Review of the Book
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
Co-authored by Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins
and L. Hunter Lovins
Vivian Hutchinson
[Reviewed by Vivian Hutchinson. Reprinted from the
CED-Network-Digest, 22 February, 2000, Vol. l, No. 165. Originally
posted in The Jobs Letter, No. 118, 18 February, 2000]
In the long-anticipated new book Natural
Capitalism, by Paul Hawken, and Amory and Hunter Lovins,
the authors present a manifesto that asks us to transform our
fundamental notions about how business is done in this new century.
The book charges traditional capitalism with always neglecting to
assign value to the natural resources and ecosystem services that make
all economic activity, and all life, possible. Natural capitalism, in
contrast, asks us to take a proper accounting of these costs. As a
first step toward a solution to environmental loss, it advocates
resource productivity -- doing more with less. The book also shows how
industry can redesign itself on biological models that result in zero
waste, and recommends more investment in sustaining and expanding our
environmental capital. It contains numerous examples of innovative and
profitable businesses which are putting these principles into practice
-- while also gaining a decisive competitive advantage.
Also woven throughout the book is the consist ent message: Moving the
economy toward resource productivity can increase overall levels and
quality of employment, while drastically reducing the impact we have
on the environment. Natural Capitalism argues that there is no
justification for the waste of people, through unemployment, when
there is also so much urgent and good work to do.
"We cannot by any means --monetarily,
governmentally, or charitably --create a sense of value and dignity in
people's lives when we are simultaneously creating a society that
clearly has no need for them ..." Natural Capitalism
"Just as overproduction can exhaust
topsoil, so can over-productivity exhaust a workforce. We are working
smarter, but carrying a laptop from airport to meeting to a red-eye
flight home in an exhausting push for greater performance may now be a
problem, not the solution ..." Natural Capitalism
With nearly ten thousand new people arriving on earth every hour, a
new and unfamiliar pattern of scarcity is now emerging. At the
beginning of the industrial revolution, labour was overworked and
relatively scarce (the population was about one-tenth of current
totals), while global stocks of natural capital were abundant and
unexploited. But today the situation has been reversed: After two
centuries of rises in labour productivity, the liquidation of natural
resources at their extraction cost rather than their replacement
value, and the exploitation of living systems as if they were free,
infinite, and in perpetual renewal, it is people who have become an
abundant resource, while nature is becoming disturbingly scarce.
Because of the profligate nature of current industrial processes, the
world faces three crises that threaten to cripple civilization in the
twenty-first century: the deterioration of the natural environment;
the ongoing dissolution of civil societies into lawlessness, despair,
and apathy; an d the lack of public will needed to address human
suffering and social welfare.
All three problems share waste as a common cause.
Learning to deal responsibly with that waste is a common solution,
one that is seldom acknowledged yet increasingly clear. There is
nothing original in this record of national waste; what is novel is
that each of the three types of waste is presented as interlocking
symptoms of one problem: using too many resources to make too few
people more productive. This increasingly expensive industrial formula
is a relic of a past that no longer serves a present or a future.
In society, waste takes the form of people's lives. According to the
International Labour Organization in Geneva, nearly a billion people
(about 30 percent of the world's labour force) either cannot work or
have such marginal and menial jobs that they cannot support themselves
or their families. In China, it is predicted that the number of un-
and underemployed will top 200 million by the year 2000, a situation
that is already leading to protests, addicted youth, heroin use, drug
wars, violence, and rising criminality. Globally, rates of
unemployment and disemployment have been rising faster than those for
employment for more than 25 years. For example, unemployment in Europe
in 1960 stood at 2 percent; in 1998 it was nearly 11 percent. In many
parts of the world, it has reached between 20 and 40 percent. In the
United States, in 1996, a year when the stock market hit new highs,
the Fordham University "index of social health" did not.
The index, which tracks problems like child abuse, teen suicide, drug
abuse, high-school dropout rates, child poverty, the gap between rich
and poor, infant mortality, unemployment, crime, and elder abuse and
poverty, had fallen 44 percent below its 1973 high.
The United States is proud of its relatively low 4.2 percent
unemployment rate (1999), and should be. Yet official U.S. figures
mask a more complex picture. According to author Donella Meadows, of
the 127 million people working in the United States in 1996, 38
million worked part-time, and another 35 million, though working,
weren't paid enough to support a family. The official unemployed rolls
of 7.3 million do not count an additional 7 million people who are
discouraged, forcibly retired, or working as temps. Of those counted
as employed, 19 million people worked in retail and earned less than
$10,000 per year, usually without any type of health or retirement
benefits.
Unemployment percentages also mask the truth about the lives of
inner-city residents. In When Work Disappears, W. Julius Wilson cites
fifteen predominantly black neighborhoods in Chicago, with an overall
population of 425,000. Only 37 percent of the adults in these areas
are employed. While there are many reasons for the high rates of
unemployment, the dominant cause is the disappearance of jobs: Between
1967 and 1987 Chicago lost 360,000 manufacturing jobs, and New York
over 500,000. When reporting corporate restructuring, the media
focuses on jobs lost. When covering the inner city, the emphasis is
more on welfare, crime, and drugs; the attrition of meaningful work is
rarely mentioned. The irony of urban America is that fifty years after
World War II, parts of Detroit, Philadelphia, and Newark look as if
they were bombed, while Dresden, London, and Berlin are livable and
bustling.
People are often spoken of as being a resource -- every large
business has a "human resources" department --but apparently
they are not a valuable one. The United States has quietly become the
world's largest penal colony. (China ranks second --most Americans
have probably bought or used something made in a Chinese prison.)
Nearly 5 million men in the United States are awaiting trial, in
prison, on probation, or on parole. In 1997 alone, the number of
inmates in county and city jails increased by 9 percent. One out of
every twenty-five men in America is involved with the penal or legal
system in some way. Nearly one of every three black men in his
twenties is in the correctional system. Is there a connection between
the fact that 51 percent of the prison population is black and that 44
percent of young black men grow up in poverty? While crime statistics
have been dropping dramatically since 1992 due to a combination of
economic growth, changing demographics, and more effective policing,
we are still so inure d to criminality that rural counties seek new
prison construction under the rubric of "economic development."
Indeed, despite the drop in crime, during the period 1990- 94, the
prison industry grew at an annual rate of 34 percent, while crime and
crime-related expenses rose to constitute an estimated 7 percent of
the United States economy.
Is this level of crime really caused by Colombian drug lords, TV
violence, and lack of family values? Is there not something more
fundamentally amiss in a society that stores so many people in
concrete bunkers at astounding costs to society? (There is no cost
difference between incarceration and an Ivy League education; the main
difference is curriculum.) While we can reasonably place individual
blame on each drug-user, felon, and mugger, or anyone who violates
civil and criminal law, we should also ask whether a larger pattern of
loss and waste may be affecting our nation. Our right to assign
individual responsibility should not make us blind to a wider, more
comprehensive social cause and effect.
In a world where a billion workers cannot find a decent job or any
employment at all, it bears stating the obvious: We cannot by any
means --monetarily, governmentally, or charitably -- create a sense of
value and dignity in people's lives when we are simultaneously
creating a society that clearly has no need for them. If people do not
feel valuable, they will act out society's dismissal of them in ways
that are manifest and sometimes shocking. Robert Strickland, a pioneer
in working with inner-city children, once said, "You can't teach
algebra to someone who doesn't want to be here." By this he meant
that his kids didn't want to be "here" at all, alive,
anywhere on earth. They try to speak, and when we don't hear them,
they raise the level of risk in their behavior --turning to
unprotected sex, drugs, or violence --until we notice. By then a crime
has usually been committed, and we respond by building more jails, and
calling it economic growth. Social wounds cannot be salved nor the
environment "saved" as long as people cling to the outdated
assumption of classical industrialism that the summum bonum of
commercial enterprise is to use more natural capital and fewer people.
When society lacked material well-being and the population was
relatively small, such a strategy made sense. Today, with material
conditions and population numbers substantially changed, it is
counterproductive. With respect to meeting the needs of the future,
contemporary business economics is the equivalent of pre-Copernican in
its outlook. The true bottom line is this: A society that wastes its
resources wastes its people and vice versa. And both kinds of waste
are expensive. But it is not only the poor who are being "wasted."
In 1994, several hundred senior executives from Fortune 500 companies
were asked for a show of hands based on the following questions: Do
you want to work harder five years from now than you are today? Do you
know anyone who wants to work harder than they are now? Do you know
anyone who is or are you yourself spending too much time with your
children? No one raised a hand. Just as overproduction can exhaust
topsoil, so can over-productivity exhaust a workforce. The assumption
that greater productivity would lead to greater leisure and
well-being, while true for many decades, may no longer be valid. In
the United States, those who are employed (and presumably becoming
more productive) find they are working one hundred to two hundred
hours more per year than people did twenty years ago.
From an economist's point of view, labour productivity is a Holy
Grail, and it is unthinkable that continued pursuit of taking it to
ever greater levels might in fact be making the entire economic system
less productive. We are working smarter, but carrying a laptop from
airport to meeting to a red-eye flight home in an exhausting push for
greater performance may now be a problem, not the solution.
Between 1979 and 1995, there was no increase in real income for 80
percent of working Americans, yet people are working harder today than
at any time since World War II. While income rose 10 percent in the
fifteen-year period beginning in 1979, 97 percent of that gain was
captured by families in the top 20 percent of income earners. The
majority of families, in fact, saw their income decline during that
time. They're working more but getting less, in part because a larger
portion of our income is paying to remedy such costs of misdirected
growth as crime, illiteracy, commuting, and the breakdown of the
family. At the same time, we continue to overuse energy and resources
-- profligacy that will eventually take its toll in the form of even
lower standards of living, higher costs, shrinking income, and social
anxiety.
While increasing human productivity is critical to maintaining income
and economic well-being, productivity that corrodes society is
tantamount to burning furniture to heat the house. Resource
productivity presents business and governments with an alternative
scenario: making radical reductions in resource use but at the same
time raising rates of employment. Or, phrased differently: Moving the
economy toward resource productivity can increase overall levels and
quality of employment, while drastically reducing the impact we have
on the environment. Today companies are firing people, perfectly
capable people, to add one more percentage point of profit to the
bottom line. Some of the restructuring is necessary and overdue. But
greater gains can come from firing the wasted kilowatt-hours, barrels
of oil, and pulp from old- growth forests, and hiring more people to
do so. In a world that is crying out for environmental restoration,
more jobs, universal health care, more educational opportunities, and
better and affordable housing, there is no justification for this
waste of people.
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