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Simcivic Home Page Cleaner Fairer Larger Better - Essays Earth Math, Lasting Sustainability, and Clean Prosperity by Steven H. Johnson April 2004 Overview - A Choice of Paths, a Choice of Futures Where is globalization taking us? Is the WTO's globalization strategy taking us in a direction that we'd like to go? If not, is there a better choice? No, and Yes. No, today's globalization leaders have not pointed the world toward an admirable future, and, Yes, there is a better option. The WTO's path to the future is, regrettably, a socially divisive, dirty technology, dirty prosperity path. It is neither earth-friendly nor people-friendly. The better option? A socially inclusive, clean technology, clean prosperity path. Which path will end up producing the larger and healthier global economy? There's no contest. It's not even close. A Clean Prosperity strategy can generate a global economy that's two, three, four, possibly five times larger than the global economy we'll find by following the poorly reasoned, badly flawed course the WTO has charted. This is not, however, an essay about the WTO and its current strategy. It is, rather, an essay about better ways to imagine the future, better principles for making global decisions, better paths to follow. This essay, part of Simcivic's Cleaner Fairer Larger Better Project, takes up three important topics:
Wrong Path, Wrong Future The business case for today's version of globalization is weak indeed, because it bets much too heavily on dirty technology. Imagine, as a thought experiment, that all the six billion people who now inhabit the earth were suddenly to find themselves enjoying a middle class living standard, American-style, with the same size houses, same number of cars, same rate of energy consumption, same rate of consuming goods and producing trash, same rate of suburbanization. Imagine, further, that all this prosperity were to be achieved using today's technologies. What would happen? Gasoline consumption would skyrocket. Air pollution
would worsen. Greenhouse gases would spread even more rapidly. Global
warming would accelerate. Global prosperity built on a dirty technology
platform is a recipe for environmental catastrophe on a global scale.
While global prosperity cannot be attained overnight, any path to global
prosperity that assumes today's dirty technology platform is deeply threatening.
An alternative path is available, one that's cleaner, fairer, larger, better. But it's not an easy path to understand till we've tried on some new ways of thinking. Today's vision of sustainability is one that's tied to old habits of thought. Sustainability, as it's generally understood today, boils down to dirty technology containment. That's all, and it's not enough. Dirty technology elimination is what's needed. Until we, we the whole of humanity, commit ourselves to weeding out and eliminating all the thousands of dirty technologies on which today's economies now rely, we will not have placed ourselves on the path of true sustainability. This is not an easy switch to make, not even
So let's start with the basics. How old is the Earth? How long have we
humans lived on our planet? How long is the Earth expected to last? How
much longer would we humans hope to live here? How big is the Earth? How
much room do we have? How much stuff do we have? Simple questions. Questions
that simulate some possible futures. Questions that exercise our minds. Astronomers and astro-physicists tell us the Earth and the sun are both about five billion years old. They also predict the sun has another five billion years of fuel left to it. Five billion years of sunshine - that's a lot to work with! And how long have humans been around, in our current evolutionary form? Nobody knows for sure, but forty or fifty thousand years isn't a bad estimate. At some point - perhaps fifty thousand years ago - the most recent evolutionary pieces fell into place. The human brain was finally equipped with its distinctive, first-ever ability to think symbolically and develop an evolving culture. Humans were liberated, in part, from Nature. And Nature was now at risk. How Much Longer Would We Like to Live Here? If one grants that we, as a species, have been here for fifty thousand years already, how much more time would we like? How much longer would we humans wish to live comfortably and happily on the Earth? Another fifty years? Another five hundred? Another thousand? Another fifty thousand years? How about five million years? Or fifty million years? Or five hundred million years? Or maybe even five billion years? Let's say - at a minimum - that we think it'd be good to keep the planet livable for another five million years. Maybe for fifty million. Maybe five hundred million. In any case, let's say we think it's important to keep the planet livable for a LONG time. Can we? It depends . . . How Much Land Area Do We Have? New questions. How big is the planet? How big is it now? How big is it going to be, five million years from now? Or fifty million years from now? This is simple. Everyone knows the answer. The Earth has a diameter of almost eight thousand miles, a radius of almost four thousand miles. Today. And, guess what? Fifty million years from now, Earth's overall size will be virtually the same as it is today. So what does the size of the Earth mean for us? That's not hard to figure out. All we have to do is calculate the surface area of the planet, look up the size of the human race, and compare. The surface area of a sphere is given by the formula 4 pi R2. That works
out to a total surface area for the earth of around 200 million square
miles. But think for a second about the formula. The area of a circle
is Of the 200 million square miles that make up the Earth's total surface area, roughly 140 million square miles are ocean, roughly 60 million are land. Set aside Antarctica's five million square miles as permanently unlivable, and that leaves us with a surface land area of about 55 million square miles. Continents, subcontinents, archipelagos, islands - the whole ball of wax adds up to around 55 million square miles. Or, if you like to think in terms of acres, about 35 billion acres. Earth math. Not too hard, once you get used to it. How does the size of the planet compare to the size of the human race? In the year 1900, when the entire human race numbered only a billion plus, the planet was in pretty good shape. Thirty acres of land per person. Not too bad a ratio. By the year 2000, the size of the human race had shot up to six billion people. The global land ratio had gone down, down, down, to less than six acres of land per person. How Fast Will Humans Run Out of Land? Now for some Earth Math what if's concerning land availability. HOW FAST COULD WE . . . . . . RUN OUT OF LAND FROM POPULATION GROWTH? What if the human race continued growing at roughly the same rate as today, forever and forever? That isn't expected, fortunately, but it's a useful thought experiment. If the size of the human family were to grow at 1.3 percent a year - roughly the current growth rate - how long would it take for the land/person ratio to drop to one acre per person? How long would it take the land/person ratio to drop to one square foot
per person? Second question - how many years to hit one square foot per person? About
960 years. Less than ten centuries. About half the institutional age of
the Catholic Church. It's unimaginable but true. If today's growth rate
of 1.3 percent a year were sustained for another millennium, the land
per person ratio would shrink to one square foot apiece. Such a scenario is physically impossible. Human life on this planet can't be sustained at a density of one person per square foot. This seems obvious, yet not everyone draws the necessary conclusion - that the human population of this planet must someday stop growing in size. What these Earth Math simulations help us appreciate is the inevitability of limits. The notion that it's safe for the human population to continue growing forever is quite a dangerous fantasy. COULD WE EVER . . . . . . RUN OUT OF LAND FOR GRAVESITES? How many gravesites could the earth eventually accommodate? This, too, is a parable about the limited size of the planet and the total size of the human race, measured over our total sojourn on this planet. Start by thinking about a single gravesite. How much surface area does it cover? Twenty square feet? Twenty-five square feet? How many gravesites per acre? If I wanted to cover an acre with gravesites, leaving no room for paths or roads, I might squeeze two thousand distinct gravesites onto a single acre. (No real cemetery would squeeze two thousand graves into a single acre, but two thousand is such a math-friendly number I'll use it anyway.) Now, what if I wanted to cover the entire planet with gravesites? Multiply this rate, two thousand gravesites per acre, by 35 billion acres. If we were to measure the Earth's surface area by the number of separate gravesites it might accommodate, we might end up with an estimate of 70 trillion gravesites. Seventy trillion! A very, very, VERY big number, right? But is it? Is 70 trillion such a huge a number that we humans would never
run out of fresh gravesites? Would the sun burn itself out first? Run
out of fuel before humanity runs out of gravesites? Afraid not. Here's
the bottom line result. If all humans from now to the end of the planet
five billion years from now were to live to the age of a hundred, each
of those seventy trillion gravesites would fill up five thousand times
over! To make the Earth Math as easy as possible, let's imagine that 10 million of those who die have chosen cremation, while the other 70 million have elected gravesite burials. 70 trillion gravesites. 70 million burials a year. Seventy million burials a year, times one million years, equals 70 trillion burials. It would take only a million years for a human race of eight billion to fill 70 trillion gravesites. Back to the Earth's total lifespan, and the total lifespan of the sun. The sun is said to have five billion years of fuel left, remember? Five billion. That's a million years, repeated five thousand times. After a million years, the human race could certainly have filled all 70 trillion gravesites. After five billion years, we could, conceivably, give each gravesite five thousand unique occupants. A million years to fill up all those gravesites. Quite a long time, if measured against the fifty thousand years humans have lived on Earth already, 20 times as long. Quite a short time, if measured against the 5 billion years that our sun is expected to burn till its fuel runs out. So what's the point? Is it time to abandon burial in favor of cremation? Not yet, perhaps, but eventually. The larger point is this. All the Earth's resources are finite, not just its real estate for gravesites, and the longer our time horizon, the more obvious this point becomes. We cannot afford to consume the Earth's resources without replacing them, because if we do, it will be only a matter of time before we have nowhere left to go, nothing left to live on. We humans are well on our way to becoming a population of 8 billion, crammed together on a planet of only 35 billion acres. If we wish Mother Earth to be livable for millions of years to come - as most of us would - it's essential that we quickly learn to honor lasting sustainability's very simple rule: Restore every resource we use. All paths to globalization that fail to honor this principle will be paths to disaster. COULD WE EVER . . . . . . RUN OUT OF LAND FOR McMANSIONS? Now for a more immediate 'What If.' Suppose the size of the human race levels off at eight billion people, as many demographers now believe it will. And suppose the human population puts its affairs in order - over the next two or three centuries - and achieves an extraordinary level of global prosperity. In this scenario, every last household on the planet is wealthy enough to acquire a twelve acre estate of its own, "somewhere in the country," with each twelve acre estate featuring a several thousand square foot McMansion. What then? Is "twelve acres and a mansion" a practical dream for the entire human race? For starters, let's imagine that a global population of eight billion translates into a household count of three billion. The Earth Math is simple. Three billion households, times twelve acres per household. Our scenario points toward 36 billion acres of land carved into nifty little twelve-acre plots. And - since everybody loves lawns - maybe every McMansion is ringed with a vast lawn. Only one small difficulty in this scenario. We, humanity, don't have this kind of acreage at our disposal. No matter how rich our descendants become - and we'd like them all to enjoy considerable wealth - humanity cannot afford a scenario in which the entire world is carved into twelve acre plots and planted over entirely in grass. There simply isn't room; there'd be nothing left over for Mother Nature. The pessimists might say that we'll never be that wealthy. They might predict endless cycles of hatred and war, of poverty, hunger, and want. So don't worry about it, they'll say, it'll never happen. But what if the pessimists are wrong, the optimists right? What if we humans succeed in settling our differences and move forward to a future of essentially limitless prosperity? What then? Given another two or three centuries, "twelve acres and a mansion" may be economically feasible for all humanity's families and households. Once this day arrives, as it eventually could, will it be safe for the entire human race to indulge itself in a limitless real estate splurge? Perhaps you suspect the answer. We don't have to know very much Earth Math to know that Mother Nature's needs must be honored, to know that humanity's potentially limitless hunger for real estate will have to be restrained by intelligent rules. It's a tough game. Eight billion people. Thirty-five billion acres of
land. And millions of years, billions of years perhaps, in which we'd
like the planet to remain livable and healthy. If Mother Nature is to
survive and nourish us for all this time, we shall have to honor Her needs
and protect Her domain. How Much Stuff Do Humans Have? How Much Will We? Think of all the "stuff" that we humans have made - all the
houses, roads, cars, clothes, toys, technology, tractors, bridges, airports,
harbors, dams, power lines, factories, shopping malls, libraries, monuments,
and so on. Not just here, in America, but worldwide. How much do you suppose
it all weighs? How much space do you suppose it all takes up? Whatever the number is, however large it is, it is still a finite quantity. If every last tidbit of human "stuff" were thrown into a cosmic trash compactor, if it were all crunched and compressed and squeezed into a single massive cube of junk, how big would it be? As an ultimate answer, I'd guess eight to ten miles on a side, depending on the starting estimates for "tons per person" and the average specific gravity of "stuff." That's just the "stuff" we use, of course. For every pound of product produced, some have said, modern industry generates and tosses ninety-nine pounds of waste. Rocks. Soil. Minerals. And other trash. While consumer products eventually get tossed into landfills, production-related waste ends up at mine sites, in valleys, silted off into rivers and streams. Whatever the waste-to-product ratio, whether it's a hundred to one, or only ten to one, or perhaps even less, it's a major concern. But back to the product "cube." Ten miles on a side. A thousand cubic miles of stuff, spread over 55 million square miles of land area. Not a lot, I suppose, at any given moment of time. But what if the entire cube has to be renewed in some sort of regular cycle? Let's ignore food and similar renewables and look only at our non-renewable "stuff." What if everything in the cube that's not renewable has to be replaced, on average, every fifty years? This is easy. We divide 1,000 cubic miles by 50 years. This works out to 20 cubic miles of new stuff dug out of the earth every year. How long, then, till we've consumed the top one mile of the earth's surface? How long till we've consumed 55 million cubic miles of planet, munching away like Pac Man at twenty cubic miles a year? The answer: 2.75 million years. For every cubic mile we consume, what if we throw away ten more cubic miles of waste? The time span drops to 275,000 years, scarcely a quarter of a million years. On the other hand, what if everything new that goes into the front end of the cube, the front end of the production cycle, has been reclaimed from the back end? What if the flow of non-renewable "stuff" is fed, entirely, by recycling? Then the cube seems ever so much smaller. A cube of stuff that's ten
miles on a side? A thousand cubic miles of "stuff?" Not necessarily
a lot, in and of itself, if it can be renewed from its own waste. Not
a lot, if it's a one-time withdrawal from the planet's asset base. If
we humans manage our "stuff" well, if we restrict humanity's
master Bill of Materials for "stuff" to substances that are
non-toxic and non-polluting, we can certainly keep the planet alive and
healthy while still having access to an enormous of "stuff." If Lasting Sustainability is about managing the affairs of the human race so that we preserve the environment for all future generations, then Earth Math is a tool for educating us and underlining the importance of Lasting Sustainability. Earth Math draws our attention to the ease with which the human race, because it is now so massive, has the ability to gobble up and destroy the Earth's natural heritage in a relatively brief segment of planetary time. Earth Math also draws our attention to the positive lessons that can help us define and pursue Lasting Sustainability. The Five Zeroes of Lasting Sustainability Lasting Sustainability is about optimism and getting the Earth Math right. To get the Earth Math right, we have to begin with the basics. What do we know about the human race? What are the basics, from the Earth's point of view? Humans engage in five basic activities. Always have, always will. We have babies. We acquire resources. We produce goods for ourselves. We throw away our trash. And we occupy land. The five basics - a permanent fact of human existence. None will ever go away, not as long as humans are human. Almost since the beginning of our sojourn on this planet, the human race has been on an upward growth track, and of late this growth track has only been accelerating. More babies every year. More resources extracted every year. More goods produced every year. More trash thrown away every year. More land bulldozed every year, for roads, shops, stores, factories, subdivisions, homes. One doesn't have to be very smart about Earth Math to suspect that it's time for the era of endless growth to come to an end:
This line of reasoning leads us toward the Five Zeroes of Lasting Sustainability. If we cherish the environment that we have inherited and wish to pass along a healthy planet to our grandchildren, endless growth won't work. It's time to rethink the habits that drive endless growth and to get rid of those habits. As we do the rethinking that's needed, we'll find ourselves face to face with the Five Zeroes of Lasting Sustainability. 1) Zero Net Increase in Population. Simple Earth Math tells us that it's important for the total size of the human population to level off. A leveling off at eight billion is much better than a leveling off at ten billion. A leveling off at seven billion would be better than a leveling off at eight. Demographers who look hard at today's growth patterns are deeply concerned, because they see today's population growth as being most concentrated in those countries that can afford it the least. They lack the water resources they need to grow food for today's populations, let alone tomorrow's. Moreover, the fertility of their land is declining due to mismanagement, land salination, over-harvesting. As today's poorest countries lack the education and institutional capacity to get ahead of the curve; population growth will push them more and more deeply into poverty. Humanity can't afford the next two billion, but they're coming anyway. After that, demographers say, we might start to level off. Regardless of the short term forecast, the Earth Math is inexorable. An unchecked upward creep in population is incompatible with lasting sustainability. Zero net increase in population is the only Earth Math that works. The sooner, the better. 2) Zero Net Loss of Resources. Some of the resources on which humans depend are renewable, some are not. Fishing is acceptable within the limits of fish populations replenishing themselves, but unacceptable once that limit is passed. On the other hand, nothing the mining industry extracts from the planet is renewable in place. There's no way around Earth Math. Obtaining this economy's feedstock materials through a perpetual reliance on mining, extraction, and drilling is simply incompatible with Lasting Sustainability. If Lasting Sustainability is to be achieved, tomorrow's mineral resources must be fully recaptured from today's waste streams. All economic activities that exhaust current resources without replacement will need to be drawn to a close at the earliest feasible time. Mining. Oil drilling. The emptying of aquifers. Lasting Sustainability requires one hundred percent of our resources to come either from renewable or from recycled sources. 3) Zero Cumulative Harm Technology. We already have a fair sense of what Zero Harm Technologies are not. Technologies that cause cumulative environmental damage - think coal-fired power plants that spew mercury into the atmosphere - are not Zero Cumulative Harm. Yesterday's mercury emissions plus today's mercury emissions plus tomorrow's mercury emissions add up to only one thing - more and more and more mercury turned loose into the natural environment, where traces of it end up first in undersea plant life, then in fish, and then finally in our own bodies and the bodies of our children. Mercury, though, is an easy call. How are we to know whether any given technology generates cumulative environmental harm or not? This won't be an easy challenge for us. Modern industry has fabricated thousands upon thousands of new molecules, reassuring us that today's corporate giants will always deliver "better living through chemistry." Sometimes the claim is wrong. According to one recent story, the Tylenol that's fed to cattle in India turns out to be a fatal toxin for some species of native vultures, with species counts down so badly that local naturalists have sounded the "pending extinction" alarm. Who would have foreseen such a risk from Tylenol? The "zero" in Zero Cumulative Harm won't be an easy standard to achieve, because the unknowns are so great, but that hardly lets us off the hook. The principle is inescapable. We cannot hinge humanity's long-run prosperity on dirty technologies that undermine the planet's health. Conceptually we know that a line has to be drawn between Dirty Technology and Clean Technology, between Dirty Prosperity and Clean Prosperity; conceptually we know that the task ahead is one of identifying and weeding out Dirty Technology, one of inventing and implementing Clean Technology alternatives. And we know the task is urgent. Fifty years from now, we - we humans
- should be able to say that most of our Dirty Technologies have been
eliminated. One hundred years from now, a century from now, all Dirty
Technology should be eliminated from the cupboard. One hundred percent
of the technologies that drive the global economy of 2100 should be clean,
should generate zero cumulative harm to the environment. 4) Zero Net Growth in Land Fills and Waste Dumps. When humans were few in number, and all our trash was organic, the practice of burying the trash and moving on didn't harm the planet. With the human race now numbering six billion and counting, and migrating from the countryside into massive mega-cities, the practice of burying trash in landfills, sealing up the landfills, and leaving them behind can no longer be defended. What's the alternative? As do many others, my wife and I have a composter in our yard. We've thrown garbage into this composter for the past ten years. Yet it never overflows. Yes, we occasionally remove some of the compost and work it into the yard. And, yes, the composter is remarkably good at recycling our garbage and turning it into a rich organic soil. A properly designed waste disposal and recycling system can do much the same for all our manufactured "stuff." Imagine a day when humanity is smart enough that every last ounce of waste we generate ends up being recycled and fed back into the front end of the production cycle. Imagine a day when non-recycled landfills are but a distant memory, the stuff of museum exhibits only. That's what Zero Net Growth in Waste Dumps will look like. 5) Zero Net Loss of Habitat to Development. This essay has already painted a picture of a world carved up into twelve acre estates, three billion strong. How much of the natural environment survives if all homeowners insist on surrounding their estates with acres and acres of grass? At some point, in the relatively near future, well before the realtors of tomorrow attempt to carve the world into three billion country estates, humanity needs to face reality. A difficult and vital decision is needed, a global decision that strikes a balance between natural habitat that's open to human interference and natural habitat that gets left alone. And that balance, once struck, needs to be preserved in perpetuity, even unto the thousandth and ten thousandth generation. If we humans take the attitude that Nature exists at our sufferance, if we believe ourselves at liberty to pave over the natural world whenever we choose, we shall perish. We are biological beings, we stem from a complex ecosystem, and ultimately it is we who exist at Nature's sufferance. The Earth Math is just as firm on this point as it is on the previous four. Lasting sustainability requires us to make a permanent and irreversible commitment to the fifth Zero as well, Zero Net Loss of Habitat to Development. Yes, we humans will always have babies, acquire resources, produce goods, throw away trash, and occupy land. But ours is the moment in history - in the vast sweep of human history across all of time - in which the Five Zeroes of tomorrow start to take over from the growth trajectories of yesterday. If we act with foresight, the generations who inhabit the planet today can earn the right to be remembered as the most pivotal generations of all of human history. It falls to our watch to end the growth habits of yesterday and move
the curve in a new direction. The ancestors from whom we descend had the
luxury of pursuing growth, growth, growth. The posterity to whom we will
bequeath the planet will either live by the Five Zeroes of Lasting Sustainability,
or will die from its own poisons. We, now, today, are history's transition
generation. Our future on this planet, and Mother Earth's future as a
nurturing home, depend entirely on our generations, on our willingness
to do our Earth Math, get it right, and learn its lessons. Clean Prosperity Up to this point, I've been using Earth Math for the purpose of showing the habits that must now be left behind. Might Earth Math also be of any help in deciphering a new path to human prosperity? A path that achieves ever-rising living standards even as we respect the Five Zeroes of Sustainability? I have already guessed that a "cube of stuff" ten miles on a side would be more than enough to provide a prosperous middle class life style for the two or three billion separate households that will make up the human race in the decades, centuries, and millennia ahead. In a Five Zeroes future, humans are smart enough to keep humanity's cube of "stuff" from growing and growing and growing. We set an ultimate "stuff" target, and then we force ourselves to live within that target. As suggested earlier, we should train ourselves to think of everything that makes up our cube of "stuff" as a Master Bill of Materials for Clean Prosperity. Humanity's Bill of Materials cannot grow, eternally, in cubic size or in weight. Yes, the physical size of the pile of "stuff" will grow, for a time, as our brothers and sisters who live in poverty make their way forward toward middle class prosperity, but after that it will level off in size. Whatever the Master Bill of Materials turns out to weigh, its total weight must then cease to grow. Moreover, the Master Bill of Materials for our "cube of stuff"
must become slowly and steadily cleaner. As time goes on, humanity's master
Bill of Materials loses its technologically dirty "stuff," replaced
with alternatives that cause no lasting environmental harm. As the Third
Zero gets implemented, Zero Cumulative Harm Tech-nology, the environment
breathes easier. And easier. Does this mean an end to economic growth? If there's no further growth
in population? No further growth in the amount of "stuff" we
produce, consume, and throw away? Isn't Lasting Sustainability just a
fancy way of saying that GDP levels off, of saying that humanity in a
sustainable future never gets any richer? Not at all. Think back to the ancient distinction between weight and value. The carbon in a ton of coal weighs far more than the carbon in a few ounces of diamonds, yet the value of the diamonds will far exceed the value of the coal. This is an apt metaphor for our future in a Five Zeroes world. Yes, the total weight of humanity's "cube of stuff" must ultimately level off. The cube's total value, though, can rise indefinitely. A world that's wise enough to master Lasting Sustainability intuitively knows that steadily rising value is the key to perpetual economic prosperity. Smarter. Prettier. More entertaining. More prestigious. More useful. More healthful. More durable. New features. New benefits. In a Five Zeroes future, although the size and weight of the cube levels off, the cube's value continues growing ad infinitum primarily because the embedded design ingenuity steadily gets better and better and better. We get richer, if you will, because we slowly get better at turning coal into diamonds. (And we get richer as well because we get smarter and smarter about protecting the health of the natural environment.) This is a good news message. We use a few nuggets of Earth Math to figure out the Five Zeroes of Lasting Sustainability - Zero Population Growth, Zero Net Resource Loss, Zero Cumulative Harm Technology, Zero Landfill Growth, Zero Net Loss of Habitat. We use a little more Earth Math to figure out how much Stuff humans get to play with. And then we realize that limits to quantity are secondary - once we have Enough, the way we get More is by taking the existing cube of stuff and progressively redesigning everything within it so that its value grows and grows.
The question now is whether the vision of a socially inclusive, clean prosperity globalization path can be translated into an actionable agenda. Does the business case for a Clean Prosperity alternative have enough appeal to attract the stakeholder support it needs? The answer depends in part on our willingness to soak up Earth Math and accept its lessons. Just as practicing architects have a knack for design math, the human generations of the Twenty-First Century shall have to acquire a knack for Earth Math and a willingness to internalize its insights into lasting sustainability. As of now, we have some experience with sustainability, but hardly enough. Many of today's sustainability adherents commonly ask only for less pollution, slower population growth, a little more recycling, a slowdown in sacrificing habitat to development. At the time these steps were first taken, they represented important improvements. Much has been learned and the experience has been invaluable. Now it's time for the next big step. The environmental side of the business case is not difficult to make. Climate change is already upon us, and its tipping point risks, while unknown, are of catastrophic potential. The reality that man-made chemicals tend to accumulate in plants and in human tissue, while not as well-profiled or understood, is also a source of deep concern. Both trends support a Five Zeroes business case. The economic side to the business case is just as significant. It has both a negative and a positive aspect. It's clear that lasting global prosperity simply cannot be achieved on a Dirty Technology foundation. Conversely, one can also show a stronger growth path for the global economy once a deal is struck to follow a socially inclusive, clean technology, clean prosperity path to globalization. Compared with today's socially divisive, dirty technology path to globalization, the path of social inclusiveness and clean technology will take the world toward a global economy that is three, four, potentially even five times larger in size. Scarcely more than a billion today belong to the global middle class; imagine a global middle class of eight billion! The WTO's path can't possibly take us there; a Clean Prosperity path certainly can. From the perspective of global capital, the business case for a socially inclusive, clean prosperity path poses an interesting challenge. Some corporations bitterly resist environmental controls as an infringement on their freedom to maximize profits regardless of the consequences. Other corporations are smart enough to pursue competitive advantage from minimizing the environmental damage they cause. Larger institutional investors may well the first to wholly embrace the business case. Those who manage multi-billion dollar portfolios, especially those who manage long-term retirement funds, know full well that a healthy global economy is essential. The more vigorous the world's economy, the better for their portfolios. How will large institutional investors respond to the notion that a socially inclusive, clean prosperity path to the future will generate a long run doubling, tripling, or quadrupling of the potential size of the global economy? The greater the future potential, the more excited they'll be. Once we've waded through the unfamiliar conceptual terrain, we find ourselves smack up against an unexpected realization. For global capital, a bet on social justice, clean technology, and lasting sustainability is the smartest bet of all. The cleaner its bets today, the greater the ultimate win. What a remarkable business case! The Clean Prosperity path forward is more promising than most stakeholders
realize. Lasting Sustainability doesn't abolish our love affair with technology.
We can have all the technology we want as long as it's Clean Technology.
We can have all the prosperity we want as long as it's Clean Prosperity.
And we can tinker endlessly with human habitat as long as the natural
habitat is permanently protected and secure. This brings us full circle back to the issue of globalization. Any globalization strategy that ignores the promise of Clean Prosperity deserves to be repudiated. On the other hand, as we have suggested, a carefully-honed globalization strategy that actively promotes social inclusion and Clean Prosperity will merit very broad support.
Steven H. Johnson, President, Simcivic.org If you like, drop me a line. I can be reached at sjohnson@simcivic.org. Cleaner Fairer Larger Better - Essays revision date 2004-04-24 |