Value Priced, Superb Overview, Isolated from Other Literatures,August 28, 2008
Peter M. Senge et al
At the end of this review following the links to other recommended books, I specify why this book receives four stars instead of five. Shortly I will load several images that will augment my written review, a couple of them recreated from this book, a couple my own original work.
I found this book absorbing, and while I recognized many many areas where the authors could have identified and respected the work of others more explicitly, I also found this to be the single best book for a manager of any business, any non-profit, any educational institution, any citizen advocacy group, with respect to the changing paradigm of business from industrial era obsess on profit and waste wantonly, to the information era of integrated full life cycle with total transparency of all costs (social, environmental, and financial) and ZERO footprint on Earth and society. There is ample original work from the authors, and this book is priced just right as a vehicle for energizing groups of any kind.
Following from my extensive notes:
+ A handful of top global businesses “get it” and have been pioneering footprint free zero waste business model: BP, GE, Coca-Cola, Dupont, even Nike.
+ Non-governmental organizations (NGO) know more about local needs and the emerging marketplace (four billion of the five billion poor, I am very disconcerted to see the business world “writing off” the one billion extreme poor) than any market “intelligence” firm.
+ With credit to Jared Diamond, I read for the first time about the unreal financial reality “bubble,” and the “real real” world bubble that is catching up with it. See John Bogle's book below for a deeper explanation of how the financial mandarins have stolen one fifth of the value and misdirected the Main Street economy while doing so.
+ Although I have read Stewart Hart's work, this book helped me appreciate in detail his Sustainability Value Matrix.
+ Other “big ideas” by others that are integrated into this book include that of civil society stakeholders; ethical consumerism, stabilization wedges (Palala and Socolow),ladder of inference (an anthropological practice), peacekeeping circles, requisite organization, and law of limited competition (Daniel Quinn)
PROBLEM STATEMENT:
1. Industrial Waste (USA wastes 100 billion tons a year, 90% of inputs)
2. Consumer/Commercial Waste & Toxicity (of 8B/year, 5B not absorbable)
3. Non-Renewable Resources in Sharp Decline
4. Renewable Resources down 30-70% and in some cases close to extinction tipping point (fresh water, topsoil, fisheries, forests)
THREE GUIDING IDEAS:
1. No viable path neglects future generations
2. Institutions matter
3. Real change must be grounded in new ways of thinking (see Durant below, capstone lessons from their ten volume history of civilization was that the only real revolution is in the mind of man, and that morality has a strategic value of incalculable proportions).
THREE AREAS OF BUSINESS CONCERN:
1. Energy & Transportation
2. Food & Water
3. Material Waste & Toxicity
THREE PRE-REQUISITES FOR NEW THINKING:
1. Seeing Systems Within Systems (Full Cycle Closed Earth)
2. Collaborating Across Boundaries (No one has it all)
3. Creating & adjusting instead of problem solving in isolation
SIX BASIC IDEAS:
1. Natural system encloses social and economic systems
2. Industrial system must operate in that context
3. Regenerable resources have harvest limits
4. Non-renewable resources are finite.
5. Waste is a cancer on the Earth
6. Socio-cultural community is the vessel for change
THREE SKILLS FOR CREATING THE SUSTAINABLE FUTURE:
1. Convening diversity of viewpoints
2. Listening to all, avoiding advocacy
3. Nurturing relationships over time and above money
EXPLICIT INCENTIVES FOR GOING GREEN:
1. Save dollars internally
2. Make dollars externally
3. Provide customers with competitive value
4. Sustainability as point of differentiation
5. Shape the future of your industry, win market share
6. Become a preferred supplier for giants like Home Depot
7. Change image and brand for better (70%+ of market value)
The book is full of examples of successful change implementation, and includes a number of “toolbox” pages that could be made into a protable booklet or distributed broadly across corporate networks.
I was struck throughout the book with the value of this work in identifying specific personalities and specific companies who could be drawn into the broader holistic work of emerging meta-strategic networks such as Reuniting America, the Transpartisan Institute, and Earth Intelligence Network. Two women in particular jumped out as future global leaders on the order of Lee Kuan Yew and Nelson Mandela:
1. Vivienne Cox of BP
2. Lorraine Bolsinger of GE
I put the book down deeply impressed with its concluding sections, and thinking to myself: China, CHINA, CHINA! That is the center of gravity for getting right on a massive scale in the near term.
I resolved to rate this book as a four for the following reasons, in relative order of annoyance:
1) Crummy index for what could have been a brilliant REFERENCE book, not just an orientation book for leaders that do not read a lot. This index is SO BAD it fails to list all the individuals mentioned, and completely blows off numerous key phrases (e.g. sustainability wedges) that would be in any properly created professional index.
2) No literature search and total isolation from the major literatures of Collective Intelligence, Wealth of Networks, Organizational Intelligence, Integral Consciousness, Closed Systems Engineering, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, and so on.
3) Understandable use of the iconic name of the lead author, but in all probability actually written by the other four authors.
4) Really marginal reference section and no bibliography (even more valuable would have been an annotated bibliography).
5) Absolutely clueless on the means of visualizing and using world-class visualization to create compelling multi-dimensional mental images (this is not to say I am any better, just that they missed a chance to be “the” reference work for the next seven years).
Bottom line on the deficiency: I read very broadly, and am increasingly distressed at the continuing isolation of authors from one another's work. It's time every work of this importance do a proper job of connecting to other works.
Double Spaced Very Useful Tour of the Energy Horizon, May 2, 2008
Miriam Horn
I like this book and recommend it for students of any age from high school to the geriatric crowd that I represent. It has a super index but no mention of Lester Brown or Herman Daly, but that is offset by back cover recomendations from E. O. Wilson, Mark Lewis, and Michael Bloomberg.
Highlights from my fly leaf notes:
+ 1977 Clean Air was a command and control one size fits all that did not pass the market test
+ Lead author and others with the Environmental Defense Fund were instrumental in getting the 1990 Clear Air Act passed.
+ Making clean air a commodity makes the environment a profit center
+ The author is fully aware that Acts of God are in fact Acts of Man. Another book, I cannot remember which, tells us that changes to the planet that used to take 10,000 years now take three. Not only do we need real time science, but we also need The Precautionary Principle: A Critical Appraisal
+ Clean energy is described by one sources as “the mother of all markets.”
+ The author considers the energy markets to be completely “rigged” and notes that grain based ethanol, which I have called idiocy on more than one occasion, exists because of lobbying from Archer Daniels Midland among others.
+ In 2005 solar power grew by 45%.
+ Solar is distributed power, storage is a major obstacle.
+ The author clearly excited by Silicon Valley nano-tech, and also cautious about what we do not know when it is destabilized.
+ The solar energy industry is shooting for the Home Depot marketplace, stuff so simple I could install it. The author also tells us that banks are starting to get into power purchase agreements that will finance clean energy the way a home or car might be mortgaged. Home depot level will also mean graceful degradation and no “crash” or energy equivalent of Bill Gate's “blue screen of death”.
+ Concentrating the sun is another promising approach. The author tells us that solar energy is six times more land efficient than wind energy.
+ Cuba is sitting on a sugar cane gold mine, biofuels with zero emissions are on the way from sugar modification.
+ Algae is covered, as well as bacteria.
+ Ocean power is also making headway, and is consistent, predictable, and has a high energy density.
+ Earth thermal includes hot water that comes with oil, previously considered a nusiance.
+ Coal is getting a make-over, and biomimicry is helping. It must get a make-over because it is an essential part of the mid-term power solution.
+ Sequestration is working and will work long enough to matter.
+ Regenerative reserves (e.g. the Amazon) are an essential part of the future. More more on this see the lovely and informative Climate Change and Biodiversity
+ Manure is turning into a major league energy source (when it's not contaminating our spinach, there is a whole land under surface water use deal here that we just do not understand.
+ Energy efficiency, hybrid cars, and smarter land use (compacting towns and cities to increase efficiency of public transportation) are part of the solution.
+ All parties will spend $10 trillion over the next thirty years to achieve clean energy.
This is a fine book. See also the WIRED Magazine Cover Story from 2000, it came out the same month Dick Cheney was meeting secretly with Enron and Exxon executives.
I like this book very much, in part because after 20 years of thinking of myself as a reformist beating his head against the idiot secret world, I now realize I am a social entrepreneur who has turned his back on secrets and is focused on creating public intelligence in the public interest.
The authors made me smile with their early explanation that most social entrepreneurs can be so unreasonable as to be called lunatic. This is precisely what happened to me when I published “E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, and Intelligence” in the Fall 1992 edition of the Whole Earth Review–for having the temerity to suggest that we should emphasize open sources of information instead of spying, and sharing instead of hoarding, I was told that Sandra Cruzman, the top woman at CIA at the time, said “this confirms Steele's place on the lunatic fringe.” So forgive me for this sidebar, but this book speaks to me in very personal as well as socially meaningful terms, it resonates with me, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to think about ways of doing good while doing well enough.
I always look for whether authors are respecting those that came before or have made adjacent contributions, and on that score this book is completely satisfactory. It is also blessed by the authors' broad range of examples, carefully selected from what is clearly a universe they know better than anyone else.
Citing George Bernard Shaw, they explain early on that “unreasonable people” are seen so for their seeking to abandon outmoded thoughts, mindsets, or practices. Amen, brother!
This is not a feel-good book in intent, although it achieves that effect. It is a serious book that methodically reviews new business models, leadership styles, and thinking about value creation. It held my total attention over two evenings of reading.
The authors offer esteem to social entrepreneurs with the observation that corporations are noticing and hiring such individuals for three reasons:
1. They see the future sooner than the average cubicle resident
2. They help retain talent by making the business challenging
3. They bring love and fun into the office environment
The authors caution that social entrepreneurs fail more often than not, but they persist and ultimately find means of making a difference while making a living.
They suggest that immature markets are best explored by non-profits while noting that hybrids with blended values are the most interesting forms.
Page 5 is suitable for scaling up and framing for the office. The ten characteristics of social entrepreneurs (severely abbreviated here):
1. Shrug off ideology and discipline
2. Focus on practical solutions
3. Innvoate
4. Do social value creation and SHARE
5. Jump in without waiting for back-up
6. Have unwavering beliefs in innate capacity of others
7. Dogged determination
8. Passion for change
9. Have a great deal to teach change makers in other sectors
0. Healthy impatience (don't do well in bureaucracies)
They tell the reader that confusion is a normal circumstance for social entrepreneurs, whom they define as those that take “direct action that generates a paradigm shift” while attacking an “unsatisfactory equilibrium.”
They see a deep and lasting need for social entrepreneurs because coming decades will require unprecedented levels of system change (I add, and will have unprecedented and often unanticipated disasters, many turning into catastrophes for lack of planning, preparation, or responsiveness)
The authors tell us that the best of the charitable foundations are shifting from plain grant-making to sequential investments and deeper continuing relations with those being funded. At the same time they tell us that corporation and private equity firms are beginning to notice the value options in this space. [I think to myself, this is great, just at a time when corporations are also understanding green to gold, sustainable design, ecology of commerce, and true cost accounting.]
I am totally impressed with one page that describes how China has developed new green accounting methods and now realizes that environmentally-related work loss is no less than 10% of their newly-understood green Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
They provide a fine overview of new measures of merit including the double bottom line, the triple bottom line, the Social Return on Investment (SROI), and the “blended value proposition.”
On page 20 I see a quote worth posting: social entrepreneurs “bring together natural, social, human, intellectual, and cultural forms of capital.”
LEVERAGE is a key concept for these authors, and one I take very serioiusly as they describe how small investments can leverage indigenous capabilities (such as hard work from people who are poor but not stupid), philanthropic and other support, business partnerships, and income from previously untapped markets (at the Base of the Pyramid, like my Seattle friends they are clearly not comfortable with C. K. Prahalad's choice of title in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks).
The middle section of the book discusses three models and examples of each:
1. The leveraged non-profit, which is hard to scale, dependent on hand-outs, focuses on public goods and being a change catalyst
2. The hybrid non-profit that combines non-profit and revenue generating activities, with a focus on outcome generation, empowering the people at the base, community-centric, focused on low cost long term, and on driving the market or pulling more traditional providers into the market.
3. The social business, which focuses on both social and financial returns, scales much more easily because it can assume both debt and equity. We learn that Whole Foods is an example, that it drove the organic market and leverages voluntary cooperation among many networks. Another example combines sustainable organic agriculture, rural employment of the uneducated but willing, price security for farmers, and transparent information.
I want to emphasize the latter: transparent information. I have been persuaded by numerous books on the wealth of knowledge as well as my own 30+ years as an intelligence professional that shared information and transparent decision support is a wealth creation process that scales fast and inexpensively.
The authors go on to discuss ten markets that lend themselves to social entrepreneurship, and I will list them with tiny examples–the book is absolutely a gem that merits buying a reading from end to end.
1. Demographic: condoms, aging, disadvantages
2. Financial: child knowledge of finances, simple technologies, helping poor self-organize for leverage
3. Nutritiional: duck rice, food bank, food waste elevated to tasty and nutritious near zero cost consumables
4. Resources: energy, energy, energy (I would add water, and throw a respectful salute the the George Mason University professor born in Bangladesh who created a virtually free means of removing arsenic from water using a combination of charcoal and steel filings (from the ships torn apart there, see The Outlaw Sea : A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime
5. Environment: educatae, plant trees
6. Health: high volume low cost (or free), cateract cures, telephone centers to help poor remotely
7. Gender (best ROI ever is on educating women, see A Half Penny on the Federal Dollar: The Future of Development Aid)
8. Educational: end rote learning, cross-pollinate, barefoot college that trains doctors and engineers narrowly and without years of credentialing (my own idea is call centers to education “one cell call at a time,” I would love to see India do this sooner than later)
9. Digital: embrace and empower poor as citizens
0. Security: redefine as jobs for everyone rather than high-end military
The last third of the book covers
1. helping those at the base of the pyramid with access (e.g. curing neglected diseases); price (slash to 10%); and quality (e.g. $100 laptops).
2. Democratizing technology (four clusters: basic building blocks, motorcycles and free neutral air in and out of disaster zones; media and media technology; and genetics and biology.
3. Changing the rules of the game (search for my “New Rules for the New Craft of Intelligence” free on the Internet). They emphasize transparency; accountability; certification; land reform; emission trading; and value & valuation.
4. Scaling solutions, with examples covering true costs, clean toilets for tens of millions, and General Electric's commitment to 17 clean technoloogies, sustainability attracting the best and the brightest of the social entrepreneurs.
5. Lessons for leaders (below does not do the section justice–buy the book and read the whole thing):
– Focus on scalable entrepreneurial solutions
– Tackle apparently insolvable problems
– Be prepared to fail–but learn from failures
– Experiment with new business models
– Close the pay gap
– Join forces
– Seed tomorrow's markets
– Fuel growing expectations
– Help democratize technology
– Work to change the system
– Figure out how to scale and replicate
– Within reason, cultivate the art of being unreasonable
I put the book down extremely pleased with the content and the presentation. This is a very serious book for serious people, not just social entrepreneurs, but Second and Third World policy makers, bankers, investors, international and non-governmental leaders, and so on.
As I see it, social networks and collaboration among what I call the “ten tribes” (government, military, law enforcement, academia, business, media, non-governmental, labor, religion, and civil society) are in their very infancy. The Internet has not been matched by easily available information sharing and decision support tools (DARPA STRONG ANGEL and TOOZL is a start), and governments persist is wasting tens of billions waging war and stealing secrets, instead of waging peace and nurturing open sources of information in 183 languages.
This book continued the inspiration that I have been getting from others, and here I list a few others including the first book from Earth Intelligence Network (free at the website):
I wrote a rave review on the author's earlier book, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time and eagerly anticipated this book. It has been a real disappointment. Only the foreword by E.O. Wilson kept me from setting it aside entirely.
As someone who reads broadly and sees with increasing dismay the insularity of citation cabals, somewhat arthritic communities of practice, and a tendency to ignore diverse perspectives, I was immediately annoyed by this book's failure to respect Lester Brown, Herman Daly, Paul Hawkin, C. K. Prahalad, and J. F. Rischard, to name but a few. The author does not appear to have read the High Level Threat Panel Report of the United Nations, and his over-all presentation, while accurate and erudite, is also dense, narrow, and of dubious implementability.
If you are steeped in the literature and care deeply about the details, then this book is an absolutely essential reference, and for that reason receives four stars.
The author opens with “Humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet.” Early on he says that sustainable energy could be achieved for 1% of world income. He believes Asia will be the economic center of gravity in the future (assuming this includes India, I agree).
He identifies six key factors for the near future:
1. Convergence
2. More people, higher incomes
3. Asian Century
4. Urban Century
5. Environmental Challenges
6. Poorest Billion
He loses one star, apart from failing to honor the real pioneers including Herman Daly, father of Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications, for overly general platitudes about global collaboration, technology, saving Darfur as if anything he lists was possible, and generally neglecting so many factors and metrics as to leave me wondering where the book was going.
He does well in itemizing the importance of the anthropocene, which tends to be neglected by many, listing impacts on land, water, carbon, nitrogen, plants, birds, and fisheries. The loss of amphibians and pollinators (e.g. bees) is noted.
He lists seven climate change impacts:
1. Rising ocean levels
2. Habitat destruction
3. Increased disease transmission
4. Changes in agricultural productivity
5. Changes in water availability
6. Increased natural hazards
7. Changes in ocean chemistry
These are all important, but I am distressed to see no reference to Blue Frontier, Blue Death, or Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource. This confirms my unease–this is a brilliant man with a great deal of influence who is out of touch with a number of very significant observers whose intellectual contributions cannot be ignored in a work such as this.
Coming back to Darfur, one recommendation he makes with which I totally agree, is the value of introducing cell phones and cell towers to the high-risk areas. I wrote to the CEOs of both Nokia and Motorola about such an initiative a year ago, and never received a response. They do not seem to appreciate the reality that cell phones, like razors, should be given away, and the transactions monetized instead (“sell the shave, not the razor”).
He makes five points about the US that are certainly serious, but as one who has read Joe Nye, Jonathan Schell, Chalmers Johnson, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Peters, and so many others, I see the following five points as the equivalent of a teen-age driver lecturing on highway safety:
1. Limits of military power (see Nye's Paradox of American Power)
2. Wars of identity (see Peter's Wars of Blood and Faith)
3. Drivers of violence (see UN High Level Threat Panel above)
4. Foreign Assistance (see O'Hanlon, Half Penny on the Dollar)
5. Real Security (proliferation, environment, failed states–ho hum)
The chapter on global problem solving was entirely reasonable, and I worry that I am communicating too harsh a sense of the book. If you are a geek and have time on your hands, by all means buy this book. Otherwise, read my reviews of all the others, and then buy Rischard's book and spend time at the Earth Intelligence Network (all free).
He says the public sector should
1. Fund basic science (never mind the Republican war on science)
2. Promote early stage technologies (never mind Monsanto's seeds of death or the Transylvanian Dracula patent system designed to retard human progress by locking up new stuff so the legacy stuff can continue to sell)
3. Create a global policy framework for solutions (see Earth Intelligence Network and the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers, see especially the EarthGame(TM) as devised by Medard Gabel who helped Buckminster Fuller create the original analog World Game)
4. Finance the scale-up of successful innovations and technologies (huh?)
No mention of the public sector's most important role in creating a social environment that is stable, orderly, and healthy, so that citizens can be educated and gainfully employed while exporting goodness.
He suggests the private sector has two core responsibilities besides making a profit (at our expense, see comment below on true costs):
1. Investing in R&D, often with public funding
2. Implementing large-scale technological solutions in partnership with the public sector
Hmmm. No mention of Green to Gold, Sustainable Design, Services Science, identification of “true cost” for all products and services, etc. There is an entire planet of literature relevant to this books purpose that does not appear here. I respect the author and his accomplishments, but at this point in the book I am exasperated.
The not-for-profit sector has five key roles, per the author:
1. Public advocacy (perhaps public education would be a better term)
2. Social entrepreneurship and problem solving (good)
3. Seed funding of solutions (but not willy nilly–has anyone heard of the concept of a creating a Global Range of Gifts Table for each of the ten threats across each of the twelve policies, with amounts from $10 to $100 million, such that individuals–80% of the giving–can select items directly, and Civil Affairs and NGO individuals all over the world can “call in” peace targets to the Table?)
4. Accountability of government and the private sector (see the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and what David Walker will be doing there–that is a first-class endeavor)
5. Scientific research, notably in academic institutions (where we should be emphasizing very low cost licensing to the governments of India, South Africa and others, and burying the profiteering pharmaceuticals and the predatory seed companies).
The author follows the above with a global funding architecture that is not persuasive and that would not satisfy my colleagues from the Office of Management and Budget.
The book ends with a limp, suggesting eight steps individuals can take:
1. Learn
2. Travel
3. Join
4. Community (face to face)
5. Social Networks (online)
6. Workplace
7. Live personally (Gandhi: be the change you want to see in the world.)
My bottom line: this book is not ready for prime time. It is dense, disappointing, and it will never be read nor understood by the kinds of people–less E.O. Wilson and George Soros–that have real power over the $1 trillion in charitable giving, the $1 trillion in spending on war instead of peace, or the $1 trillion in corporate and government and other foreign assistance.
I challenge the author to post a one page summary suitable for a President, and a one-page spending plan that addresses the ten threats and twelve policies that I list below for the convenience of the Amazon shopper:
TEN THREATS (LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft and others on High Level Threat Panel of the United Nations–in order of priority)
01 Poverty
02 Infectious Disease
03 Environmental Degradation (includes climate change and warming)
04 Inter-State Conflict (we spend $1.3 trillion on waging war)
05 Civil War (often occasioned by corruption and our support for 42 of the 44 dictators on the planet–see Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
06 Genocide
07 Other Atrocities (kidnapping for body parts; kidnapping dumb cute girls from Connecticut that go to “movie auditions” alone)
08 Proliferation (no mention of small arms, the real weapon of mass destruction: the USA sells five times more weapons to the rest of the world than the UK, three times more than Russia–and the worst proliferators of nuclear, biological and chemical are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Reality check, anyone?)
09 Terrorism (a law enforcement problem, not even close to the casualties from automobile accidents in the US alone)
10 Transnational crime ($2 trillion against the US $7 trillion, and getting worse–they have better intelligence, encryption, computers, and wages than any government force)
The twelve policies, based on an EIN study of the last 5 presidential election “mandate for change books”:
01 Agriculture
02 Diplomacy
03 Economy
04 Education
05 Energy
06 Family
07 Health
08 Immigration
09 Justice
10 Security
11 Society
12 Water
Last but not least, the author, who is without question one of the very highest experts in his narrow chosen domain, appears out of touch with the literatures on collective intelligence and on the wealth of networks. I will mention only one book (there are others, including one now free at EIN on COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace). See my favorite, Yochai Benckler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.
I am going to end with a harsh thought: As much as I admire Columbia University, as much as I see the possibilities for the United Nations, what I sense in this book is that the author is deeply entrenched in a pyramidal systems of systems, and is still in the “command and control” top-down elites rule mode. Common Wealth is not going to be orchestrated by the New York mandarins–it is going to be created by We the People, using Open Money, boycotting all products and services whose true costs are externalized (e.g. Exxon did not make $40 billion in profit–they externalized $12 in costs to the earth for EACH gallon of gas they sold–one will not find that fact in this author's book–he might not be invited back to the high table).
See for instance (Amazon limits me to ten links, sorry):
Infinite Wealth by Barry Carter (the first real visionary)
Wealth of Networks by Tom Stewart
Revolutionary Wealth by Alvin and Heidi Toffler
Group Genius by Keith Sawyer
Wikinomics by Don Tapscott
Then there is the sustainability and ecological economics literature:
Seven Tomorrows by Paul Hawkins
Green to Gold by by Daniel Esty and Andrew Williams
Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawkins
Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawkins
Capitalism 3.0 by Peter Barnes
The Philosophy of Sustainable Design by Jason McClellan
and so on….
Argh. Annoying. I expected so MUCH more. I expect some negative votes. There are those that simply cannot stand to be told they have missed a big part of the diversity answer. As we used to say in Viet-Nam, “Sorry 'bout that.” It takes ALL of us, SHARING and creating COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE from the BOTTOM UP, to create Common Wealth. This book is certainly accurate as far as it goes, well-intentioned, but looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
5 of 5 stars.Ā Treasure Trove that Ends with USA-India Axis of Good
March 9, 2008
I've been struggling with this book, published in 2006, for months. Today I realized I could combine my notes with a handful of key index entries to create a more useful synthesis. I end with ten other books I have reviewed that augment this one.
My first impression of the book was soured by the absence of any mention of green chemistry, ecological economics, or ecology of commerce. I've known about citation analysis clusters since 1970, but I grow increasingly frustrated by the fragmentation of knowledge and the constantly growing barriers between schools of thought within political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic.
An important early distinction is between industrial-cost for profit capitalism and commercial speculative capitalism. Toward the end of the book I finally encountered the author's emphasis on national priorities, and I for one condemn all seeds that do not reproduce naturally. In agriculture, economy, energy, health, my bottom line is that anything that retards the eradication of hunger, poverty, sustainment, or individual and social health gains, is inherent against the laws of God and man.
Early notes include:
+ Information science plays huge role in genomics. I am reminded of the convergence in the 1990's among cognitive and information science, nano-technology, bio-technology, and earth science. I have a later note, “life sciences becoming information sciences.”
+ Although E. O. Wilson is not cited, the author is on a clear convergence in taking about how valuation is a vital aspect of getting it right. I think of India as IT rich and farm poor–they are allowing the aquifers to drop a meter a year because farmers can sell a tanker-full of water for $4, which is insane, and 2,000 farmers a year commit suicide in the face of drought and debt. Valuation is a critical national function.
+ This work falls within a new category of reading that I have been increasingly impressed by, “ethnographic,” or the study of localities and particularities to map global system that is not generic, homogenized, or blurred..
+ As the author does not cite Paul Hawken or Herman Daly, I draw the distinction between the author's focus on “natural capitalism” as of the privatization of biocapital and the patenting of gnomes, and the purer definition, of natural capitalism as one that understands the true costs over the lifetime of the materials being used including water (4000 liters of water Bangladesh cannot afford to export in a designer cotton shirt), and that makes the case for going green to create gold.
+ The author views biocapital as a combination of circuits of land, labor, and value; and biopolitics.
+ Life sciences are being “overdetermined” by speculative capitalism. I agree, and apart from India's symbiotic relationship with the US, I would like to see India develop a special relationship with Cuba and with the global academic community to take patents away from speculators and carpet bagging profiteers with no morality.
+ Technoscience changing laws (I am reminded that Google is now a suprnational entity that no government understands or regulates, something similar is happening in technoscience where Recombinant DNA technology is undermining the future of life.
+ Political economy is an epistemology.
+ Life, labor, & language–biology, political economy, philology central to the knowledge of and management of humanity.
+ VERY IMPORTANT: Game requires playing in FUTURE in order to stimulate and guide present. Visit Earth Intelligence Network to read about Medard Gabel's EarthGame that for $2M a year can offer this up across the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers, with embedded budgets of all organizations (governments, corporations, international and non-governmental, and charitable foundations).
+ Market valuation buries ethics, defines “allowable” ethics. Author touches, and I really respect this, on the moral value of information. Later on in the book the author cites Michael Fischer on “ethical plateaus.”
+ The author addresses the “social lives” of biological materials and biological information (note: I violently oppose Google's biomedical information initiative–we may as well become their zombies). In this vein, “ownership” of any of the bio-information constrains seamless sharing, enhancement, and I would add privacy. [Easy answer: CISCO AON on individual recyclable server-routers so individuals control all the information–medical, financial, etc. at their point of creation.] If CISCO will not do this, then India needs to.
+ Useful detailed discussion of conflicts & costs of privatized information versus information as a public good. The author makes case for blurring of lines and avoidance of either/or binary approach. I've already solved this: information in the aggregate should be public, while individual instances are private. Simple example: average spare parts costs can be derived from the aggregate while protecting the individual prices paid by any one of the contributors. AON, not Google, is the key.
+ The author emphasizes that the genome data demands robust detailed medical history to be valued. He contrasts India bio-ethics versus US. Sidenote: computational ethics are just as crucial.
+ I like, very much, the India public sector laboratories. I firmly believe that all health and education should be free, a public good similar to public safety.
+ Biocapital is complicated by context, distance, culture, financial, and technical variances among the competing parties.
+ I credit the author with this but I may have drawn it out: if we now see the value of collective intelligence, why are we having so much trouble seeing the value of collective intellectual property (the Creative Commons not-with-standing)?
+ Biopolitics centers of life (citing Foucault), accounting for and taking care of the population at large are central.
+ Political ecologies at all levels, gifting versus indebtedness, unions as a factor. UNIONS as a major factor. Vision fundamental. Direct links among ideology, capital, and locality.
+ Excluded populations (e.g. HIV not eligible…) can cause them to be consumed populations.
This is a deep complicated book hard for the lay reader (which I am), so to do it justice, I am resorting for the first time to a short list of key terms from the index that more represent the content:
belief systems
bioethical issues
biopolitics
biotechnology industry
capitalism, biocapital as new phase
diseases and illnesses
drug development marketplace
economic issues, multiple forms of currency
ethnographic research
genomics bioethics and industry
global market terrains
hype, capitalism
information ownership
intellectual property
life sciences
market value and non-market value
patient-in-waiting
populations, classification of
production issues
promissory biocapitalist futures
public domain issues
research issues
social issues
speed issues
temporality issues
therapeutic development
value access to
vision, commercial value
This is a pretty spectacular book, and someone did a great job across the board in presenting it.
This is a gem of an educational book. Mixing case studies with elaborating chapters on key concepts, it's as a good a volume as I have found for teaching undergraduates, graduates, and practitioners (farmers, factory managers, investors) the core ideas needed to restore a sustainable social-ecological system.
Highlights for me:
+ Optemization is a false premise, simplifies complex systems we do not understand, with the result that we end up causing long-term damage.
+ Resilience thinking is systems thinking. I cannot help but think back to all of the excellent work in the 1970's and 1980's–the authors were simply a quarter century ahead of their time.
+ In a nut-shell, resilient system can absorb severe disturbance.
+ System resilience is affected by context, connections across scales of time and space, and current system state in relations to threshholds.
+ Fresh water, fisheries, and topsoil depletion are major failures.
+ Drivers of environmental degradation are poverty, willful excessive consumption, and lack of knowledge (from another book, I recall that changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three, one reason we need real-time science).
+ Key concepts are threshholds and adaptive cycles. Adaptive cycles have four phases: Rapid Growth; Conservation; Release; and Reorganization.
+ Redundancy is NOT a dirty word (just as intelligence–decision support–should not be a dirty word within the United Nations)
+ Ecological networks cannot be understood nor nurtured with a tight linking and understanding of the social networks that interact with the ecological networks.
+ Subsidies are a form of social denial, as they subsidize unsustainable practices and prevent adaptation and change.
+ Lovely–absolutely lovely–chart on page 89 about time-scales of climate and natural disasters like major fires.
+ One size does not fit all–solutions for one social-ecological network, e.g. in the USA, will not be the same as for another, e.g. in Norway.
+ Diversity is the key to regeneration.
+ Governances must be able to see and act upon key intervention points.
+ A Resilient world would be characterized by:
1. Diversity
2. Ecological variables
3. Modularity
4. Acknowledgement of slow variables
5. Tight feedbacks
6. Social capital
7. Innovation
8. Overlap in governance
9. Ecosystem services
Within this small and very easy to absorb book one finds a great annotated bibliography of recommended readings, a fine reference section, and a very solid index.
