A discussion of a few environmental solutions that arise from a neo-liberal, pro-market framework. An attempt to split the horns of the dilemma between those who say that we must promote economic growth at all costs (and that when we're rich we'll buy as much environment as we want) and those who say that all such growth necessarily implies a commensurate negative human impact on ecological infrastructure.
Ideas are copiously taken from William McDonough. If you appreciate any of the ideas here or find them profound in any way, the credit is his. I am merely trying to disseminate them as widely as possible.
Did you know that all of the ants on Earth amount to more biomass than all of the people on Earth? Ok, maybe an interesting factoid at best. But now, think about ants for a moment. They are the most industrious creatures on the planet. They spend their days burrowing, hauling, and constructing. They are easily more active than humans are. Given this, and given that, again, they are similar to humans in terms of aggregate physical presence, why don't we hear about all of the negative effects of ant industry? If they have as much biomass as we do, why don't we hear more about how ants are reaching their "carrying capacity", and if they're as busy as we are, why aren't we concerned about ants' "ecological footprint"?
The answer to these questions is related to the idea of sustainability, but not in the obvious way. Sustainability is the idea that we must keep improving the efficiency of our systems so that we get more of what we want (products) from our resources and less of what we don't want (pollution). The hope is that eventually, we will become so sustainable that our ability to squeeze more and more products out of the same amount of resources will outstrip our rate of population growth, while at the same time our rate of pollution will go to zero.
There are problems with this agenda. One is that while we keep lowering our pollution rate, our demand for products keeps getting higher. So if you cut you pollution rate by half, and your population gets 4 times as big, you've doubled your problem. The second is that we keep discovering new problems. Carcinogens are active in concentrations on the order of parts per million. So we reduce our pollution by 90%, but then we discover endocrine disruptors (hormonal and pseudo-hormonal effects), which are active in concentrations on the order of parts per billion; even though you've reduced pollution by 90%, the problem has effectively gotten 100 times bigger. The third problem is that cutting pollution is an example of Zeno's Paradox: no matter how much you cut pollution, every morning, you wake up with a fresh 100% to deal with. You'll never get to zero, and that's an awfully depressing way to start your day. Just ask Sisyphus. A sustainable agenda is a depressing agenda, based on the assumption that we're all bad, and every day the best that we can hope for is to be less bad. It's just not worth getting out of bed in the morning for that. It's amazing that the environmental movement has done as well as it has, with a message like that.
The reason why ants get around this problem is that ants are not sustainable, not in the sense that people have defined sustainable. Nothing in nature is sustainable. Nothing in nature is efficient. A cherry tree makes thousands of blossoms on the off chance that maybe one will get pollinated, bear fruit, land in a suitable location, and grow a new cherry tree. That's not efficient.
What nature is, is sustaining. A sustaining agenda rejects some of the basic assumptions of a sustainable agenda that doom it to failure from the start. A sustaining agenda is not concerned with efficiency, but with effectiveness. The cherry tree is not efficient. But it is effective -- it gets the job done and we get more cherry trees. Relatedly, a sustaining agenda is not concerned with reducing the number of byproducts of a process -- a sustaining agenda is concerned with making as many of the byproducts of the process as possible useful. Nature is the master of this. Let's go back to the cherry tree. Those thousands of blossoms, where one becomes actually becomes a tree? Well, the ones that don't a) provide food for insects, b) provide mulch for plants, c) grow into cherries which provide food for animals, and d) are delightful to look at, all while being completely safe and non-toxic. This makes the cherry tree even more effective, because not only does it serve itself by reproducing, but it contributes to the natural infrastructure that sustains an environment where it's possible to grow cherry trees. Nature is 100% sustaining; everything that nature produces is useful to something else in nature.
This is why we don't worry about ants. Ants work all day, and everything that ants do is useful to nature. Therefore, as long as nature has cycles in place that can use all of the products of ant labor, every bit of ant growth is a good thing. Ant growth doesn't bring with it toxic byproducts. It brings useful byproducts.
This is the promise of what designer William McDonough calls Eco-Effectiveness. Whereas a sustainability agenda is about adaptation (adapting old factories with pollution controls, adapting old cradle-to-grave designs to use fewer raw materials), a sustaining agenda is a revolution in design, where products and processes are designed from cradle-to-cradle to produce as many useful byproducts as possible, where natural resources are put into closed loops and used indefinitely, and where buildings are like trees, providing services like water filtration and generating more energy than they use.
I'll go into some of the strategies that McDonough gives for Eco-Effectiveness in my next entry, but here's a sneak preview. One of McDonough and Braungart's clients was a Swiss textile mill called Rohner. When they got there, the Swiss government had just declared it illegal to dispose of the mill's trimmings in Switzerland. Rohner was selling what was between the trimmings, which was basically hazardous waste. When McDonough and Braungart had finished designing their new products, not only could the trimmings be used as mulch to grow strawberries, but the workers at the mill didn't have to wear gloves or masks anymore. And not only that, but the water leaving the mill after curing the fabric was cleaner than the water coming in (it turned out that the fabric was filtering particulates out). There was nothing about that mill that required regulation. This makes both businessmen and environmentalists very happy.
Some of the companies working with McDonough and Braungart right now include Herman Miller, Nike, and Ford.