.
The past one, hundred years have seen waves of enterprise sweep across the world, discovering, mining, extracting, and processing eons worth of stored wealth and resources. This flood of commerce has enriched capital cities, ruling families, powerfull governments, and corporate elites. It has, therefore, quite naturally produced a dominant commercial culture that believes all resource and social inequities can be resolved through development, invention, high finance, and growth--always growth. For centuries, business has been able to claim that it is the organizational key to "unlocking the hidden wealth of creation for distribution to the masses." By and large that has been true. But now, rather than distributing the wealth of the present, we are stealing the wealth of the future to enrich a society that seems nonetheless, deeply troubled about its'- "good fortune." While democratic capitalism still emanates an abundant and optimistic vision of humankind and its potential, it also retains the means to negate this vision in ways that are as harmful as any war.
It is lamentable to extinguish a species by predation and killing, whether the perceived gain is leather, feather, pelt, or horn. But how will we explain that the disappearance of songbirds, frogs, fireflies, wildflowers, and the hundreds of thousands of other species that will become extinct in our lifetime had no justification other than ignorance and denial? How will we explain to our children that we knew they would be born with compromised immune systems, but we did nothing? When will the business world look honestly at itself and ask whether it isn't time to change? Having expropriated resources from the natural world in order to fuel a rather transient period of materialistic freedom, we must now, restore no small measure of those resources and accept the limits and discipline inherent in that relationship. Untill business does this, it will continue to be maladaptive and predatory. In order for free-market capitalism to transform itself in the century to come, it must fully acknowledge that the brilliant monuments of its triumph cast the darkest of shadows. Whatever possibilities business once represented, whatever dreams and glories corporate success once offered, the time has come to acknowledge that business as we know it is over. Over because it failed in one critical and thoughtless way: It did not honor the myriad forms of life that secure and connect its own breath and skin and heart to the breath and skin and heart of our earth.
Although the essential nature of commerce has not altered since the very first exchange of coin for corn, the power and impact of corporate capitalism have increased so dramatically as to dwarf all previous forms of international power. No empire--- Greek, Roman, Byzantine, British, or any other---has had the reach of the modern global corporation, which glides easily across borders, cultures, and governments in search of markets, sales, assets, and profits. This institutional concentration of human energy and creativity is unparalleled in history. But if capitalism has pillaged, it has also delivered the goods, and in quantities that could not have been imagined just two generations ago. Providing that abundance is one of the central goals of doing business, and those who believe in capitalism believe that goal must be facilitated at every opportuitty. Government is key to this strategy. The conservative view of free-market capitalism asserts that nothing should be allowed to hinder commerce. Sacrifices might be called for here and there, but in the end, the environment, the poor, the Third World, will all benefit as business more fully realizes its potential. In the new world order of the post-communist age, free-market capitalism promises to be the secular savior, echoing theologian Michael Novak's homage- "No system has so revolutionized ordinary expectations of human life--lengthened the life span, made the elimination of poverty and famine thinkable, enlarged the range of human choice-as democratic capitalism." This view of business was fervently embraced by the recent Republican administrations, who found in Novak's words an unimpeachable affirmation of many of their programs, of deregulation. Invoking the sanctity of the free market to prove that present business practices are sound and constructive, and using it to rebut every charge of ecological malfeasance is, at its heart, dishonest. Historically, we have given industry great latitude for its miscalculations because there was no science sufficiently developed to inform society of industrialism's effects. One hundred years ago, industrial cities were coated with grime and cut off from the sun by permanent palls of smoke; the citizens were beset by disease; the very conditions under which workers toiled and died were inhumane and exploitative. These conditions had their analog in the industrial processes of waste and despoliation, and- were the direct costs of the Industrial Revolution. It took many decades before an appreciation of the social and environmental damage spread beyond a small circle of Marxists and muckrakers to society as a whole. Today, businesspeople readily concede the abuses of the early days of this Revolution, but they do not wholly and genuinely acknowledge the more, threatening abuses perpetuated by current practices. Troubling untruths lie uneasily within a colossal economic system that denies what we all know while it continues to degrade our world, our society, and our. bodies. Business economists can explain in detail the workings of the modern corporation, its complex interrelation with financial markets, how its holdings might be valued on a discounted cash-flow basis, or the dynamics of global competitive advantages. These pronouncements and equations promise hope but they cannot explain-much less justify-the accelerating extinction of species, the deterioration of human health, the stress and anguish of the modern worker, the loss of our air, water, and forests. In short, they cannot explain the consequences of their actions.
Why, then, do we accept the excuses? Why do we hand business a blank check and exempt enterprise from the responsibility for maintaining social values? One reason might be that like the conferees, we have only a piecemeal view of events. We have no hallways to congregate in and go accumulate the overall image of cumulative destruction. Furthermore, their actions are defended--I daresay have to be defended--because most of us are dependent upon them for our livelihood. Even a declining General Motors still employs nearly 600,000 people. A supermarket chain such as American Stores employs 200,000 or more. The 400 companies profiled in Everybody’s Business Almanac employ or support one-fourth of the U.S. population. The largest 1,000 companies in America account for over sixty percent of the GNP, leaving the balance to 11 million small businesses. The average large business is 16,500 times larger than the average small business. And since much of the population is now employed by these large corporations, they naturally see their interest as being linked to the success and growth of their employers. Such fealty resembles the allegiance that sustained feudal baronies; the vassal serfs believed that the lord who exploited them was better than the uncertainty of no lord at all. But in the competitive world of modern commerce, loyalty to the system prevents an objective examination of how market capitalism can also work against those who serve it. Tinkering with the system will not bring species back to life, profit-sharing schemes do not restore our wetlands, donating money for a new production of Don Giovanni will not purify our water, nor will printing annual reports on recycled paper save us. The dilemma that confronts business is the contradiction that a commercial system that works well, by its own definitions, violates the greater and more profound ethic of biology. Succeeding in business today is like winning a battle and then discovering that the war was unjust. Of course, the discovery that a loyalty which has served so well can betray so badly is a troubling concept for any culture. From my observations, most people involved with commerce who are also educated about environmental issues care deeply about commerce's effects. At the same time, such people feel anxious about their jobs, the economy,, and the future in general. The environment becomes just, one more thing to worry about. It looms in the future at a time, when we are beset with many other, more immediate, concerns. It is like being a single parent when the dog has run away, the children are fighting, the dinner is burning, the babysitter hasn't shown up, we are late for the PTA meeting, and have just spilled gravy on the carpet when someone doing a survey knocks at the door and wants to know how we feel about the proposed landfill at the edge of town. Although the landfill will affect our lives in the future, we are afflicted with pressing problems today. Similarly, when environmental issues are presented to businesspeople as one more cost and one more regulation, "doing the right thing" becomes burdensome and intrusive. And the way our economy is organized today, businesspeople are right: Doing the right thing might indeed put them out of business.
We should not be surprised, then, that there is a deep-seated unwillingness to face the necessary reconstruction of our commercial institutions so that they function on behalf of our lives. Business believes that if it does not continue to grow and instead cuts back and retreats, it will destroy itself. Ecologists believe that if business continues its unabated expansion it will destroy the world around it. This book will discuss a third way, a path that restores the natural communities on earth but uses many of the historically effective organizational and market techniques of free enterprise.
The act of doing business carries with it ethical import, so given the dominance of business in our time, we must ask the question: How do we want our principal economic organism to conduct its commerce? Is it to be as a marauder, high on the food chain, pinning its prey with ease? If business is based on the notion that it can call upon nature without constraint to submit to the objectives of commerce, it will destroy the -foundation on which rests the society it has pledged to serve. Though "nothing seems foul to those that win:" the cultures that have been previously harmed and the lands we have forfeited must now be reincorporated into the body economic. Business must judge its goals and behavior, not from inherited definitions of the corporate culture, but from the perspective of the world and society beyond its self-referential borders.
If business is prepared to reexamine its underlying assumptions and listen to ecologists, botanists, toxicologists, zoologists, wildlife management experts, endocrinologists, indigenous cultures, and victims of industrial processes, without the selective filter of its internal rationale and biases, it will not only fulfill its own agenda of contributing to society by providing products, jobs, and prosperity, but also initiate a new era of ecological commerce, more promising and ultimately more fulfilling than the industrial age that preceded it.
While business teaches us effective forms of human organization, environmental science reveals that those forms do not necessarily preserve the natural resources that are the basis of our well-being. While business teaches how to gain financial wealth, ecological understanding demonstrates that wealth to be ultimately illusory unless it is based on the principles and cyclical processes of nature. The dialogue reconciling these dichotomies will be the fundamental basis for economic transformation. In order for this dialogue to succeed, business needs a new language, a new role, a new way of seeing itself within the larger environment. Business parlance is a specific, rarefied, and, for most of us, borrowed language. It is useful when it describes the mechanics of commerce, but fails when we try to connect it with biology, society, or feeling, yet this specialized dialect has established itself as the planetary lingua, franca. In the language and accounting of classical economics, resources do not technically exist until they are drilled, extracted, pumped, or cut; in biological accounting, the principle is reversed. Business language reduces living transactions to costs and exchange value. From this semantic strait emerges the talk of tradeoffs and compromises between growth and conservation, jobs and ecology, society and biodiversity, American competitiveness and resource pricing.
The language of commerce sounds specific, but in fact it is not explicit enough. If Hawaiians had 138 different ways to describe falling rain, we can assume that rain had a profound importance in their lives. Business, on the other hand, only has two words for profit-gross and net. The extraordinarily complex manner in which a company recovers profit is reduced to a single numerically neat and precise concept. It makes no distinctions as to how the profit was made. It does not factor in whether people or places were exploited, resources depleted, communities enhanced, lives lost, or whether the entire executive suite was in such turmoil as to require stress consultants and outplacement services for the victims. In other words, business does not discern whether the profit is one of quality, or mere quantity.
It is understandable that a more meticulous language has not developed in this area because, until relatively recently in history, business has not been central to how societies and cultures defined themselves. In fact, its hegemony is still debated, especially by politicians who cling to the outdated vanity that government is in control. While governments still retain the power to wage war, defend territory, and issue currency, they can do little to create wealth except to work with business. Given that power, the modern corporation needs to expand and widen its vocabulary to become more environmentally accurate and culturally enduring. Without this new vocabulary, capitalism will become the commercial, equivalent of the Holy Roman Empire: an amorphous global-corporate state taking what it needs and forcing smaller governments into financial subjugation, since no governing body can retain political legitimacy without money, credits, investment, and the sanction of the international business community. Biologically speaking, such unbalanced dominance will precipitate the demise of global capitalism, just as it brought down Rome.
Free-market purists believe that their system works so perfectly that even without an overarching vision the marketplace will attain the best social and environmental outcome. The restorative economy is organized in a profoundly different way. It does not depend upon a transformed human nature, but it does require that people accept that business is an ethical act and attempt to extend to commerce the interwoven, complex, and efficient models of natural systems. Current commercial practices are guided by the promise that we can stay the way we are, live the way we have, think the thoughts of old, and do business unburdened by real connections to cycles, climate, earth, or nature. Restorative economics challenges each of these assumptions.
The economics of restoration is the opposite of industrialization. Industrial economics separated production processes from the land, the land from people, and, ultimately, economic values from personal values. In an industrial, extractive economy, businesses are created to make money. Their financing and ability to grow are determined by their capacity to produce money. In a restorative economy, viability is determined by the ability to integrate with or replicate cyclical systems, in its means of’ production and distributions. The restorative economy would invert many fundamentals of the present system. In such an economy, there is the prospect that restoring the environment and making money would be the same process. As in nature, business and restoration should be part of a seamless web. Environmental protection should not be carried out at the behest of charity, altruism, or legislative fiats. As long as it is done so, it will remain a decorous subordinate to finance, growth, and technology.
Business has three basic issues to face: what it takes, what it makes, and what it wastes, and the three are intimately connected. First, business takes too much from the environment and does so in a harmful way; second, the products it makes require excessive amounts of energy, toxins, and pollutants; and finally, the method of manufacture and the very products themselves produce extraordinary waste and cause harm to present and future generations of all species including humans.
The solution for all three dilemmas are three fundamental principles that govern nature. First, waste equals food. In nature, detritus is constantly recycled to nourish other systems with a minimum of energy and inputs. We call ourselves consumers, but the problem is that we do not consume. Each person in America produces twice his weight per day in household, hazardous, and, industrial waste, and an additional half-ton per week when gaseous wastes such as carbon dioxide are included. An ecological model of commerce would imply that all waste have value to other modes of production so that everything is either reclaimed, reused, or recycled. Second, nature runs off of current solar income. The only input into the closed system of the earth is the sun. Last, nature depends on diversity, thrives on differences, and perishes in the imbalance of uniformity. Healthy systems are highly varied and specific to time and place. Nature is not massproduced.
Many industries are now trying to re-source their raw materials to take into account sustainability, methods of extraction, means o processing and impact on local cultures and ecosystems. For example, Herman Miller, the Knoll Group, and Wal-Mart have all committed themselves to paying higher prices for sustainably produced timber. They join many thousands of businesses, most much smaller, in recognizing their responsibility to initiate an ecological commerce. They should not have to pay more for raw, materials that are produced in a sustainable manner. They should pay less. It should be possible to secure sustainably produced raw materials without the extraordinary expense and effort that is required today. Preserving life should be the natural result of commerce, not the exception.
In order to accomplish this, we need to rethink our markets entirely, asking ourselves how it is that products which harm and destroy life can be sold more cheaply than those that don't. Markets, so extremely effective at setting prices, are not currently equipped to recognize the true costs of producing goods. Because of this, business has two contradictory forces operating upon it: the need to achieve the lowest price in order to thrive if not survive in the marketplace, and the increasingly urgent social demand that it internalize the expense of acting more responsibly toward the environment. Without doubt, the single most damaging aspect of the present economic system is that the expense of destroying the earth is largely absent from the prices set in the marketplace. A vital and key piece of information is therefore missing in all levels of the economy. This emission extends the dominance of industrialism beyond its useful life and prevents a restorative economy from emerging. Despite that disadvantage, the restorative economy is beginning to prosper.. In the United States alone, an estimated 70,000 companies are already committed to some form of environmental commerce that competes with businesses that are not willing to adapt. The impulse to enhance the economic viability of life on earth through the recognition and preservation of all living systems is one- that is becoming increasingly central to religion, science, medicine, literature, the arts, and women. It should be the dominant theme of generations to come. Because the restorative economy inverts ingrained beliefs about how business functions, it may precipitate unusual changes in the economy. As will be discussed in later chapters, the restorative economy will be one in which some businesses get smaller but hire more people, where money can be made by selling the absence of a product or service, as is the case where public utilities sell efficiency rather than additional power, and where profits increase when productivity is lowered. Corporations can compete to conserve and increase resources rather than deplete them. Complex and onerous regulations will be replaced by motivating standards.
Author Ivan Illich has pointed out that the average American is involved with his or her automobile---working in order to buy it, actually, driving it, getting it repaired, and so on---for sixteen hundred hours a year. This means when all car mileage in a given year is divided by the time spent supporting the car, the average car owner is traveling at an average speed of five miles per hour. To attain the speed of a bicycle, we are devastating our cities, air, lungs, and lives, while bringing on the threat of global warming. It is the restorative, not the industrial economy, that can and will address such aberrations. Restorative entrepreneurs may not be as mediagenic as Wall Street tycoons, because their companies will be smaller, quieter, and less glamorous. However, it is the former who challenge the economic superstitions and fantasies that determine our concept of what a business should be.
A business works best when it has a positive vision, good morale, definite standards, and high goals. Such an organization is receptive to ideas that reinforce corporate growth as it is currently defined, but may be hostile to ideas that are critical of the basic system. After all, a successfull business is in effect an advertisement that so much is working, that so many people have done a good job. This intolerance of seemingly irrelevant advice and information allows a company to concentrate single-mindedly on carving out market niches, but it also creates a yawning chasm between business economics and good ecology. If corporations were to take worldwide environmental degradation as seriously as they take demographic changes in consumer tastes, they would discover that the remedies for their depredation are more profound and transformative than the measures currently proposed by a few businesses, or even by many of the large environmental orgamzations. Perhaps that is why they have not delved more deeply.
On the other hand, it is important to understand that we consumers are accessories before and after the fact. We create businesses just as much as businesses create our wants. We have been enthralled by the opportunities, wealth, image, and power offered by business success. We like our comfortable lifestyles if we have them and want them if we don't. Business has intrinsic flaws, but they are created and reinforced by our own desires. "However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporation," writes essayist and farmer Wendell Berry, "the root of the problem is always to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us ... always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world is being destroyed--no doubt about it--by the greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand. There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people."
The restorative economy comes down to this: We need to imagine a prosperous commercial culture that is so intelligently designed and constructed that it mimics nature at every step, a symbiosis of company and customer and ecology. This book, then, is ultimately about redesigning our commercial systems so that they work for owners, employees, customers, and life on earth without requiring a complete transformation of humankind. Much has been written linking our environmental crises to everything from patriarchal values to a spiritual malaise that has accompanied industrial riches. But we may be trying to accomplish too much. Science does teach us that everything is interdependent: the respiration of the blossom of a lily in the backwaters of the Rio Negro in the Amazon basin affects the weather in New York. However, if we are to be effective in our lives, we have to find workable techniques and programs that can be put into practice soon, tools for change that are easily grasped and understood, and that conform naturally to the landscape of human nature.
If this scenario sounds dreamy and Arcadian it is because we assume that economic forces only exploit and destroy. The Ecology of Commerce will try to demonstrate that while this has been largely true up until now, and will continue to be true for some time in the future, this behavior is not the inherent nature of business, nor the inevitable outcome of a free-market system. It is merely the result of the present commercial system's design and use. The human matures from a state of grasping ego gratification to some degree of ethical awareness. Our species is not perfect, but is certainly not depraved, either. Like individuals, societies also mature, albeit more slowly and haltingly. America ended institutionalized slavery, for example, but is only now beginning to address its many forms of racism. I believe our economic system can also mature in a similar fashion.
In The Merchant of Prato, Iris Origo's recent account of a fourteenth-century Tuscan merchant, Francisco di Marco Datini, we recognize in Datini all the anxiety and daily vicissitudes of a contemporary businessman. Datini was worried about his investments, taxes, and penalties. As his successes grew, so too, did his insecurity. He devoted increasing amounts of his riches to acts of piety, from penance to munificent acts for the church, but largess could not alleviate Datini's guilt and maninconia (the stress of constant worry and doubt). Datini sounds like every modern businessperson who, approaching death, ponders not the deals that got away, but the humanity and society forsaken in the rush to profit.
Annie Dillard recounts a story with a similar moral in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A 19th century French physician, having perfected the first procedure to remove cataracts safely, traveled throughout his country restoring sight to people blinded from birth. He witnessed two distinct reactions when people saw the world for the first time: some were appalled at the squalor and ugliness (one person blinded himself in order to forget what he had seen and return to what he imagined the world to be); the greater number were overwhelmed by the beauty, vastness, and colors of the world, their senses flooded with the newness and variety of a creation that had heretofore lacked its most beautiful dimension.
We who are in business today are like these fortunate French men and women. Scientists, naturalists, essayists, and poets are offering us vision, a means with which to see and understand the splendor and sacredness of life. They help us understand that we, as Whitman wrote, "are nature, long have we been absent, but now we return." Will we tear out our eyes, ignore what we are being shown, and continue commercial practices that demean the earth and hasten that day when everything we hold precious has been destroyed? Will we die burdened with Datini’s many regrets, or will we exult and exclaim, grateful for the possibilities, the newness, the knowledge offered us to transform our world and our relationship to it?
Many believe that it is too late, that at this moment in our history we cannot be redeemed through existing institutions. It is true that in our lifetime we cannot restore felled ancient forests, vanished wetlands, ghostly strip mines, or the ruined, lives of toxic waste victims. Contemporary events support Goldsmith's longstanding declaration, "Honor sinks where commerce long prevails." It takes a serious leap of faith to imagine a transformed Fortune 500, a restorative sustainable economy that will offer full employment, more security, better education, less fear, more stability, and a higher quality of life. But I believe this will happen because prior forms of economic behavior no longer produce the desired results. Even though the GNP of the United States grew considerably during the 1980s, three-fourths of the gain in pretax income went to the richest one percent. The majority of Americans had less money and lower incomes than they did when the decade began. Primarily, what growth in the 1980s produced was higher levels of apprehension, violence, dislocation, and environmental degradation.
Gordon Sherman, the founder of Midas Muffler, once wrote: "There is a teasing irony: we spend our lives evading our own redemption. And this is naturally so because something in us knows that to be fully human we must experience pain and loss. Therefore, we are at ceaseless effort to elude this high cost, whatever the price, until at last it overtakes us. And then in spite of ourselves we do realize our humanity. We are put in worthier possession of our souls. Then we look back and know that even our grief contained our blessing. "
Ironically, business contains our blessing. It must, because no other institution in the modern world is powerful enough to foster the necessary changes. Perhaps during the many battles between environmentalists and businesspeople we have been asking the wrong question all these years. As generally proposed the question is "How do we save the environment?" As ridiculous as it may first sound to both sides, the question may be "How do we save business?"
Business is the problem and it must be a part of the solution. Its power is more crucial than ever if we are to organize and efficiently meet the world's needs. This book contains quite a few horror stories perpetrated by large, respected, well-managed businesses. I do not cite them to demonize corporations, but to lay the foundation and basis of understanding that will allow us to re-create these companies. Commerce can be one of the most creative endeavors available to us, but it is not worthy of business to be the convenient and complicit bedfellow to a culture divorced from nature. While commerce at its worst sometimes appears to be a shambles of defilement compared to the beauty and complexity of the natural world, the ideas and much of the technology required for the redesign of our businesses and the restoration of the world are already in hand. What is wanting is collective will.