Environment (Solutions) – Page 22 – Public Intelligence Blog

2006/12/142009/12/04

Review: Cradle to Cradle–Remaking the Way We Make Things

4 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Economics, Environment (Solutions), Intelligence (Commercial), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

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Hawken & Pals Better, But These Authors Are Part of the A Team,

December 14, 2006

William McDonough, Michael Braungart

Warning. This is a plastic book (recycled something other than paper, waterproof). A pen smears, so plan to use a pencil if you are a normal person who reads serious books with an annotating hand. It is a fast light read, and in some ways I think the authors do not do their pioneering work full justice.

It was very helpful to me to have first read Paul Hawken's books (with his co-authors–see my reviews for a fast overview), namely Seven Tomorrows, The Ecology of Commerce, and Natural Capitalism. With that background, and of course having read Limits to Growth and related works in the 1970's, I found these authors to be impressive, coherent, and on target. HOWEVER, someone without that broader background could possibly find this book facile and unpersuasive if not somewhat opaque, which would be unfair to the authors. They are brilliant and merit our attention.

The book opens with a review of the industrial era which is characterized by cradle to grave design, meaning all things are designed for eventual disposal, generally at the taxpayers' expense and without regard to the natural capital cost of what was produced. This era, as the authors describe it, has been characterized by one size fits all planning (which wastes enormously on diverse points along the spectrum of actual need); by design for worst case conditions (more waste when they do not materialize 80% of the time); by the application of brute force to the land (with all that implies in energy consumption); by a monoculture concept (lawns with pesticide instead of natural gardens as eco-systems), and relatively crude products.

The authors' bottom lines here are that being less bad is not good enough, because in a closed system you can only go so far in relegating stuff to a grave, eventually the whole Earth will be one massive grave.

The four R's, and they give credit throughout the book to others, are Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Regulate.

They are very specific in stating that downcycling is not true recycling, and most often leads to a cumulative increase of toxins with each reuse.

They are conscious of and discuss conflicting views of growth, but like Paul Hawken, they are clearly pro-business and articulate in pointing out that if Henry Ford can see the value of going green, then all businesses should take this general message seriously: sustainable profit is ONLY possible if you go green.

They distinguish between biological recycling and technical recycling. Although many more examples could have been provided of both processes being successfully implemented, they go far enough to be understood on this point.

“Clean” water is not so clean after all. Just as fish are absorbing and passing on to human very high levels of mercury, so also is even the cleanest of water being found to be contaminated in alarming ways.

The authors conclude that it is possible to design cradle to cradle products if one commits to converting the products into leased services, with the “producer” being responsible for taking any given product back for proper and full recycling. This gives the producer every incentive for designing products that can be easily broken down, re-used, and purified of all toxins from cradle to cradle.

The localizing of processes, but especially of waste treatment, is another theme that runs strongly here. Not only can neighborhoods create aquatic biological localized waste treatment processes that are beautiful and natural, but since the water they drink comes out the other end, they are individually incentivized to avoid dropping toxins into the natural waste system.

The authors have a triangle comprised of Energy, Equity, and Economy, and without getting into the public philosophy (see my review of the book by that title), suggest that the three must go forward together.

They point out that feedback is important, that information improvements can contribute a great deal to our making progress along the lines they suggest, with business being the greatest beneficiary.

The book concludes with five steps and five guiding principles.

The five steps are:
1) Get rid of known toxins and culprits in every product and service
2) Follow informed personal preferences
3) Do detailed analysis of the positive, neutral, and negative components of any product or process
4) Design around the positive
5) Reinvent constantly–exceed the first fix again and again

The five guiding principles are:
1) Signal intention
2) Restore, restore, restore
3) Innovate and keep innovating
4) Understand and prepare for the learning curve of the client
5) Exert inter-generational (sustainable) responsibility

This is not a good book to read in isolation. It earned four stars because of the authors' proven accomplishments, but the book I wish they had written would have had much more substance of successful natural designs from the past, and proposed new designs for neighborhoods, townships, rural areas, and cities as well as factories. It would be quite interesting for these two authors to create a book on “Designing Forever: The Way It Needs to Be.” If they write it, I will buy it and review it here at Amazon.

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2006/12/132009/12/04

Review: Seven Tomorrows

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Environment (Solutions), Future, Survival & Sustainment, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

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Published in 1982, Relevant Today and Proven with Time,

December 13, 2006

Paul Hawken

I am finding that many of the books from the 1970's and 1980's that focused on Limits to Growth, the global reach of multinational corporations, the dangers of centralized financial power, are all becoming accutely relevant now. They were a quarter century before the mainstream, and are now ready to be accepted and acted on by at least 80 million in the USA alone.

This is such a book. It focuses on five “driving trends”: energy, climate, food, the economy, and values. The latter is especially important, as we discover that our failure to adapt our educational systems, and our failure to *have* national values, insisting on government being “neutral,” has actually made us hollow and vulnerable.

The set the stage by listing key factors that today are much more worse: diverse social values, a turbulent world devoid of the stabilizing influence of the Cold War, slow energy growth, burdensome debt (who could have imagined what Bush-Cheney would do), an aging population, slowing economic growth, a social legacy of distrust (which also increases the costs of doing business), no end to crime (now $2 trillion a year, which along with $2 trillion in waste, makes the remaining $5 trillion in legal economics seem much devalued), continuing environmental degradation, rising level of disease and related costs, and deterioration of soil (meaning topsoil, which pesticides have now poisoned).

The authors had no way of knowing in 1982 that in 2006 the High Level Threat Panel of the United Nations would identify the ten global threats as poverty, infectuous disease, environmental degradation, inter-state conflict, civil war, genocide, other atrocities, proliferation, terrorism, and transnational crime. For the cost of this book in 1982, we could have saved a quarter century of loss had the adults at the time been willing to listen.

In the manner made so internationally respected by Peter Schwartz, who is one of the three authors, the book then posits a positive, middle of the road, and negative future for each of the five driving trends, and from that combination, then derives the seven scenarios that are ours to choose from:

1) The Official Future
2) The Center Holds
3) Mature Calm
4) Chronic Breakdown
5) Apocalyptic Transformation
6) Beginnings of Sorrow
7) Living Within Our Means

Each is discussed in detail, including tables showing specific countries likely to prosper or decline, and specific occupations likely to be in demand or face extinction.

The book ends with a discussion of cultural economics and why values matter, and provides at the end three tables of values as the authors anticipated they would be among a Right Wing, a Left Wing, and a Transformation Alternative. The latter, contrary to my expectations, is not a balanced reasoned transpartisan value system, but one that romanticizes some aspects and ignores other (e.g. crime and national-level threats including poverty).

The author first posit an emphasis on decentralization (today I use the word localization) and also address the dangers of moving so far in favor of individualism that the good of the group is lost sight of.

The bibliography is as fine a list of important books from the decade preceeding the publication of this book as to be worthy of study on its own merits.

I put the book down lamenting how ill-suited our current systems of governance and business are to the need for listening to reasonable people who can actually forecast the future and warn us of the dire consequences. Peak Oil was well known in 1974-1979, but because of the values in place, the Senate and the oil companies felt they could ignore the problem and deceive the majority of the people–the many who did not read or think about such matters, postponing the day of reckoning, which is today, and dramatically reducing our flexibility while increasing the cost to future generations of the remedial measures.

This book is still relevant, and indeed all the more enjoyable in the context of the two latest books by Paul Hawkins and friends, and the forthcoming book “Blessed Unrest.” I was fortunate to buy this book from a third party through Amazon, and am quite pleased to have it for its current value as well as its tangible demonstration that we did indeed have smart people a quarter century ago who knew exactly where we would end up if we continue with “the official story” of endless growth without regard to the “natural capital” of the planet.

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2006/12/082010/02/14

Review: The Ecology of Commerce–A Declaration of Sustainability

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Complexity & Resilience, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Intelligence (Commercial), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Foundation Reference for Future of Business Without Waste,

December 8, 2006

Paul Hawken

This is easily one of the top ten books on the pragmatic reality of what Herman Daly calls “ecological economics” (see my list of Environmental Security).

The author excels at painting a holistic view of the realities that are not being addressed by the media or by scholars in anything other than piecemeal fashion.

The bottom line: what we are doing now in the face of accelerating decay (changes and losses that used to take 10,000 years now take three years) is the equivalent of “trying to bail out the Titanic with teaspoons.” On page 21-22 the author states that we are using 10,000 days of energy creation every day, or 27 years of energy each day.

This is a practical book. In brief, we can monetize the costs of the decay, we can show people the *real* cost of each product and in this way inspire both boycotts (of wasteful products) and boycotts (Jim Turner's term) of solar energy and long-lasting repairable products.

The author appears to be both pro-business and very wise in seeing that the cannot save the environment by destroying business, but rather must save business so it can save the environment–we must help business understand that doing more with less is what they must do to survive.

The author includes a recurring theme from the literature, that diversity is an option generator, and hence one of the most precious aspects of life on Earth. Diversity is the ultimate source of wealth, and anything that reduces diversity is impoverishing the planet and mankind. In a magnificent turn of phrase, the author states that the loss of a species is the loss of a biological library.

At its root this book is about missing information, needed information, about the urgency of making all inputs, processes, and outputs from corporate production transparent. He quotes Vaclav Havel on page 54 as saying that this is an information challenge, a challenge of too much (or too little) information and not enough actionable intelligence supporting sustainable sensible outcomes.

This is also a financial problem that has not been monetized properly. Although E. O. Wilson takes a crack at the strategic or gross costs of saving the Earth in his book “The Future of Life,” this author looks at the retail level and describes the waste inherent in our military system. He reminds me of Derek Leebaert's “The 50 Year Wound” when he notes that the US and the USSR spent over 10 trillion dollars on the Cold War, enough to completely re-make the entire infrastructure of Earth, including all schools. As I myself like to note, for the half trillion we have spent on the war against Iraq, we could instead have given a free $50 cell phone to each of the 5 billion poor people, and changed the planet forever.

The author is compelling in pointing out that conservation alone would save more energy than drilling in Alaska, and that President Reagan not rolled back gasoline mileage expectations, we would today be free of any dependency of Middle Eastern energy.

A good part of the book focuses on the need to eliminate waste, what some call “cradle to cradle” (waste must be fully absorbed of other pieces of the system), and where waste cannot be eliminated, to include the cost of its storage in the price of the product, requiring producers of products to take them back (e.g. refrigerators).

I am inspired by the author's view that not only is technology NOT a complete solution, but that full employment is possible if we REDUCE our excessive acquisition of technology that not only replaces humans, but also consumes energy and produces pollution.

This is an extraordinarily clever and useful book that fully integrates discussions of feedback loops and especially of financial and legal feedback loops that are now misrepresentative. One example the author uses is the GATT demand that there be no discrimination of “like” products based on methods of production. This is code for blocking labor laws by imposing high tariffs on products made by slaves or under sweatshop conditions.

I completely agree with one of the author's most important opinions, that we must end corporate claims of “personality” and the rights of a person. This has had two pernicious effects, the first allowing corporations to dominate the public debate; and the second of exempting managers from legal liability and transparency.

The book emphasized the restoration of human and natural capital as vital foundations for evaluating investments–this would dramatically reduce the financial criteria's dominance and emphasis on short-term returns that do not reflect the cost of natural resources and lost jobs to the future and the community.

Distressingly but importantly, the author notes that a major component of the cost of goods is in advertising, where corporations spend more on advertising than the government spends on all secondary schools, and on packaging, much of which is designed to last vastly longer than the contents.

I especially liked the author's suggestion that insurance costs be included in the price of homes and of gasoline, essentially making universal insurance affordable for all. I also liked his idea for indexing Nations by their sustainability, i.e. Most Sustainable Nation (MSN).

The author ends with a restatement of his three fundamentals:

1) End waste
2) Shift to renewable power (solar and hydro)
3) Create accountability and feedback

Although this book was published in 1993 and the author has now published “Natural Capital” (next on my reading list), I did not discover it until recently and am now very enthused about the author's newest project, the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER). I am certain in my heart that a bottom up Earth Intelligence Network is forming, and that end-user voluntary labor–social networks–are going to place enough information in the hands of individuals to restore participatory democracy and moral communal capitalism. This author is extraordinary in his understanding and his ability to teach adults about reality and the future.

2006/10/032010/01/13

Review: Human Scale

5 Star, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Intelligence (Public), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Secession & Nullification, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Should be Re-Issued, a Seminal Publication Relevant to Governance

October 3, 2006

Kirkpatrick Sale

I am finding that books written in the 1970's and 1980's a making a comeback and people realize that certain of those authors were a quarter century ahead of their times. Richard Falk is one, Kirkpatrick Sale is the other. This book could usefully be read with Leopold Kohr's “The Breakdown of Nations,” Joel Garreau's “Nine Nations of North America,” and Philip Alcott's “The Health of Nations,” on why sovereignty and the Treaty of Westphalia should be overturned in favor of more localized governance with more universal rights and protections.

The bottom line in this book is crytal clear half-way through the book: at a specific point of scale, variable depending on natural resources, technical and cultural sophistication, etc, an individual's share of earned income goes MORE toward “power” goods and services of common concrn than to their own benefit. It is at this point that “the state” has outgrown its utility and becomes a burden on the individual taxpayer.

It merits comment in this context that there are 27 seccessionist movements in the United States of America, and at least 3 in Canada. As we look at the idiocy of the elective war on Iraq, and the very real prospect that the German Pope has cut a neo-fascist deal with the Karl Roves and Otto Reichs of this world–all descendants of Nazi war criminals admitted to the US under espionage cover, we have to contemplate the possibility that our big states are *out of control* and need to be chopped back to more “human scale.” This is a Nobel Prize kind of book, quite extraordinary.

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2006/09/082009/08/03

2006 State of the Future

6 Star Top 10%, Complexity & Resilience, Environment (Solutions), Future, Games, Models, & Simulations, Intelligence (Public), Strategy, Survival & Sustainment

Clear Map of the Future and What We Do Wrong Now,

September 8, 2006

Jerome C. Glenn and Theodore J. Gordon

I have been much taken with the integrity and wisdom of the Honorable David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, who has been telling Congress that they are not providing for the future and that today's budget is inconsistent with sustainable national security and enduring national prosperity. He is right. This is the book he should buy and give to every Senator and every Representative, along with E. O. Wilson's “The Future of Life” and J. F. Richard's “HIGH NOON: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them.”

The book is actually in two pieces. 129 black and white pages that is comprised of an Executive Summary, a section on Global Challenges, a State of the Future Index, 40 pages on four global energy scenarios, a separate chapter on emerging environmental security issues (see my review of Max Manwaring's “Environmental Security and Global Stability”), and a final chapter on reflections as the project achieves its tenth anniversary.

The printed book also includes a table of contents for the CD-ROM of 5,400 pages with color graphics and global maps that are quite good, and the publishers are to be complemented for providing the CD material in both PDF form and Document form, the latter for ease of extraction of pictures and text for repurposing.

As I get ready to publish a book by Thomas J. Buckholtz entitled “INFORMATION METRICS: The GIST (Gain Impact, Save Time) of Successful Intelligence,” I cannot help but admire the manner in which the authors have leveraged the measurement of political, social, economic, and other indicators of quality and sustainability, a process that was first pioneered by Professors Banks and Textor in the 1970's.

The day will come when this book and the CD are available in a Serious Game that is both receiving near-real-time information feeds from all open sources in all languages, AND is connected to the real-world budgets of all governments and non-governmental organizations and private sector parties so that any individual can type in their zip code and their issue, and see the color-coded “threat condition” corresponding to whether or not their level of government or their organization is spending wisely, what I call “reality-based budgeting.”

The authors have done a superb job of documenting reality, and as I went through the book, I could not help but feel that we need a second book that evaluated national-level budgets in detail, to publicize the erroneous trade-offs that are being made without the public's real understanding or approval–too much money for a heavy-metal military and corporate tax loopholes, not enough for a global educational Marshall Plan and free telecommunications for the five billion poor (easily affordable for the half trillion the USA has wasted on the elective invasion and sustained heavy-handed occupation of Iraq).

In brief, this book, the CD, this project, are a *cornerstone* for building our future. Worth every penny, and worth several hours of a good read and reflection.

2005/04/282010/09/18