In principle and generally in practice, business is rewarded for producing the best product demanded by the market for the lowest price. In classical economics, this free market is an efficient system because the producer has every incentive to be as thrifty and innovative as possible. The market sorts out winners and losers with democratic and sometimes draconian efficiency, relegating the ineffective producers to the economic margins, if not failure. This free-market industrial system took root in a world in which trade was expansive and global. Resources of unusual abundance were wrested away from indigenous cultures in the Americas, Africa and Asia, furthering the fortunes of the trading, industrial nations who took what they wanted with force and rapaciousness. It was colonialism, and it is practiced today not by adventurers, but by transnational corporations. Business did not anticipate a time when those resources would diminish or run out. It was inconceivable that the vast plains and forests of the New World could be exhausted, or that the abundant new fuels of coal could produce enough waste to foul the air and the seas, or that the use of oil could eventually lead to global climate changes. So the system of rewarding lowest price, impelling companies to exploit the cheapest sources of labor and materials, could not anticipate a time when the lowest price would no longer actually be the lowest price, when seeking out the cheapest means to get a product to market would end up costing society in terms of pollution, loss of habitat, degradation of biological diversity, human sickness, and cultural destruction. Although the symptoms of this dysfunction were evident at the very outset, they seemed minor when compared to the abundance of the world, or in the case of colonialism, justified by the doctrine of economic and racial supremacy. Today, each of us who works in or manages a business is essentially guided, even coerced, by these nineteenth-century models. Today, business is being asked by environmentalists to internalize some of the costs that were formerly externalized and largely invisible, and thus is being forced to respond to conflicting signals. On the one hand, it is asked to deliver goods to the marketplace at the lowest possible price; on the other, it is asked to assume the “new” costs of environmental stewardship. If it performs the first function too well, it is held accountable and punished by government, if not by public opinion, because it cannot achieve the lowest price without some or many forms of environmental and societal compromises. If it performs the latter function well, its costs may be raised so high that it suffers in the marketplace. In order for business to function both effectively and ecologically, the contradictions between guardian and commercial interests must be reconciled. In order to break out of the destructive and ultimately fatal loop in which we’re trapped, we need a consensus-building, collaborative approach that both guardians and commerce can support. Business is concerned that it is being regulated into oblivion (an overblown fear, but one that underlines the dysfunctionality of the system), while governance, seeming to realize the dangers posed to the ecosystem and society, has spun out of control, trying to take care of everyone and everything with its runaway budgets and deficits. We need to redesign the system in a way that solves the malfunctions of both. The role of government is to assume those functions that cannot or will not be undertaken by citizens or private institutions. Unfortunately, politics has come to be more a matter of partisan winning or losing, of benefiting one party without regard to the interests of others. Political analysts describe the intricate tradeoffs and struggles for power that exist in and around government. But forgotten is the true meaning and purpose of politics, to create and sustain the conditions for community life. Politics was not intended to be the province of money, but the arena wherein individuals could collectively discuss and manage those elements of life that affected the whole of their town, city, or state. In other words, politics was very much about food, water, life, and death, and thus intimately concerned with the environmental conditions that supported the community. When business introduces money into the discourse, it wdl by its very nature corrupt the dialogue. It is the role of government, then, as a political act, to set standards within the community. Simply stated, one of the roles of the guardian is to ensure that citizens and institutions take care of their habitat and clean up after themselves so that their actions and presence not compromise the life of the community, however large or small it may be. In any endeavor, good design resides in two principles. First, it changes the least number of elements to achieve the greatest result. Second, it removes stress from a system rather than adding it. Bad design is pinning our hopes for environmental and cultural survival on a change in human consciousness and behavior alone, because we therefore depend on the highest number of uncontrollable elements- people- to undergo a great change. Likewise, bad design is having to institute several hundred thousand rules and restrictions under the jurisdiction of the government and expecting business to know them all, much less obey them. Hawken
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 02:01:57 +0000
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