Introduction and Recap
In the previous posts on this topic, this blog discussed how sustainability emerged as a path forward in a world that, in the two decades following Earth Day 1970, had become politically and morally stalemated between two equally compelling recognitions: first, that in its pursuit of wealth, society had detrimentally mismanaged the planet and its resources; second, despite this, humanity had no intention of throttling back on its pursuit of wealth. Sustainability was the answer to that political and moral stalemate for it recognizes the need to make peace with humanity’s desire for wealth and the elimination of poverty, while accepting that such desires cannot be met if the mismanagement of the globe’s environmental resources continues to waste the environmental wealth that is the basis for prosperity and, ultimately, human survival.
In the second post on this topic, this blog emphasized that sustainability is not a checklist of green things, but requires a new system of economics, based not on being “green”, but on capturing the enormous amounts of wealth lost by not being green and utilizing it to create a robust long-term prosperity.
The third and the fourth posts will discuss the five steps needed needed to create this new economic system. The third will look at the nature of the problem and the first steps that humanity has already taken. The fourth will look at the four-step path into the future.
Where Humanity Must Go
That humanity wastes an enormous amount of the planet’s wealth is not subject to serious dispute. Long ago, we broke away from the wisdom of nature, whose mantra is, in the words of the old Puritan proverb “waste not, want not!” Every byproduct of natural processes–from the grains of rock lichens dissolve, to the bones of dead whales sinking into the ocean floor–are ultimately recaptured and used to maximize the variety of life and the total productivity of the global ecosystem.
Photo by J. Henry Fair
By contrast, human have focused only on the productivity of the specific resources that we utilize, rather than the total productivity of an entire ecosystem. Take, for example, a natural grassland. Nature gives it approximately 200 species of grasses and other plants. But the grass that is most directly beneficial to us is wheat, so we plow the grassland up and devote it exclusively to growing wheat. We lose any benefits from all of the other grasses, and all the animals that feed upon them. We vent the soil carbon that the dense grass root systems captured into the atmosphere. We accept the soil erosion and loss of soil nutrients from breaking the sod and limiting the biota that use it, and the disruption of the groundwater regime. And we promote more wheat growth through fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides whose amounts we seldom calculate accurately, sending run-off pollution into streams and groundwater, all at high cost to fish and downstream users.
So why has humanity been so wasteful and why has this waste suddenly become a global crisis? Because the benefits of being able to transgress nature’s limits and produce the quantities of food and other goods that our steadily growing, ever-wealthier human population needed, all seemed self-evident to us. Impacts on the natural world seemed small in comparison. Moreover, moving on to new lands, new techniques, and new uses of nature’s seemingly endless resources always overcame any limitations we came up against. For six millennia, the story was the same: the world was big and we were small, and to survive and prosper we were driven to wrestle wealth from the earth, and dismiss the costs.
But, in a world that has been industrializing for the 250 years since 1765, and that has seen its population multiply by ten times and its wealth by at least 100 times, we have become big and the earth has become small. The costs we have inflicted on the environment have accumulated to the point where they can no longer be ignored. One can start with climate change and, from there, go on to a long list of consequences, such as the health impacts of air and toxic pollution, the loss of renewable resources such as groundwater and fish, the waste from unnecessary consumption of water and energy. If these costs keep rising, as they are on course to do, the cost curve of our ways of exploiting nature will cross the benefits curve, ultimately reversing most, if not all, of the gains of 250 years of industrialization.
Sustainability is about saving the civilization that humanity built over the last 250 years from ignoring its impact on the environment, by capturing natural wealth, rather than wasting it. From which it follows, that we need to shift our economics to incorporate nature in our cost calculations. So where should humanity start to do so? Or more precisely, since sustainability has now been debated for over twenty years, has humanity started in the right place and where should it go next?
Today’s Progress Towards Sustainability: A Promising First Step–Harvest the Low Hanging Fruit
The good news is, that despite some notable exceptions, such as the fossil fuel industry, industrialized agriculture, and most real estate development, the overall news on starting down the sustainability road is actually pretty positive, particularly when one considers how deeply embedded non-sustainable economic practices have been for centuries.
Numerous business and government institutions now recognize the problem of sustainability and the benefits of doing something about it. They have launched numerous sustainability efforts, and created internal organizational entities to support them. There has been a common theme as well to all these efforts, a logical first step: to harvest what we will describe as the low hanging fruit.
Low hanging fruit can best be defined as readily obtainable financial benefits from environmentally sound practices that are technically and organizationally feasible. What is needed is a leadership push to overcome the obstacles to adopting this, such as institutional inertia, concern with startup costs and a general cultural inconsistency with organizational self-images (i.e., that tree hugger green-fluff is not for serious businessmen).
Until about ten years ago, these factors kept most large business and governmental institutions from taking any real steps down the road towards being more profitable by being sustainable. But in the last decade, as pioneering efforts have made the economic benefits of sustainability measures apparent and the evidence of the sustainability crisis has become irrefutably obvious to the average intelligent organizational leader, that push has been forthcoming and the cultural image has changed, resulting in a surge of sustainability initiatives. Now, in the business world, a commitment to corporate sustainability has become a mark of enlightened management. And as companies such as, Walmart, Google, Federal Express, MacDonald’s, 3M have embraced sustainability; they have discovered a vast orchard of low hanging, sustainability fruit. Changes in delivery routes to save fuel, new forms of packaging to reduce waste costs, redesigned industrial processes that conserve water and reduce chemical uses, switching to green energy to lower impacts on global warming, provision of dedicated buses for commuting employees, are just a thin slice of the many examples of how sustainability has saved money and improved productivity.
This new culture of corporate sustainability had done three important things. First, it validates the basic model of sustainability, as the new and future path to wealth and prosperity. Second, it makes corporations comfortable with continuing to pursue sustainability up the ladder of involvement. And third, it puts growing peer pressure on laggard organizations to embrace sustainability. It is no accident that in the last five years most leading business schools have begun to offer course concentrations in sustainability, often leading to degree programs.
Moreover, the pursuit of low hanging fruit has not been limited to the private sector. Both government and nonprofits organizations such as colleges and medical institutions are now pursuing the benefits of harvesting sustainability’s low hanging fruit. Consider New York City’s Plan NYC, an overall blueprint for urban sustainability. Universities are now competing with each other in their Greenprint initiatives and programs for sustainability, to the point where the Sierra Club now publishes an annual listing of America’s 100 greenest universities.
Of course, this does not mean an end to companies rationalizing environmentally destructive practices when they directly affect the corporate bottom line or from trying to use sustainability as a green wash. Many argue that the resistance to addressing problems such as global warming proves that nothing has changed. But, that is a naïve view of how humanity makes the kind of course correction that sustainability will require. A sustainable movement gathers successful experience, creates a new climate of opinion and establishes the proposed course as the wave of the future. This is happening now, perhaps more slowly than one would like or the problem demands, but it is happening. What is being created is a business and social climate of counting the environmental costs and pursuing profit by saving such money, instead of externalizing it. The stage is being set. For if we cannot do the easy stuff, we will not be able to do the hard stuff. In the next blog post, we will discuss the next steps that clearly a sustainable agenda will require.
Twenty-First Century Choices 