Whenever a disturbance or perturbation such as a road violates an established ecosystem, invasive weeds like thistle or broom take over bare ground and spread quickly, establishing temporary primacy. These opportunistic species are suited to what are sometimes called immature systems. The plants compete for sunlight in order to capture the maximum available energy, in the process covering the bare earth as quickly as possible. In such a system, energy is used less efficiently, diversity is reduced, and the plant communities support less life in general. Anyone who has observed, day by day, the changes on a patch of land cleared in the spring knows this colonization can happen within weeks.
The constant transformation of ecosystems by organisms is the subject of ecology. Plants and organisms do not simply occupy an environment; they alter and remake it, creating increasingly varied and complex forms of organization. The second law of thermodynamics states that as energy dissipates, systems descend into reduced states of organization and ultimately to chaos and entropy. Only life prevents entropy from extending to nature: the intricate, mysterious interaction of organisms that captures sunlight and evolves into higher levels of order and complexity. This state of organization and succession, the opposite of entropy, is called negentropy. It is this evolving order that humbles us before nature. While the origins and meaning of life may be unknown, the way nature transforms the nonliving to the living, the simple to the complex, the inefficient to the efficient, is better known and understood. All industrial systems and designs pale when compared to the efficiency of natural systems of production. Nothing does more with less. This knowledge makes nature the logical exemplar for an increasingly evolved form of commerce.
An ecosystem evolves from pioneering, immature states that emphasize growth, through several intermediate stages, until it evolves into mature systems that are efficient and resource conserving. Mature, climax systems comprise an association of organisms that reach a state of equilibrium that leaves habitats stable from year to year. Because no environment remains unchanged, even climax communities do not last forever, but they are the most diverse, lasting, and complex of communities, and are thus more resilient to disturbances in the greater environment.
Through their complex interchanges of nutrients, gases, and information, mature systems create the greatest amount of biomass with the least amount of input. Pioneer systems create the foundation for more mature ecosystems because they stabilize the soil, check erosion, bring trace elements up from the subsoil, and prevent further deterioration of the area. Once a pioneer state is established, increasingly complex organisms and relationships succeed the initial colonizers. This process continues until the most adapted system the setting will allow is reached. The differences between pioneer and climax systems are instructive. In immature systems, most energy is used to create new growth, and soil is quickly covered. In a climax system, the greater part of energy is devoted to the continuation of the existing plant and animal communities, since the entire ecosystem is, in fact, colonized and inhabited. All present agriculture, whether it is slash-and-burn or industrial, involves the reversion of a climax system to a pioneering one. We exchange stability and sustainability for short-term abundance and production. In other words, we go backward, and not just on our farms.
In ecological terms, our present industrial economy is an immature ecosystem. Environmental scientist David Wann states this bluntly when he says: “It may not be flattering to our national concept, but the present American culture is still the bare field full of colonizing weeds, struggling toward something more sophisticated, interwoven, and permanent. Until now we’ve consistently chosen the resource-hungry path of least resistance.” At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, a vast new world of apparently unlimited natural resources became available for the taking. By constructing an economy that demanded ever-increasing supplies of all resources, but particularly energy—specifically, sunlight stored in the form of timber, plants, and fossil fuels—humans successfully mimicked the processes of a newly formed ecosystem. Like pioneer plants, we were aggressive and competitive. We emphasized untrammeled growth and didn’t worry about efficiency, conservation, or diversity. In technical terms, we set up a linear industrial ecology of low information quality.
Less than two centuries later, the environment for economic growth has changed dramatically, because the vast trove of natural resources is dwindling. We watch economic indexes climb, as measured in gross national product, but we have not yet formulated an accepted index of what that progress is costing on the environmental side. Despite the fact that environmental issues are now accepted internationally as the most pressing problem of the twenty-first century, the institutions that embody and guide our economic progress have only begun to respond.
To change this state of affairs, business will have to deal directly with the three issues of what it takes, what it makes, and what it wastes. This chapter deals with our methods of taking.
A business is similar to an organism insofar as it takes food and energy from the environment. However, creatures in their natural habitat consume only renewable resources: leaves, nuts, seeds, grass, water, berries, insects, fungi, bark, and fish. Companies consume renewables, too, in addition to nonrenewable resources, including oil, coal, and natural gas. While use of renewables can theoretically be sustained perpetually, resources such as fuels and minerals are irreplaceable. And renewables, if overconsumed or depleted, can become nonrenewable. The ability to overexploit the earth’s stored-up supply of resources is what we call economic progress. One statistic makes clear the demand placed on the earth by our economic system: every day the worldwide economy burns an amount of energy the planet required 13,000 days to create. Or put another way, thirty-seven years’ worth of stored solar energy is burned and released by utilities, cars, houses, factories, and farms every twenty-four hours. During the Bush administration, from 2000 to 2008, the world burned 20 percent of all the oil consumed since its discovery in 1856. That number, 240 billion barrels of oil, is, coincidentally, 20 percent of remaining proven and estimated reserves.
Another measure of our impact on ecosystems is provided by estimating the net primary production (NPP) of the planet, defined as the sum of all photosynthetic production minus the energy required to maintain and support those plants. The annual figure arrived at is in the area of 225 billion metric tons of wood, grass, fiber, and food. Of this total, 60 percent is produced on land and 40 percent in the oceans. An illustration of how a small amount of consumption can have geometrically larger impacts on NPP is provided by chemist G. Tyler Miller. It would require 300 trout to provide protein for one person in a year. The trout would need to eat 90,000 small frogs, which would have to consume 27 million grasshoppers that would require 2 million pounds of grass.
Our human economy utilizes, consumes, converts, burns, or clear-cuts annually more than 40 percent of the total NPP on land. In short, one species—our own—out of 5 million to 30 million species (no one is sure how many there are) is directly and indirectly claiming 40 percent of the earth’s production for itself. If, as predicted, population grows to 9 billion, we will usurp 60 percent of the primary production of the planet. If our standard of living doubles in the next forty years—the accepted projection—we will theoretically quadruple our impact, a physical impossibility.
In fact, we may have already reached the diminishing point. We are seeing many dangerous signs of this usurpation of planetary production, foremost of which is the loss of other forms of life—extinctions. Before we reach 60 or 70 percent utilization of the NPP, we will witness an ecological crash. Hundreds of thousands of species will vanish because they will not be able to compete with us for food. These newly depleted ecosystems will be reduced to soil substrates into which we will have to force increasing amounts of chemicals to grow decreasing amounts of food.
Every living system in the world today is in decline. Between 1975 and 2005, the world’s forests were reduced by 608 million acres. In 1991, 42 million acres were cut or destroyed, the highest rate of reduction in the history of humankind. Since that time, owing to efforts by governments and civil society, that figure has been reduced somewhat to 32 million acres. Of that total, 15 million acres are primary forests, ecosystems with no prior signs of human impact, which are the most biologically diverse lands of the world.
Estimates of annual loss of productive cropland are between 12 million and 17 million acres. Since 1950, world agriculture has tripled its use of irrigation, a practice that depletes groundwater and can also decrease long-term fertility because of the excessive buildup of salts in the soil. Despite surpluses in industrial nations and some increases in the third world, overall world production of food is declining in relation to world population. Grain production per person has peaked in every area of the world except Asia, where it has slowed substantially. Much of the increase witnessed in grain production from 1950 until 1984 was the result of a ninefold increase in the use of fertilizer. But as every farmer knows, constant increases in fertilizer usage do not produce equal gains in production, for a point is reached where additional increments produce little or no benefit. Worldwide crop losses due to pollution are already estimated at between 5 and 10 percent and continue to rise.
There are many other examples—locally, regionally, and globally—where demand is exceeding supply, causing a deterioration of the living systems that provide our present standard of living. We are drawing down resources that took millions of years to create in order to supplement current consumption. To compensate for the limitations placed on production provided by the carrying capacity of the environment, we are speeding up the rate at which we fish, farm, deforest, and extract. In other words, rather than facing the challenges posed by ecosystem limits, we are temporarily bypassing the problem by harvesting resources more rapidly, by drift netting, mechanical deforestation, and factory farming. Science and common sense both dictate that such extravagance leads to disaster. It not only borrows from the future, thus threatening human societies in the long term, but it also puts intense pressure on other species in these ecological niches that depend on the same resources. As a consequence, habitats are destroyed, species become extinct, and in the process the productive health of the environment is compromised and decreased.
Human populations are already being severely affected by damage to the environment due to depletion and degradation of resources. Scientists and experts such as Robert Heilbroner, Paul Ehrlich, and Jessica Tuchman Mathews had predicted that resource shortages would engender widespread social discord, but there were no studies to support or refute those views. A team of thirty researchers, assembled under the auspices of the University of Toronto and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, formed the Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict. This group examined a number of societies and countries where resource shortages were already occurring, and their findings were disturbing:
“Scarcities of renewable resources are already contributing to violent conflicts in many parts of the developing world. These conflicts may foreshadow a surge of similar violence in coming decades, particularly in poor countries where shortages of water, forests and, especially, fertile land, coupled with rapidly expanding populations, already cause great hardship.” Land shortages in Bangladesh, for example, have led to mass migrations to India involving as many as 15 million people. These migrations have in turn led to fierce ethnic clashes. To those who discount such theories by arguing that resource conflicts have been an enduring element of human history, the authors warn: “We maintain . . . that renewable resource scarcities of the next 50 years will probably occur with a speed, complexity and magnitude unprecedented in history.”
Because resource supplies are declining, we as a species are exceeding our carrying capacity—the uppermost limit on the number of species an ecosystem or habitat can sustain, given the supply and availability of nutrients. In island systems, where ruminants browse and graze, grass, leaves, and berries might be the chief limiting factor to carrying capacity. In the semi-arid Sahel in north-central Africa, brushwood used for cooking might be the limiting factor on the human population. The industrialized world has more extensive needs and wants, so a larger number of resources can become limiting factors. Not only food but fuel, water, and electricity can serve as limits to carrying capacity. What is most dismaying about our political and commercial unwillingness to examine such limits on a global level is that there is absolute agreement on what it means on a local level. Range management experts can properly assess grazing limits that maximize yield while preserving the health of a habitat. In a pasture or range, one can temporarily increase herd size and output, but it is a short-lived phenomenon that eventually results in lower production and eroded soil, requiring a long period of recovery. Transnational corporations, the World Bank, and politicians have not yet determinedly integrated the processes involved with the estimation of carrying capacity into the act of development. Exceeding carrying capacity does not prove that limits do not exist but merely that we know how to evade it temporarily, further damaging the sustainable yield of a given habitat.
Natural and human history is replete with examples in which animals or humans exceeded carrying capacity and went into steep declines or extinction. A haunting case of such an overshoot took place on St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea in 1944 when 29 reindeer were imported. Specialists had calculated that the island could support 13 to 18 reindeer per square mile, or a total population of between 1,600 and 2,300 animals. By 1957, the population was 1,350; but by 1963, with no natural controls or predators, the population had exploded to 6,000. The original calculations had been correct; this number vastly exceeded carrying capacity and was soon decimated by disease and starvation. Such a drastic overshoot, however, did not lead to restabilization at a lower level, with the extraneous reindeer dying off. Instead, the entire habitat was so damaged by the overshoot that the number of reindeer fell drastically below the original carrying capacity. By 1966 there were only 42 reindeer alive on St. Matthew Island. The difference between ruminants and ourselves is that the resources used by the reindeer were grasses, trees, and shrubs and they eventually return, whereas many of the resources we are exploiting will not.
Until recently, the decline or loss of species was largely regional because carrying capacity was a local phenomenon. Today, industrial civilization has increased the reach of human beings, at least the wealthier peoples, far beyond their own lands to the entire world. Tropical forests in Brazil have been razed to grow soybeans that are fed to cows in Germany that produce surplus butter and cheese that is piling up in refrigerated warehouses. This artificial ecosystem has artificially increased Germany’s carrying capacity but drastically lowered it for the one million displaced forest settlers now living in squalor in Rio de Janeiro and other urban centers.
Because richer nations cannot directly experience the effect they have on poorer countries, they do not realize how fulfilling their wants impacts carrying capacity. In the time it takes to read this page, 100 people will have succumbed to pesticide poisoning or become gravely ill: 48 per minute, 25 million every year. Because we have globalized our capacity to draw from an expanded environment, our world appears to be more secure and stable. While food surpluses from one region can be shipped to drought-stricken areas, preventing starvation and disease, relief can be maintained only if the overall impact by humans is less than the overall carrying capacity. This, in fact, is the opposite of what is occurring.
Defenders of the status quo sometimes cite the book of Genesis, in which God grants dominion over the planet and over all the creatures to mankind. We can take what we want because it has been given by God, who likewise endowed us with special gifts and genius. When we take entire species, extirpating them, business ideologues may ask, “So what?” They argue that a high percentage of all the species that have ever lived are extinct and because human activity is part of the natural order, extinctions caused by human activity are part of that evolution.
This syllogism sounds reasonable enough, but the logic is disingenuous, because a key point is conveniently omitted: excluding the five previous mass extinctions such as those that occurred in the Late Permian and Cretaceous periods, past extinctions opened new opportunities for greater speciation. These mass extinctions were caused by extraordinary, catastrophic events, such as a meteorite strike. Today, we are experiencing the first mass extinction in the 3.8-billion-year history of life-forms caused by another organism—Homo sapiens. The general rate of species extinction today is 1,000 to 10,000 times greater than the background level of extinction that has existed for the past 65 million years of the Cenozoic era. Human activity is part of the natural world, in the largest sense, but human activity now exceeds anything civilizations were able to do in the past. The most radical example is a nuclear explosion; less dramatic but also devastating is the clear-cutting of rain forests and the mismanagement of wetlands. Ecologically, the only difference among these three intrusions is how much we pay now or how much we pay later.
The ecologist who fights for the preservation of bowhead whales, Oregon silverspots, snail darters, Gooding’s nodding onion, and periwinkles does so not just for their intrinsic value but because we are largely ignorant of how the complex interconnections between different biotic communities affect the well-being of all species, including human beings. When species disappear, we can delude ourselves that human life exists independently of grackles and goatfishes, but that is only true to a limited extent. Even if one is indifferent to species loss, extinctions are a direct indication of ecosystem health, which bears directly on our own survival.
Biological diversity, in the end, is the source of all wealth, and with a developed and practiced knowledge of nature, it could be even more so. We are pilgrims of evolution, a part of a biological family that has embarked upon a 3.8-billion-year journey, and most of our fellow travelers are still unknown, unexamined, and unnamed. Thus far, we have identified approximately 1.5 million life-forms, a figure that was once considered equivalent to 28 percent of the species on the planet. The estimate of 5 million kinds of organisms might have endured for many years were it not for the experiments of Terry Erwin of the National Museum of Natural History. In 1983, on a windless early morning, Erwin and his team of entomologists fumigated a single tree in the Panamanian rain forest with insecticide. The gases not only caused the insects to move out from their crevices and hiding places, but it killed them quickly enough so that they fell to the ground where one-meter funnels over solutions of 70 percent alcohol were ready to collect them. Based on Erwin’s count of 163 distinct beetles exclusive to this one species of tree, he calculated that the 50,000 distinct tree species in the rain forest may well contain over 8 million new species of insects. Taking into consideration that beetles constitute about 40 percent of the population of insects, spiders, and other types of arthropods, and that the number of species in the rain forest canopy is approximately twice the number found on the ground, Erwin calculated that there may be as many as 30 million different species of these groupings alone. Although it is highly extrapolated, it has led scientists to conclude that the closest estimate of the range of possible species that exists on Earth is within a factor of ten, from 10 million to 100 million species.
A species contains a vast amount of information about the world, its evolution, and how it continues to develop, but most of the information is still undecipherable because biology has not cracked all the codes. The demise of a species is the loss of a biological library. A tropical forest does not resemble Levittown; it is thousands of times more complex than the Mall of America. Biota crawls, swims, swoops, and slithers; it buzzes, bores, and burrows; it rots and oozes through forest floors and estuaries; it takes wing; it permeates, devours, and is fecund. This life has no voice other than our own because extinction is silent and mute. The lost orangutan of Sumatra’s clear-cut forests cannot speak to us through the tropical plywood paneling; it cannot explain that our new home wiped out its own. The poet and essayist Gary Snyder writes: “The ending of the lines of so many creatures with whom we have traveled this far is an occasion of profound sorrow and grief. Death can be accepted and to some degree transformed. But the loss of lineages and all their future young is not something to accept. It must be rigorously and intelligently resisted. Defend all of these plants, bugs, and animals equally? Little invertebrates that have never been seen in a zoo or a wildlife magazine? Species that are but a hair away from one another? It isn’t just a case of unique lineages but the lives of overall ecosystems (a larger sort of—almost—organism) that are at stake. Some archly argue that extinction has always been the fate of species and communities alike. Some quote a Buddhist teaching back at us: ‘all is impermanent.’ Indeed. All the more reason to move gently and cause less harm. Large highly adapted vertebrates, once lost, will never return in the forms we have known them. Hundreds of millions of years might elapse before the equivalent of a whale or an elephant is seen again, if ever. The scale of loss is beyond any measure the planet has ever known. Death is one thing; an end to birth is something else.”
The biologist E. O. Wilson has suggested that we mount an effort to record the entire spectrum of biological diversity on the planet, a taxonomic undertaking that would allow us to fully develop and apply evolutionary biology on a global scale. If 10 million species were classified, the effort would require 25,000 professional lifetimes and would create two-fifths of a mile of shelved books. Were we to recognize that our long-term interests rest in preserving biological diversity, such an inventory would be an investment of the highest order. Because we are losing 27,000 species a year, 74 per day, one every twenty minutes, due in no small part to the 500,000 trees that are cut every hour in tropical forests, a large-scale biological survey should take precedence for federal funding over underground nuclear testing and at a fraction of the cost. A project like this would offer us a means to understand what is happening with life on Earth, as well as a way to measure our impact upon it.
Despite our exaggerated dependence on them, we currently use or derive benefit from only 1 percent of all the species known to us. For food, we use, one way or another, only 7,000 of the some 75,000 known edible plants. Besides edibles, thousands of insects, yeasts, bacteria, and fibers may have unknown potential for bettering our lives, providing natural oils, fuels, pollinators, medicines, restoration materials for degraded environments and other useful products. But as matters stand now, we seek progress not by responsible interactions with biological diversity but by its elimination.
At the present rate of extinction we may lose 20 percent of all the species on the planet within the next twenty to forty years, most of these in the tropical rain forests. In the United States, if present global warming projections are correct, we face losses of 20 percent of our 20,000 plant species. It’s worth noting that many species, even though not yet at risk of completely disappearing, are being so severely depleted genetically that their ability to reproduce and adapt is increasingly impaired. The loss of evolutionary potential is being called the death of birth. This is tantamount to marching backward through evolution, losing millions of years of development in a matter of decades. We will face what naturalist Jack Turner calls the final loss—that point in the not-too-distant future when environmental degradation on the planet will no longer require our active participation.
An illustrative example of this principle is a pond when it begins to receive large runoffs of phosphate-containing detergents. Ordinarily, as fish create waste and die, detritivores decompose the waste into inorganic products that feed the algae population and the invertebrates, which in turn become food for the fish population. When phosphates drain into a pond, the influx causes the algae to bloom faster than the slower-breeding fish can consume it. As the algae die, the decomposition uses up much of the available oxygen, causing a die-off in the oxygen-deprived fish. The dead fish are more waste, creating more algae, since the fish are not consuming them. The increased levels of decomposition lower the oxygen levels even further, and what was once a balanced closed system collapses under the burden of rapid and accelerating growth. Today, we face similar prospects on a global level. Because increased warming can release methane from tundra, a gas twenty times more powerful than carbon dioxide, the global warming cycle can hit a tipping point where it warms on its own, regardless of whether we continue to combust fossil fuels or not.
Economists sometimes take the moral position that human life is superior to natural life, and there are environmentalists who take the opposite position. This is not a useful polarization. We can’t turn our backs on the web of life that sustains us and live in a biological vacuum engineered by technology. Even if God did grant us dominion over life, I do not believe she had in mind the kind of stewardship we are practicing today. In the Old Testament, Eliphaz the Temanite admonishes a caterwauling old man by the name of Job: “Have you listened in at God’s keyhole and crept away with his plans?” Job did not have a convincing reply. Neither do we.
Since the advent of the modern environmental movement with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, people who present the concept of ecological drawdown have been depicted as a doom-oriented, splinter sect of radicals fixated on a Chicken Little syndrome. Concerned scientists such as climatologist Dr. James Hansen of NASA are depicted as hortatory and shrill. Most businesses continue to view the environment as extraneous. Government regulations, well intended but nevertheless complex and difficult, have been fought in the courts and resisted by industry every step of the way. Although this pattern is changing in some companies, there remains a yawning gulf between the kind of friendly and moderate environmentalism that business wants to promote—one that justifies growth and expansionary use of resources—and the kind that actually deals with the core issues of carrying capacity, drawdown, biotic impoverishment, and extinction of species.
In the early years of environmental regulation, it was as if the corporate ship of state, having sailed magnificently to postwar ascendance, was suddenly having its electrical wiring nibbled by mice. Environmental lobbyists, pressure groups, and troubling scientific data became a nuisance. The evidence of ecological destruction was specific, but there was little but vague sentiments about what to do in the future. Was industry supposed to turn its back on growth and progress because the eggshells of raptors were thinning or an obscure species of fish would be wiped out by a hydroelectric project? Why should it spare a native forest to save the spotted owl when jobs and prosperity were at stake?
Industry has generally responded to environmental claims by invoking its duty to protect shareholders, markets, and profits. Efforts to clean up pollution were expenses that came straight off the bottom line. Regulations were attacked as regressive, reducing international competitiveness. This contention is still given credence despite the fact that our two most successful competitors, Japan and Germany, both have less access to resources, pay more for them, and charge higher energy taxes to encourage conservation. These restrictions have produced economies that are significantly more efficient and less wasteful than our own. Yet no major piece of environmental legislation has ever been supported by corporate America.
Because business does not face or confront environmental issues, there are tens of thousands of environmental groups in the world working to abate and ameliorate the destruction of the world by commerce. As important as their gains have been, this battle cannot be won by civil society, because commerce and industry are growing faster than nature. We’re still operating under commercial rules, placing the reputed needs of humankind above the health of the planet. For example, legislators from coal-mining states consistently torpedo legislation that would move the United States toward reductions in carbon emissions.
Legislators representing their constituents’ economic interest sidestep the evidence that we have already surpassed limits in the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb carbon dioxide without climatic disruption. As author Dennis Meadows explains it, “Economists assume the future will be much like the past. Since markets and technology have avoided catastrophe in the past, we can count on them to do the same in the future. Ecologists believe they see unique problems in the future, which will demand solutions outside the capacity of our present market mechanisms. Economists tend to see evolution as a series of continuous reversals: problems leading to solutions, new problems leading to new solutions. Ecologists are worried about irreversibilities. When species are lost, no change in price or technology will bring them back.”
The global economy already exceeds carrying capacity—that point beyond which further growth will decay and effectively destroy its host. There is not one peer-reviewed scientific paper that suggests otherwise. Perhaps if our planet—its land and sky and oceans—were growing at the rate of 2 percent a year, we could posit sustainable economic growth of a similar rate. But the earth does not grow. The input of the sun likewise remains constant, and much of the wealth derived from that input, stored over tens of millions of years in the form of fossil fuels, has already been consumed in less than two centuries.
If capitalism has a pervasive myth, it is the tacit assumption that business is an open, linear system: that through resource extraction and technology, growth is always possible. In other words, there are no inherent limits to further expansion, and those who wish to impose them have a political agenda. The cornucopian paradigm asserts that the limits before us are irrelevant, that finiteness is a Malthusian misconception, and that economic growth can be extended indefinitely into the future. Such a position would be analogous to the reindeer on St. Matthew Island having a leader who proclaimed, when the population hit 4,600, that ecologists and doomsayers were proved wrong: we’ve doubled the estimates given by the limits-to-growth crowd.
The counter myth of no limits is powerful even as knowledge of Earth’s carrying capacity becomes starkly evident. Ever-expanding abundance is not a theory based on science or history or nature. It is based on self-interest. Whether it is willfully ignorant or unabashedly hypocritical, at some point we must ask business to look candidly at the real world and see the skull-and-crossbones posted alongside ecological pathways so that we can begin to create solutions instead of evasion. “Moral outrage should result from the dawning realization that we are destroying the capacity of the earth to support life and counting it as progress, or at best as the inevitable cost of progress,” writes Herman Daly, former World Bank economist. “ ‘Progress’ evidently means converting as much as possible of Creation into ourselves and our furniture. ‘Ourselves’ means, concretely, the unjust combination of overpopulated slums and over-consuming suburbs. Since we do not have the courage to face up to sharing and population control as the solution to injustice, we pretend that further growth will make the poor better off instead of simply making the rich richer. The wholesale extinctions of other species, and some primitive cultures within our own species, are not reckoned as costs. The intrinsic value of other species, their own capacity to enjoy life, is not admitted at all in economics, and their instrumental value as providers of ecological life—support services to humans—is only dimly perceived. Costs and benefits to future humans are routinely discounted at 10 percent, meaning that each dollar of cost or benefit 50 years in the future is valued at less than a penny today.”
Businesses do not need to recognize sustainability in order to succeed. They don’t have to take into account that present demands on resources are tantamount to stealing from the future, or that selling today’s wants is at the expense of tomorrow’s needs. Nor does business have to acknowledge the devastating legacy of toxins and waste passed off to future generations. In fact, businesses are usually better off ignorant of these facts and principles if they intend to prosper in the present economic system. Conversely, to redesign or start up a business that maintains a holistic relationship between economy and ecology handicaps the entrepreneur financially since she bears the costs of the additional responsibilities that she has assumed and her competitors have shunned. Thus, commercial acts that would lead us away from harm, although sound in the principles of nature, are not always sound by the standards of the current economic system.
Limits and prosperity are intimately linked. If our economy is limited by its inclusion in nature, those limits are no more necessarily constricting to a sound economy than a blank canvas was to Cézanne or a flute to Jean-Pierre Rampal. The natural world of sunlight, rainfall, photosynthesis, topsoil, coral reefs, raptors, and pistils is a limit that can be circumvented only at the cost of the world itself. It is precisely in the discipline imposed by the limitations of nature that we rediscover and reimagine who we are and what economy truly means. It is only in the fullest context of the world as it is presented to us, and not as we manipulate it, that we may celebrate our humanity and create true prosperity. Such perspectives can lead us to a very different type of economy and way of doing business.