DR. KARL-HENRIK ROBÈRT IS ONE OF SWEDEN’S FOREMOST CANCER SCIENTISTS WHO, IN 1989, INITIATED AN ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT CALLED “THE NATURAL STEP,” WHICH PROVIDED SYSTEM CONDITIONS FOR SOCIAL AND ECOLOGICAL SUSTAINABILITY. TOGETHER WITH A GROWING NETWORK OF SCIENTISTS AND DECISION MAKERS IN BUSINESS AND POLITICS, THESE CONDITIONS HAVE BEEN ELABORATED INTO A CONCRETE FRAMEWORK FOR STRATEGIC PLANNING TOWARD SUSTAINABILITY.
KARL-HENRIK HAS WRITTEN MANY BOOKS AND OTHER PUBLICATIONS ON SUSTAINABILITY, PROMOTING AWARENESS OF THE LINK BETWEEN ECOLOGY, ECONOMY, AND TECHNOLOGY IN 1999 HE WAS AWARDED THE GREEN CROSS AWARD FOR INTERNATIONAL LEADERSHIP, AND IN 2000 HE WON THE BLUE PLANET PRIZE.
Art in nature is all about the connectedness between people, and between people and nature.
Regardless of where the primary focus of interest is placed in the sustainability debate—social or ecological—the fact remains that human behavior is the key to leveraging change. Therefore we must focus on people and society.
The social tissue of the global human society is currently suffering from many impacts, and perhaps the worst of these is the gradual loss of meaningful stories. This is a global disease and leads to a shrinking of perspective. Instead of forming worthwhile goals we concentrate on results; instead of seeing the whole picture we recognize only the details; instead of valuing community we care only about ourselves.
This social disease can only be cured by meaningful stories—the stories that provide the cultural glue between people. It is true that the reason for needing nature, and each other, can be explained and verified in scientific terms, but people are a social species.
It is our stories—or myths—that tell us about connectedness and why we need nature and each other. However, the full meaning of that connectedness also requires us to use another dimension of our mental capacity—one that goes beyond intellectual understanding and into the realm of art. It’s like seeing in the dark: you can see things more clearly if you look indirectly at them instead of focusing directly on them.
Martin Hill’s art allows us to fully understand the meaning of connectedness. His work tells us these stories—and his inspiration comes from learning from nature’s design.
Karl-Henrik Robèrt
AFTER GRADUATING FROM THE GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY AS AN INDUSTRIAL ENGINEER, RAY ANDERSON APPLIED HIS ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT TO BUILDING ONE OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST INTERIOR FURNISHINGS COMPANIES HE FOUNDED INTERFACE IN 1973. RAY AND HIS COMPANY REVOLUTIONIZED THE COMMERCIAL FLOOR COVERING INDUSTRY BY PRODUCING AMERICA’S FIRST FREE-LAY CARPET TILES. NOW, RAY HAS EMBARKED ON A MISSION TO “BE THE FIRST COMPANY THAT, BY ITS DEEDS, SHOWS THE ENTIRE INDUSTRIAL WORLD WHAT SUSTAINABILITY IS IN ALL ITS DIMENSIONS: PEOPLE, PROCESS, PRODUCT, PLACE, AND PROFITS BY 2020,” AND IN DOING SO, TO BECOME RESTORATIVE THROUGH THE POWER OF INFLUENCE. HE’S LEADING A WORLDWIDE EFFORT TO PIONEER THE PROCESSES OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT.
RAY HOLDS HONORARY DOCTORATES FROM SIX COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES.
I am an industrialist, some would say a radical industrialist, but you can be sure that I am as competitive and as profit minded as anyone you know. My world is the world of business and industry—the technosphere, if you will—a world where amazing transformation is happening. I would like to draw you into that world, to give you a taste of what it is like as it moves toward sustainability. The example I’m using to illustrate this world is a carpet factory in Georgia, the manager of which is determined to find a sustainable way to design, dye, and produce carpet.
The head of design at the carpet factory gives his design team an outrageous assignment: to go into the forest and see how nature would design a floor covering. “And don’t come back with leaf designs; that’s not what I mean. Come back with nature’s design principles.” The head of design has read BIOMIMICRY, by Janine Benyus. (BIOMIMICRY: nature as teacher, nature as inspiration, nature as mentor and measure.)
So the design team spends a day studying the forest floor and the stream beds, and they come to realize there is total diversity, even chaos—no two things are alike, no two sticks, no two stones, no two leaves. Yet there is a very pleasant orderliness in this chaos. So the designers go back to the design studio and design a carpet tile such that the face designs of no two tiles are identical. All are similar, but every one is different, contrary to the prevailing industrial paradigm that every mass-produced item must be the “cookie-cutter” same, reflecting our traditional predilection for man-made perfection.
This new product is introduced to the market with the name “Entropy” (meaning “disorder”), and in a year and a half it moves to the top of the factory’s best-seller list, faster than any other product ever has. The advantages of breaking the old paradigm, insistence on perfection and sameness, are surprisingly numerous: there is almost no waste and no off-quality in production. Inspectors cannot find defects among the deliberate “imperfection” of no-two-alike. The installer can install tiles very quickly, without having to take the traditional care to get the pile nap running uniformly—the less uniform the installation, the better; so he can just take tiles out of the box the way they come and lay them randomly. There is almost no scrap during installation; even piece-tiles can find a place.
Yet, even with these unexpected benefits, is there still more to explain the success of “Entropy”? Perhaps there is. A speaker on the environmental speaking circuit begins every speech by having her audience close their eyes and picture that ideal place of peace, repose, serenity, creativity, comfort, and security—that perfect comfort zone. Then she asks, “How many were somewhere indoors?” And almost no one ever raises a hand. We humans seem to gravitate to nature for that ideal comfort zone. Somehow, perhaps Entropy brings outdoors indoors in a subliminal way, and that is its real appeal. This quality has a name: “biophilia.” There is enormous power in bomimicry and in biophilia. This is very new thinking. Nature, the inspiration, is by the way anything but uniformly perfect, yet she is very effective!
This is sustainability in action.
Believe me, I could go on and on with examples of new thinking. Eleven years of this kind of new thinking and innovation, combined with a determination to abandon the comfort of the status quo, can produce unimagined results. Yet it does not come naturally, only through extraordinary commitment. The status quo is a powerful opiate, is it not? Breaking institutional inertia, “We’ve always done it this way,” is hard. Yet, I do know an industrial company that did make the break in the total, absolute, wholehearted pursuit of sustainability and in the process is completely transforming itself.
Consequently, I can report to you today that this company, which was once so petro-intensive for its energy and raw materials you could have said it was an extension of the petrochemical industry, has, from that starting place with the new thinking I just described and a sense of shared purpose, over the last ten years, reduced its global net greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent in absolute tonnage against its 1996 baseline. (For comparison, the Kyoto treaty, which the U.S. refuses to ratify, calls for 7 percent reduction by 2012.)
This company reckons it has reduced its overall environmental footprint by more than 40 percent and, by the year 2020, believes it will be sustainable, with zero environmental footprint: taking nothing from earth that is not rapidly and naturally renewable (not another fresh drop of oil) and doing no harm to the biosphere.
This company’s people will tell you emphatically that these initiatives have been amazingly good for business. Its costs are down, not up, dispelling a myth and exposing the false choice between economy and environment. Its products are the best they have ever been, because sustainable design has provided an unexpected wellspring of innovation. Its people are galvanized around a shared higher purpose. You cannot beat this for bringing people together. Better people are applying, and the best people are staying and working with purpose. And the goodwill in the marketplace generated by this initiative exceeds, by far, what any amount of advertising or marketing expenditure could have generated.
I know this company very well because it is my company, Interface, and I know firsthand that everything I just said about it is true. I also know it could not have happened or continue to happen without the support of our customers.
In the summer of 1994, at age sixty, in the twenty-second year of the company I founded from scratch in 1973, I read Paul Hawken’s book, THE ECOLOGY OF COMMERCE; it changed my life and my view of the world. It came for me at a propitious moment. Our customers, especially interior designers, had begun to ask a question we had not heard before, “What is Interface doing for the environment?” So I had agreed, reluctantly, to speak to a newly assembled environmental task force of Interface people from around the world. I had been asked to provide them with my environmental vision, a vision I did not have, and to address this awkward question, “What are you doing…?” Awkward for me, because I could not get beyond, “We obey the law; we comply”; and somehow I knew that “comply” was not a vision.
Hawken’s book changed everything for me. I read it, I got it, and I committed this third child of mine (after my two natural daughters) to the path to sustainability.
This new business paradigm has a name: doing well by doing good—cause and effect, effect and cause, all rolled into one positive feedback loop that is good for the earth. This is how the triple bottom line of corporate social responsibility-economy environment, social equity—done right, will come together in one truly superior, ethical, honest, and legitimate financial bottom line, and companies everywhere will want to emulate the example. And that is how an entire industrial system can move toward sustainability.
I see no other long-term choice for the entire industrial system if it is to survive. Not just our industry, all industry, has got to make this transition, undergo this transformation to survive. Those who don’t, won’t.
Ray C. Anderson
AS CHAIRMAN AND CEO OF MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC AMERICA, TACHI KIUCHI BUILT THE MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC BRAND IN THE U.S. AND MANAGED THE COMPANY’S TRANSITION FROM THE OLD TO THE NEW ECONOMY. AS MANAGING DIRECTOR OF MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC CORPORATION, HE BROKE WITH JAPANESE CORPORATE NORMS TO CHAMPION A “LIVING SYSTEMS” APPROACH TO BUSINESS THAT INCLUDED RAPID ADAPTATION, FINANCIAL TRANSPARENCY, OPENNESS, CULTURAL DIVERSITY, AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY. HE EVEN FORGED A BOLD AGREEMENT WITH RAINFOREST ACTION NETWORK (RAN) TO PROMOTE CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY.
TODAY, AS CHAIRMAN OF FUTURE 500, AND CEO OF TOKYO-BASED E-SQUARE, KIUCHI INFORMS AND INSPIRES BUSINESS LEADERS ALL OVER THE WORLD AND DEVELOPS PROFITABLE AND SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS PRACTICES AT COMPUTER, ELECTRONICS, AUTOMOBILE, AND OTHER COMPANIES. HE IS THE COAUTHOR, WITH BILL SHIREMAN, OF THE POPULAR BOOK WHAT WE LEARNED IN THE RAINFOREST: BUSINESS LESSONS FROM NATURE, WHICH DECLARES THE BUSINESS-AS-MACHINE ERA OVER, AND SHOWS HOW COMPANIES CAN BECOME AS INNOVATIVE AS THE RAINFOREST, LEVERAGING FEEDBACK TO GROW MORE PROFITABLE AND SUSTAINABLE THAN EVER.
MESSAGE FROM THE RAINFOREST
In the rainforest,
where the soil is thin, minerals are scarce,
and resources are always in short supply,
life is extraordinarily rich, more abundant and diverse than
anywhere else on earth.
There is a simmering dynamism in the forest, as organisms constantly chase the increments of sunlight, water, and minerals that are always at a premium.
Yet through all their interplay with one another,
the plants and animals of the rainforest find the unique niches,
places where they fit better than any others,
where their specialized forms make them masters of skill and efficiency,
using just what they need of the scarce resources that are delivered to them,
“just in time,” as those resources cascade through multiple stages of recycling.
Limits are a constant reality in the rainforest,
yet, paradoxically, scarcity is its own remedy.
It triggers constant feedback, learning, and adaptations that
shape the organisms
and the relationships between organisms so that an
extraordinary richness of life is created.
On a constant flow of energy from the sun, resources recycle
continuously from the earth,
and nothing else but a complex and ever-changing design,
life, flourishes in the rainforest in more concentrated
abundance than anywhere else on the planet.
Sometimes life departs from the rainforest for a time, only to
return there later,
for lessons that can be learned only at home.
We return there now.
Tachi Kiuchi
PETER PRICE-THOMAS WORKS FOR AN INTERNATIONAL SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATION THE NATURAL STEP (TNS), OF WHICH FORUM FOR THE FUTURE IS THE U.K. LICENSE HOLDER. PETER WORKS WITH FORUM BUSINESS PARTNERS AND THE WIDER CORPORATE SECTOR—USING THE NATURAL STEP’S APPROACH—TO HELP THEM STRATEGICALLY ADDRESS ISSUES OF SUSTAINABILITY. BEFORE JOINING THE FORUM, PETER WAS THE DIRECTOR OF EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR TNS U.S. HE HAS WORKED ON SUSTAINABILITY ISSUES IN NORTH AMERICA, EUROPE, AND ASIA—INCLUDING WORK WITH CORPORATIONS, STATE AND NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS, EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS, AND MULTILATERAL AGENCIES. PETER IS A FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR, AND HAS A MASTER’S DEGREE IN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE FROM YALE UNIVERSITY AND AN M.A. IN GEOGRAPHY FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH.
It is often said that the most sustainable building is the one that is never built: one that does not take any land, nor use any materials; a building that does not use any energy, nor create any waste. And yet, this building is unsustainable in one key aspect: it does not provide for human need. The basic human need of shelter has been with us for millennia and will continue to be with us as long as human life on this planet exists. It is a need not only for some, but for all, and a view of sustainability that does not cater for these needs is far from sustainable.
In these times of increasing global population and consumption it is tempting to try to protect areas from development, to cordon them off for conservation, to say, “We mustn’t use any more resources.” But humans whose needs are not met are no respecters of such arbitrary limits. No longer can we carry on with business as usual in one place and seek solely to “offset” our negative impacts by setting aside another. Rather, we should seek to develop in such a way that is restorative to the social and natural systems that surround us. Only when we have maximized the positive impact of our development and minimized the negative should we seek to “pay the balance” by offsetting elsewhere.
So how, then, does one go about building in a restorative manner? Firstly, identify the need or service that is to be met, be it one of shelter for a house, or education for a school, or patient health in a hospital. Then envision what success would look like. How could you provide that service in such a way as not to overwhelm nature or society? Design the service provision in such a way that it maximizes the positive and reduces the negative? Do you actually need to build a structure to achieve it? If you do, design it with the end of use in mind, so that all the materials can be readily reused; build on a plot that has already been taken from nature, with materials that aren’t virgin; power the building using free distributed energy from the sun or wind; insulate well; and, most of all, always think of the service that is being provided.
Over the next fifty years the world’s population will increase one-and-a-half-fold. Over the same time, consumption per capita will go up between four- and six-fold. People’s needs, including that of shelter, have to be met, and yet the natural systems upon which we are dependent are already in significant decline. How, then, are we to have any hope of meeting these needs? Einstein once suggested, “We cannot solve our problems with the thinking we used when we created them.” In order to achieve sustainability in buildings we need a fundamental shift in thinking—from creating buildings to providing for human need. And to do this we need to build restoratively.
Peter Price-Thomas
EDWIN DATSCHEFSKI HELPS PEOPLE FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE THEIR PRODUCTS SUSTAINABLE: GOOD FOR PEOPLE, PROFITS, AND THE PLANET. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF TOTAL BEAUTY OF SUSTAINABLE DESIGN, WHICH IS USED BY MOST DESIGN SCHOOLS AND DESIGNERS AS A REFERENCE AND GUIDE ON SUSTAINABLE PRODUCT DESIGN. EDWIN DEVELOPED THE CYCLIC/SOLAR/SAFE METHODOLOGY FOR ASSESSING THE ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE OF PRODUCTS AND PROCESSES.
EDWIN’S BACKGROUND IS AS A BIOLOGIST AT BRISTOL UNIVERSITY. AFTER WORKING IN THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY HE SPENT EIGHT YEARS WORKING AT THE ENVIRONMENT COUNCIL, DEVELOPING PROGRAMS INVOLVING THOUSANDS OF U.K. BUSINESSES TO ENABLE THEM TO REALIZE THE BENEFITS OF IMPROVED ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE. EDWIN HAS TRAINED OVER 6,000 PEOPLE IN ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT AND SUSTAINABLE PRODUCT DESIGN. AS PART OF HIS PERSONAL EDUCATIONAL MISSION, EDWIN HAS ALSO DEVELOPED A SET OF FREE WEB-BASED EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES FOR PEOPLE TO USE TO LEARN ABOUT SUSTAINABLE DESIGN.
Visit www.biothinking.com.
Every day each of us changes the world. We change it primarily through the side effects of the physical transformation of materials that make up the products, energy, and food we consume. Unfortunately this change is almost always detrimental, as even products that seem beautiful on the outside have a hidden ugliness behind them, an ugliness caused by exploitation of workers, releases of pollution, and destruction of habitats. The world is so fundamentally wrong when it comes to the way products are designed and made that it is hard to comprehend.
In a strange kind of blessing, these horrors below the surface are starting to manifest themselves in ways even the most thick-skinned skeptics can no longer deny, and this has spurred many nations and businesses to radically improve their products and industrial and agricultural processes. Yet there is still a huge mountain of product types, perhaps hundreds of millions, that need to be redesigned to be properly compatible with nature.
Martin Hill’s work shows how, in a very pure way, materials can be borrowed from nature to make a physical product that performs a function or service—in this case the stirring of people’s souls. Unlike traditional artists’ materials, when the materials Martin has used are returned to nature, they continue on their geological or organic pathways, and the cycles of life are unbroken.
Can we achieve similar purity in the design and manufacture of everyday products? This is the simple goal. Instead of using pigments and oils, Martin uses leaves and stones, and so in an analogous way mass-produced products can be designec to be cyclic at a molecular level, able to be consumed in turn by recycling machines or composted by microorganisms and rebuilt with no persistent wastes into new materials and new products once more.
All products are ultimately as ephemeral as a leaf. The average household object has a useful life of only a few months. So it needs to be as easily assimilated back into the system as a leaf is. From earth, to earth, to earth …
This is not just about the obvious things like recycled paper or recyclable packaging. We now have the techniques and technologies to make it easy for people to design or redesign any product at all and make it better, from barbecues and binoculars to suitcases and swimming goggles, from cars and lipstick to ocean liners and sushi.
There has been such a dilution of the term “sustainability” that it seems even a slight benefit to the community or a modest saving in energy use gets described as sustainable. Instead we need to think about becoming 100 percent sustainable on an absolute level; a threshold which we are as yet far from attaining but one that is theoretically and practicably achievable in our own lifetime.
One hundred percent sustainable products are renewable, efficient, and fair. This means totally renewable (cyclic, solar, and safe) and superefficient in their use of materials and energy. It means fair to humans in the form of workers, neighbors, shareholders, and consumers. But also, as has been too often overlooked, fair to nonhumans. We need to be fairer to the wildlife and all the species of plants and animals whose habitats we are trampling in our blind rush to extract materials.
In the twenty-first century we must recognize that becoming 100 percent sustainable is not only possible but required. We will not achieve this while there is still the widely held misconception that sustainability is optional or that it is some kind of moral behavior that requires unilateral individual sacrifice in favor of the environment.
Humans and nonhumans are part of the same system, so when we harm nature we are committing self-harm as surely as a razor blade on our own arms.
Deep within each of us is the feeling that we are part of a larger whole, and that the everyday, institutionalized violation of nature to bring us our daily needs is profoundly wrong. By taking one of our purest emotions, the appreciation of art and beauty, we can begin to assuage those feelings and through this book begin to understand the path to true sustainability that lies before us.
Edwin Datschefski
