I think the whole point of this book is: don't be so laissez-faire about your life and your choices that you willingly lumber right into your own demise/downfall. In fact, I don't even feel like Colin and Mary ever made any real choices.. they just went along with what outside influences dictated for them. Maybe it was all the pot that made them so listless and irritable.
"It was the total absence of traffic in the city that allowed visitors the freedom to become so easily lost. They crossed streets without looking and, on impulse, plunged down narrower ones because they curved tantalizingly into darkness, or because they were drawn by the smell of frying fish. There were no signs. Without a specific destination, the visitors chose routes as they might choose a colour, and even the precise manner in which they became lost expressed their cumulative choices, their will." (21)
"Robert was fifty yards away, walking unhurriedly towards him. Colin turned round to look behind. A narrow commercial street, barely more than an alley, broke the line of weatherbeaten houses. It wound under shop awnings and under washing hung like bunting from tiny wrought-iron balconies, and vanished enticingly into shadow. It asked to be explored, but explored alone, without consultations with, or obligations towards, a companion. To step down there now as if completely free, to be released from the arduous states of play of psychological condition, to have leisure to be open and attentive to perception, to the world whose breathtaking, incessant cascade against the senses was so easily and habitually ignored, dinned out, in the interests of unexamined ideals of personal responsibility, efficiency, citizenship, to step down there now, just walk away, melt into the shadow, would be so very easy." (112)
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1981)
Friday, November 30, 2007
Thursday, November 15, 2007
The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability by Paul Hawken
A wake-up call if ever there was one:
1.) "A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, it did not seem urgent that we understand the relationship between business and a healthy environment, because natural resources seemed unlimited. But on the verge of a new millennium we know that we have decimated ninety-seven percent of the ancient forests in North America; every day our farmers and ranchers draw out 20 billion more gallons of water from the ground than are replaced by rainfall; the Ogalala Aquifer, an underwater river beneath the Great Plains larger than any body of fresh water on earth, will dry up within thirty to forty years at present rates of extraction; globally we lose 25 billion tons of fertile topsoil every year, the equivalent of all the wheatfields in Australia. These critical losses are occurring while the world population is increasing at the rate of 90 million people per year. Quite simply, our business practices are destroying life on earth. Given current corporate practices, not one wildlife reserve, wilderness, or indigenous culture will survive the global market economy. We know that every natural system on the planet is disintegrating. The land, water, air, and sea have been functionally transformed from life-supporting systems into repositories for waste. There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world." (3)
2.) "...we need to rethink our markets entirely, asking ourselves how it is that products which harm and destroy life can be sold more cheaply than those that don't. Markets, so extremely effective at setting prices, are not currently equipped to recognize the true costs of producing goods. Because of this, business has two contradictory forces operating upon it: the need to achieve the lowest price in order to thrive if not survive in the marketplace, and the increasingly urgent social demand that it internalize the expense of acting more responsibly toward the environment.
Without doubt, the single most damaging aspect of the present economic system is that the expense of destroying the earth is largely absent from the prices set in the marketplace." (13)
3.) "Natural and human history are full of examples in which animals or humans exceeded carrying capacity and went into steep declines, or extinction. A haunting and oft-cited 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 "extra" 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, and by 1966 there were only 42 reindeer alive on St. Matthew Island." (25)
4.) "[It is senseless] to create packaging that lasts four hundred years to keep on a shelf for two months a product that we eat in two minutes [...]" (40)
5.) "If economic growth is founded on an ever-increasing reliance on chemicals, toxins, poisons, and energy by-products, then we will choke on the growth that is supposed to save us. The solution is not to put better filters on our effluent pipes, or line the settling ponds with thicker plastic, or fire the incinerators fifty degrees hotter. We need a different kind of growth, one that reduces and changes the inputs of raw materials and energy, and simultaneously eliminates the outputs of waste. We will have environmental success as a nation when we have eliminated most if not all toxic substances. When planes still swoop down and aerial spray a field in order to kill a predator insect with pesticides, we are in the Dark Ages of commerce. Maybe one-thousandth of this aerial insecticide actually prevents the infestation. The balance goes into the leaves, into the soil, into the water, into all forms of wildlife, into ourselves." (52)
6.) "To pay the bills from the past, we need a means. To act we need a way to serve. For those who say that times are tough, that we can ill afford sweeping changes because the existing system is already broke or hobbled, consider that the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R. spent over $10 trillion on the Cold War, enough money to replace the entire infrastructure of the world, every school, every hospital, every roadway, building and farm. In other words, we bought and sold the whole world to defeat a political movement." (58)
7.) "Because our automobile exhaust is fairly clean if not invisible, it is difficult to conceive of carbon dioxide as a pollutant. After all, we all exhale carbon dioxide; it is food for our plants. Another way of imagining the scale of the carbon dioxide problem is by removing its two oxygen molecules. Looked at that way, every time you fill up and use a tank of gas in a medium-sized American car, you are depositing in the atmosphere the equivalent of a 100-pound sack of pure carbon, 5.6 pounds for every gallon of gasoline. Now try to imagine the 450 million automobiles on the road today, the railroads and trucks, the tractors and heavy equipment, the chainsaws and motorcycles, the diesel fuel for the ships, the jet fuel for airplanes, and to them add the oil- and coal-fired steam turbines generating 100 million megawatts of electricity, the thousands of steel works fed with coke, the natural gasoline flared at petroleum wellheads and burned on our stovetops. When the year is over, not counting the 1 to 2 billion tons of carbon placed into the air from burning forests and grasslands, every person in the world will have placed 2,363 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere, a total of 5,854,000,000 tons, three and a half times as much as we emitted thirty years ago." (85)
8.) "Competition in the marketplace should not be between a company wasting the environment versus one that is trying to save it. Competition should be between which company can do the best job in restoring and preserving the environment, thereby reversing historical price and cost incentives of the industrial system that essentially send the wrong signals to consumers." (90)
(New York: HarperBusiness, 1993)
1.) "A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, it did not seem urgent that we understand the relationship between business and a healthy environment, because natural resources seemed unlimited. But on the verge of a new millennium we know that we have decimated ninety-seven percent of the ancient forests in North America; every day our farmers and ranchers draw out 20 billion more gallons of water from the ground than are replaced by rainfall; the Ogalala Aquifer, an underwater river beneath the Great Plains larger than any body of fresh water on earth, will dry up within thirty to forty years at present rates of extraction; globally we lose 25 billion tons of fertile topsoil every year, the equivalent of all the wheatfields in Australia. These critical losses are occurring while the world population is increasing at the rate of 90 million people per year. Quite simply, our business practices are destroying life on earth. Given current corporate practices, not one wildlife reserve, wilderness, or indigenous culture will survive the global market economy. We know that every natural system on the planet is disintegrating. The land, water, air, and sea have been functionally transformed from life-supporting systems into repositories for waste. There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world." (3)
2.) "...we need to rethink our markets entirely, asking ourselves how it is that products which harm and destroy life can be sold more cheaply than those that don't. Markets, so extremely effective at setting prices, are not currently equipped to recognize the true costs of producing goods. Because of this, business has two contradictory forces operating upon it: the need to achieve the lowest price in order to thrive if not survive in the marketplace, and the increasingly urgent social demand that it internalize the expense of acting more responsibly toward the environment.
Without doubt, the single most damaging aspect of the present economic system is that the expense of destroying the earth is largely absent from the prices set in the marketplace." (13)
3.) "Natural and human history are full of examples in which animals or humans exceeded carrying capacity and went into steep declines, or extinction. A haunting and oft-cited 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 "extra" 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, and by 1966 there were only 42 reindeer alive on St. Matthew Island." (25)
4.) "[It is senseless] to create packaging that lasts four hundred years to keep on a shelf for two months a product that we eat in two minutes [...]" (40)
5.) "If economic growth is founded on an ever-increasing reliance on chemicals, toxins, poisons, and energy by-products, then we will choke on the growth that is supposed to save us. The solution is not to put better filters on our effluent pipes, or line the settling ponds with thicker plastic, or fire the incinerators fifty degrees hotter. We need a different kind of growth, one that reduces and changes the inputs of raw materials and energy, and simultaneously eliminates the outputs of waste. We will have environmental success as a nation when we have eliminated most if not all toxic substances. When planes still swoop down and aerial spray a field in order to kill a predator insect with pesticides, we are in the Dark Ages of commerce. Maybe one-thousandth of this aerial insecticide actually prevents the infestation. The balance goes into the leaves, into the soil, into the water, into all forms of wildlife, into ourselves." (52)
6.) "To pay the bills from the past, we need a means. To act we need a way to serve. For those who say that times are tough, that we can ill afford sweeping changes because the existing system is already broke or hobbled, consider that the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R. spent over $10 trillion on the Cold War, enough money to replace the entire infrastructure of the world, every school, every hospital, every roadway, building and farm. In other words, we bought and sold the whole world to defeat a political movement." (58)
7.) "Because our automobile exhaust is fairly clean if not invisible, it is difficult to conceive of carbon dioxide as a pollutant. After all, we all exhale carbon dioxide; it is food for our plants. Another way of imagining the scale of the carbon dioxide problem is by removing its two oxygen molecules. Looked at that way, every time you fill up and use a tank of gas in a medium-sized American car, you are depositing in the atmosphere the equivalent of a 100-pound sack of pure carbon, 5.6 pounds for every gallon of gasoline. Now try to imagine the 450 million automobiles on the road today, the railroads and trucks, the tractors and heavy equipment, the chainsaws and motorcycles, the diesel fuel for the ships, the jet fuel for airplanes, and to them add the oil- and coal-fired steam turbines generating 100 million megawatts of electricity, the thousands of steel works fed with coke, the natural gasoline flared at petroleum wellheads and burned on our stovetops. When the year is over, not counting the 1 to 2 billion tons of carbon placed into the air from burning forests and grasslands, every person in the world will have placed 2,363 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere, a total of 5,854,000,000 tons, three and a half times as much as we emitted thirty years ago." (85)
8.) "Competition in the marketplace should not be between a company wasting the environment versus one that is trying to save it. Competition should be between which company can do the best job in restoring and preserving the environment, thereby reversing historical price and cost incentives of the industrial system that essentially send the wrong signals to consumers." (90)
(New York: HarperBusiness, 1993)
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