Jesus of Nazareth was a religious genius and perhaps the first synergic scientist. The Gnostic Gospels offer new insights into his thinking. Reposted from PBS.

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 ”If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” 

 –Jesus of Nazareth

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The Gnostic Gospels

Elaine Pagels

In December 1945 an Arab peasant made an astonishing archeological discovery in Upper Egypt. Rumors obscured the circumstances of this find–perhaps because the discovery was accidental, and its sale on the black market illegal. For years even the identity of the discoverer remained unknown. One rumor held that he was a blood avenger; another, that he had made the find near the town of Naj ‘Hamm·dÏ at the Jabal al-T·rif, a mountain honeycombed with more than 150 caves. Originally natural, some of these caves were cut and painted and used as grave sites as early as the sixth dynasty, some 4,300 years ago.

Thirty years later the discoverer himself, Muhammad ‘Al“ al-Samm·n; told what happened. Shortly before he and his brothers avenged their father’s murder in a blood feud, they had saddled their camels and gone out to the Jabal to dig for sabakh, a soft soil they used to fertilize their crops. Digging around a massive boulder, they hit a red earthenware jar, almost a meter high. Muhammad ‘Al“ hesitated to break the jar, considering that a jinn, or spirit, might live inside. But realizing that it might also contain gold, he raised his mattock, smashed the jar, and discovered inside thirteen papyrus books, bound in leather. Returning to his home in al-Qasr, Muhammad ‘All dumped the books and loose papyrus leaves on the straw piled on the ground next to the oven. Muhammad’s mother, ‘Umm-Ahmad, admits that she burned much of the papyrus in the oven along with the straw she used to kindle the fire.

A few weeks later, as Muhammad ‘Al“ tells it, he and his brothers avenged their father’s death by murdering Ahmed Isma’il. Their mother had warned her sons to keep their mattocks sharp: when they learned that their father’s enemy was nearby, the brothers seized the opportunity, “hacked off his limbs . . . ripped out his heart, and devoured it among them, as the ultimate act of blood revenge.”

Fearing that the police investigating the murder would search his house and discover the books, Muhammad ‘Al“ asked the priest, al-Qummus Basiliyus Abd al-Masih, to keep one or more for him. During the time that Muhammad ‘Al“ and his brothers were being interrogated for murder, Raghib, a local history teacher, had seen one of the books, and suspected that it had value. Having received one from al-Qummus Basiliyus, Raghib sent it to a friend in Cairo to find out its worth.

Sold on the black market through antiquities dealers in Cairo, the manuscripts soon attracted the attention of officials of the Egyptian government. Through circumstances of high drama, as we shall see, they bought one and confiscated ten and a half of the thirteen leather-bound books, called codices, and deposited them in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. But a large part of the thirteenth codex, containing five extraordinary texts, was smuggled out of Egypt and offered for sale in America. Word of this codex soon reached Professor Gilles Quispel, distinguished historian of religion at Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Excited by the discovery, Quispel urged the Jung Foundation in Zurich to buy the codex. But discovering, when he succeeded, that some pages were missing, he flew to Egypt in the spring of 1955 to try to find them in the Coptic Museum. Arriving in Cairo, he went at once to the Coptic Museum, borrowed photographs of some of the texts, and hurried back to his hotel to decipher them. Tracing out the first line, Quispel was startled, then incredulous, to read: “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down.” Quispel knew that his colleague H.C. Puech, using notes from another French scholar, Jean Doresse, had identified the opening lines with fragments of a Greek Gospel of Thomas discovered in the 1890’s. But the discovery of the whole text raised new questions: Did Jesus have a twin brother, as this text implies? Could the text be an authentic record of Jesus’ sayings? According to its title, it contained the Gospel According to Thomas; yet, unlike the gospels of the New Testament, this text identified itself as a secret gospel. Quispel also discovered that it contained many sayings known from the New Testament; but these sayings, placed in unfamiliar contexts, suggested other dimensions of meaning. Other passages, Quispel found, differed entirely from any known Christian tradition: the “living Jesus,” for example, speaks in sayings as cryptic and compelling as Zen koans:

Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

What Quispel held in his hand, the Gospel of Thomas, was only one of the fifty-two texts discovered at Nag Hammadi (the usual English transliteration of the town’s name). Bound into the same volume with it is the Gospel of Philip, which attributes to Jesus acts and sayings quite different from those in the New Testament:

. . . the companion of the [Savior is] Mary Magdalene. [But Christ loved] her more than [all] the disciples, and used to kiss her [often] on her [mouth]. The rest of [the disciples were offended] . . . They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” The Savior answered and said to them, “Why do I not love you as (I love) her?”

Other sayings in this collection criticize common Christian beliefs, such as the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection, as naÔve misunderstandings. Bound together with these gospels is the Apocryphon (literally, “secret book”) of John, which opens with an offer to reveal “the mysteries [and the] things hidden in silence” which Jesus taught to his disciple John.

Muhammad ‘Al“ later admitted that some of the texts were lost–burned up or thrown away. But what remains is astonishing: some fifty-two texts from the early centuries of the Christian era–including a collection of early Christian gospels, previously unknown. Besides the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip, the find included the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel to the Egyptians, which identifies itself as “the [sacred book] of the Great Invisible [Spirit].” Another group of texts consists of writings attributed to Jesus’ followers, such as the Secret Book of James, the Apocalypse of Paul, the Letter of Peter to Philip, and the Apocalypse of Peter.

What Muhammad ‘Al“ discovered at Nag Hammadi, it soon became clear, were Coptic translations, made about 1,500 years ago, of still more ancient manuscripts. The originals themselves had been written in Greek, the language of the New Testament: as Doresse, Puech, and Quispel had recognized, part of one of them had been discovered by archeologists about fifty years earlier, when they found a few fragments of the original Greek version of the Gospel of Thomas.

About the dating of the manuscripts themselves there is little debate. Examination of the datable papyrus used to thicken the leather bindings, and of the Coptic script, place them c. A.D. 350-400. But scholars sharply disagree about the dating of the original texts. Some of them can hardly be later than c. A.D. 120-150, since Irenaeus, the orthodox Bishop of Lyons, writing C. 180, declares that heretics “boast that they possess more gospels than there really are,” and complains that in his time such writings already have won wide circulation–from Gaul through Rome, Greece, and Asia Minor.

Quispel and his collaborators, who first published the Gospel of Thomas, suggested the date of c. A.D. 140 for the original. Some reasoned that since these gospels were heretical, they must have been written later than the gospels of the New Testament, which are dated c. 60-l l0. But recently Professor Helmut Koester of Harvard University has suggested that the collection of sayings in the Gospel of Thomas, although compiled c. 140, may include some traditions even older than the gospels of the New Testament, “possibly as early as the second half of the first century” (50-100)–as early as, or earlier, than Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.

Scholars investigating the Nag Hammadi find discovered that some of the texts tell the origin of the human race in terms very different from the usual reading of Genesis: the Testimony of Truth, for example, tells the story of the Garden of Eden from the viewpoint of the serpent! Here the serpent, long known to appear in Gnostic literature as the principle of divine wisdom, convinces Adam and Eve to partake of knowledge while “the Lord” threatens them with death, trying jealously to prevent them from attaining knowledge, and expelling them from Paradise when they achieve it. Another text, mysteriously entitled The Thunder, Perfect Mind, offers an extraordinary poem spoken in the voice of a feminine divine power:

For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin….
I am the barren one, and many are her sons….
I am the silence that is incomprehensible….
I am the utterance of my name.

These diverse texts range, then, from secret gospels, poems, and quasi-philosophic descriptions of the origin of the universe, to myths, magic, and instructions for mystical practice.

Why were these texts buried-and why have they remained virtually unknown for nearly 2,000 years? Their suppression as banned documents, and their burial on the cliff at Nag Hammadi, it turns out, were both part of a struggle critical for the formation of early Christianity. The Nag Hammadi texts, and others like them, which circulated at the beginning of the Christian era, were denounced as heresy by orthodox Christians in the middle of the second century. We have long known that many early followers of Christ were condemned by other Christians as heretics, but nearly all we knew about them came from what their opponents wrote attacking them. Bishop Irenaeus, who supervised the church in Lyons, c. 180, wrote five volumes, entitled The Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-called Knowledge, which begin with his promise to set forth the views of those who are now teaching heresy . . . to show how absurd and inconsistent with the truth are their statements . . . I do this so that . . . you may urge all those with whom you are connected to avoid such an abyss of madness and of blasphemy against Christ.

He denounces as especially “full of blasphemy” a famous gospel called the Gospel of Truth. Is Irenaeus referring to the same Gospel of Truth discovered at Nag Hammadi’ Quispel and his collaborators, who first published the Gospel of Truth, argued that he is; one of their critics maintains that the opening line (which begins “The gospel of truth”) is not a title. But Irenaeus does use the same source as at least one of the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi–the Apocryphon (Secret Book) of John–as ammunition for his own attack on such “heresy.” Fifty years later Hippolytus, a teacher in Rome, wrote another massive Refutation of All Heresies to “expose and refute the wicked blasphemy of the heretics.”

This campaign against heresy involved an involuntary admission of its persuasive power; yet the bishops prevailed. By the time of the Emperor Constantine’s conversion, when Christianity became an officially approved religion in the fourth century, Christian bishops, previously victimized by the police, now commanded them. Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, someone; possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St. Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction–in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years.

But those who wrote and circulated these texts did not regard themselves as “heretics. Most of the writings use Christian terminology, unmistakable related to a Jewish heritage. Many claim to offer traditions about Jesus that are secret, hidden from “the many” who constitute what, in the second century, came to be called the “catholic church.” These Christians are now called gnostics, from the Greek word gnosis, usually translated as “knowledge.” For as those who claim to know nothing about ultimate reality are called agnostic (literally, “not knowing”), the person who does claim to know such things is called gnostic (”knowing”). But gnosis is not primarily rational knowledge. The Greek language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge (”He knows mathematics”) and knowing through observation or experience (”He knows me”), which is gnosis. As the gnostics use the term, we could translate it as “insight,” for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself. And to know oneself, they claimed, is to know human nature and human destiny. According to the gnostic teacher Theodotus, writing in Asia Minor (c. 140-160), the gnostic is one has come to understand who we were, and what we have become; where we were… whither we are hastening; from what we are being released; what birth is, and what is rebirth.

Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis. Another gnostic teacher, Monoimus, says:

Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, “My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.” Learn the sources of sorrow:, joy, love, hate . . . If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself.

What Muhammad ‘All discovered at Nag Hammadi is, apparently, a library of writings, almost all of them gnostic. Although they claim to offer secret teaching, many of these texts refer to the Scriptures of the Old Testament, and others to the letters of Paul and the New Testament gospels. Many of them include the same dramatic personae as the New Testament–Jesus and his disciples. Yet the differences are striking.

Orthodox Jews and Christians insist that a chasm separates humanity from Its creator: God is wholly other. But some of the gnostics who wrote these gospels contradict this: self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.

Second, the “living Jesus” of these texts speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and repentance, like the Jesus of the New Testament. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. But when the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal–even identical.

Third, orthodox Christians believe that Jesus is Lord and Son of God in a unique way: he remains forever distinct from the rest of humanity whom he came to save. Yet the gnostic Gospel of Thomas relates that as soon as Thomas recognizes him, Jesus says to Thomas that they have both received their being from the same source:

Jesus said, “I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out…. He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am: I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.”

Does not such teaching–the identity of the divine and human. the concern with illusion and enlightenment, the founder who is presented not as Lord, but as spiritual guide sound more Eastern than Western? Some scholars have suggested that if the names were changed, the “living Buddha” appropriately could say what the Gospel of Thomas attributes to the living Jesus. Could Hindu or Buddhist tradition have influenced gnosticism?

The British scholar of Buddhism, Edward Conze, suggests that it had. He points out that “Buddhists were in contact with the Thomas Christians (that is, Christians who knew and used such writings as the Gospel of Thomas) in South India.” Trade routes between the Greco-Roman world and the Far East were opening up at the time when gnosticism flourished (A.D. 80-200); for generations, Buddhist missionaries had been proselytizing in Alexandria. We note, too, that Hippolytus, who was a Greek speaking Christian in Rome (c. 225), knows of the Indian Brahmins–and includes their tradition among the sources of heresy:

There is . . . among the Indians a heresy of those who philosophize among the Brahmins, who live a self-sufficient life, abstaining from (eating) living creatures and all cooked food . . . They say that God is light, not like the light one sees, nor like the sun nor fire, but to them God is discourse, not that which finds expression in articulate sounds, but that of knowledge (gnosis) through which the secret mysteries of nature are perceived by the wise.

Could the title of the Gospel of Thomas–named for the disciple who, tradition tells us, went to India–suggest the influence of Indian tradition?

These hints indicate the possibility, yet our evidence is not conclusive. Since parallel traditions may emerge in different cultures at different times, such ideas could have developed in both places independently. What we call Eastern and Western religions, and tend to regard as separate streams, were not clearly differentiated 2,000 years ago. Research on the Nag Hammadi texts is only beginning: we look forward to the work of scholars who can study these traditions comparatively to discover whether they can, in fact, be traced to Indian sources.

Even so, ideas that we associate with Eastern religions emerged in the first century through the gnostic movement in the West, but they were suppressed and condemned by polemicists like Irenaeus. Yet those who called gnosticism heresy were adopting–consciously or not–the viewpoint of that group of Christians who called themselves orthodox Christians. A heretic may be anyone whose outlook someone else dislikes or denounces. According to tradition, a heretic is one who deviates from the true faith. But what defines that “true faith”? Who calls it that, and for what reasons?

We find this problem familiar in our own experience. The term “Christianity,” especially since the Reformation, has covered an astonishing range of groups. Those claiming to represent “true Christianity” in the twentieth century can range from a Catholic cardinal in the Vatican to an African Methodist Episcopal preacher initiating revival in Detroit, a Mormon missionary in Thailand, or the member of a village church on the coast of Greece. Yet Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox agree that such diversity is a recent–and deplorable–development. According to Christian legend, the early church was different. Christians of every persuasion look back to the primitive church to find a simpler, purer form of Christian faith. In the apostles’ time, all members of the Christian community shared their money and property; all believed the same teaching, and worshipped together; all revered the authority of the apostles. It was only after that golden age that conflict, then heresy emerged: so says the author of the Acts of the Apostles, who identifies himself as the first historian of Christianity.

But the discoveries at Nag Hammadi have upset this picture. If we admit that some of these fifty-two texts represents early forms of Christian teaching, we may have to recognize that early Christianity is far more diverse than nearly anyone expected before the Nag Hammadi discoveries.

Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these-the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure–emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century. Before that time, as Irenaeus and others attest, numerous gospels circulated among various Christian groups, ranging from those of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, to such writings as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth, as well as many other secret teachings, myths, and poems attributed to Jesus or his disciples. Some of these, apparently, were discovered at Nag Hammadi; many others are lost to us. Those who identified themselves as Christians entertained many–and radically differing-religious beliefs and practices. And the communities scattered throughout the known world organized themselves in ways that differed widely from one group to another.

Yet by A. D. 200, the situation had changed. Christianity had become an institution headed by a three-rank hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons, who understood themselves to be the guardians of the only “true faith.” The majority of churches, among which the church of Rome took a leading role, rejected all other viewpoints as heresy. Deploring the diversity of the earlier movement, Bishop Irenaeus and his followers insisted that there could be only one church, and outside of that church, he declared, “there is no salvation.” Members of this church alone are orthodox (literally, “straight-thinking”) Christians. And, he claimed, this church must be catholic– that is, universal. Whoever challenged that consensus, arguing instead for other forms of Christian teaching, was declared to be a heretic, and expelled. When the orthodox gained military support, sometime after the Emperor Constantine became Christian in the fourth century, the penalty for heresy escalated.

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The above excerpt is from The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels.

This excerpt from the last chapter of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution is reposted from Rocky Mountain Institute. This book is also on the Understanding in Time Reading List, and available at Amazon.com.

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Once Upon a Planet

Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins

The environmental debate is conducted in a predictable cycle: Science discovers another negative human impact on the environment. Trade groups and businesses counter, the media reports both sides, and the issue eventually gets consigned to a growing list of unresolved problems. The point is not that one side is right and the other wrong but that the episodic nature of the news, and the compartmentalization of each successive issue, inhibit devising solutions. Environmentalists appear like Cassandra, business looks like Pandora, apologists sound like Dr. Pangloss, and the public feels paralyzed.

The Worldwatch Institute’s 1998 State of the World report again reported that the trend in environmental indicators was downward: “Forests are shrinking, water tables are falling, soils are eroding, wetlands are disappearing, fisheries are collapsing, rangelands are deteriorating, rivers are running dry, temperatures are rising, coral reefs are dying and plant and animal species are disappearing.”

Predictably, Worldwatch’s critics argued that the report was unduly gloomy. “In every single report in 15 years, [Worldwatch has] said we are outgrowing the planet’s capacity. For 15 years, that’s proved to be absolutely in every way false [sic],” retorted Jerry Taylor of the libertarian Cato Institute. Taylor cited increased life expectancy, decreasing child mortality, and improved nutritional intake as proving that standards of living improve as population grows.

Ignored by the media is the likelihood that both sets of data are correct. It is unquestionable that humanity has made astonishing progress. Average life spans continue to increase, a middle-class person can travel the world, and people in developed countries have the highest standard of living in history. But those facts do not make the Worldwatch observations wrong. Seemingly contradictory trends in the environment and society should not be portrayed as mutually exclusive. Both sets of data are credible and can be explained by the concept of overshoot: the ability to exceed temporarily the carrying capacity of the earth can help people to live longer, but put our natural capital into decline. Stated in another way, the ability to accelerate a car that is low on gasoline does not prove the tank is full.

Although such debates make good fodder for reporters and can help expose gaps in knowledge, the cacophony has unfortunate effects. One is the “expert’s dilemma.” If you went for your annual physical and were diagnosed by two doctors who fought and argued every step of the way as to whether you were sick or healthy, you would come away confused, numbed, and probably angry. When citizens who are not experts in climatology watch Nightline and hear one scientist state that automotive emissions of CO2 could lead to killer hurricanes and massive crop loss while the other says that not using carbon-based fuels will signal the end of Western civilization, the citizens are left confused and disheartened. Mediagenic arguments allow little room for consensus or shared frameworks. Though great for ratings, such media-devised wrangling ignores the possibility that innovative, pragmatic solutions might exist that can satisfy the vast majority of Americans and make the wrangling irrelevant.

Remembering Einstein’s dictum on mind-sets, cited at the beginning of this book, it might be useful to review a matrix of four world-views on the emotional and intellectual frameworks that business, citizens, and governments use to negotiate and choose about economics and the environment. Biophysicist Donella Meadows, adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College, outlined them in The Economist. She stated that she has become less interested in winning the environmental debate and more concerned with the “intransigent nature of the discussion.” Each of the worldviews discussed below—which are color-coded with only a slight bias—is a systems view reflecting a perspective common among business, labor, environmentalists, and synthesists, in that order.

The Blues are mainstream free-marketers. Such people have a positive bias toward the future based on technological optimism and the strength of the economy. They are armed with a strong statistical case, based on the vigorous and dynamic economies of Western and (until 1998) Asian nations. Their approach is deeply rooted in conventional economics, and their number-crunching reveals a world vastly improved and rapidly ascending. Blues believe that reliance on innovation, investment, and individual freedom will ensure a shining future for humankind, and a level of material well-being that has strong appeal to virtually everyone in the world. Their optimism also extends to the environment, believing that in most cases, markets will send strong and appropriate price signals that will elicit timely responses, mitigating environmental damage or causing technological breakthroughs in efficiency and productivity.

The Reds represent the sundry forms of socialism. Although one might expect them to have been discredited by the downfall of the erstwhile Soviet Union, their worldview is very much alive. They find validation in the chaotic and horrific economic conditions that the rise of bandit capitalism has brought to contemporary Russia, a country whose economic machinery now benefits a minority at the expense of a materially and socially disadvantaged majority. The growing and worldwide gap between rich and poor confirms the Reds’ analyses, which are as accurate about poverty and suffering as the Blues’ observations are accurate about growth and change. While Blues focus on the promise of growth and technology, Reds focus on its shadow and try to discern its root causes. They view labor—one aspect of human capital—as the principal source of wealth and see its exploitation as the basis of injustice, impoverishment, and ignorance. The Reds generally have little to say about the environment, seeing it as a distraction from fundamentally important social issues.

The Greens see the world primarily in terms of ecosystems, and thus concentrate on depletion, damage, pollution, and population growth. They focus on carrying capacity and want to bring about better understanding of how large the economy can grow before it outstrips its host. Their policy focuses on how many and how much, the number of people, and the amount of impact each person can have upon the environment. Greens are not usually technophobes; most see technology as an important tool to reduce human impact. More recently, some have become interested in free-market mechanisms, and want externalities presently borne by society to be fully integrated into producer costs and consumer prices so that markets become, in David Korten’s phrase, “mindful.” The Greens, and to some extent the Reds, host bigger tents in that they hold a bolder and broader diversity of views. But this also keeps them splintered and self-canceling, as Greens tend to unite their enemies and divide their friends, a good formula for political failure. They are often portrayed as caring less for people than animals, more about halogenated compounds than waterborne diseases.

The Whites are the synthesists, and do not entirely oppose or agree with any of the three other views. With an optimistic view of humankind, they believe that process will win the day, that people who tell others what is right lead society astray. Since Blues, Reds, and Greens all fall into that category, Whites reject them all, preferring a middle way of integration, reform, respect, and reliance. They reject ideologies whether based on markets, class, or nature, and trust that informed people can solve their own problems. On the environmental level, they argue that all issues are local. On business, they say the fabled level playing field never existed because of market imperfections, lobbying, subsidies, and capital concentration. On social problems, they argue that solutions will naturally arise from place and culture rather than from ideology. Leadership in the White world is reminiscent of the Taoist reminder that good rulers make their subjects feel as if they succeeded by themselves. Environmental and social solutions can emerge only when local people are empowered and honored.

While many individuals have traits of two or more of these typologies, the different views tend to become isolated and to define the others by their own internal logic. Blues see Reds as anachronistic, even fascistic. Reds return the compliment and neither think much of the Greens, who they say are hindering progress and speaking for a privileged minority. Blues win points (among Blues) by lumping Greens in with the Reds. All three tend to ignore the Whites but will take credit when any White-type scheme works in their sphere. Meadows asks:

What would we see if we were willing to approach the question of human population growth and planetary limits purely scientifically? What if we could divest ourselves of hopes, fears, and ideologies long enough to entertain all arguments and judge them fairly? What we would see, I think, is that all sides are partly right and mostly incomplete. Each is focusing on one piece of a very complex system. Each is seeing its piece correctly. But because no side is seeing the whole, no side is coming to wholly supportable conclusions.

The Greens are correct: Population growth that causes people to level forests and overgraze lands exacerbates poverty. The Reds are correct: The helplessness of poverty creates the motivation for parents to have many children, as their only hope of providing for themselves. The Blues are right: Economic development can bring down birthrates. The Whites are right: Development schemes work, but not when they are imposed by large bureaucratic institutions such as the World Bank. Capital can be the scarcest factor of production at some times and places, labor at other times and places, materials and energy and pollution-absorption capacity at still others. The limits the Greens point out really are there. So are the injustices that anger the Reds. So are the market and technical responses the Blues have faith in. And so is the wisdom of the people that the Whites respect.

A successful business in the new era of natural capitalism will respect and understand all four views. It will realize that solutions lie in understanding the interconnectedness of problems, not in confronting them in isolation.

Moreover, it will seek a common framework of understanding about the functions of the earth itself, and the dynamics of society. While interpretation of data is subject to culture, education, and outlook, the basic principles that govern the earth are well established and commonly agreed upon by all scientists. But you would hardly know that by reading heated op-ed columns or listening to legislative debates. Although you can go to a bookstore and find books that explain the tenets, principles, and rules for everything from golf and dominoes to taxes, judo, and war, there’s no user’s manual for how to live and operate on the earth, the most important and complex system known. …

Download the entire chapter (PDF-112k)

Copyright 2003–2004 by the Rocky Mountain Institute

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Visit the Rocky Mountain Institute.

This is the first chapter from Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins published in 2000. This book is also on the Understanding in Time Reading List, and available at Amazon.com.

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Natural Capitalism

Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins

Imagine for a moment a world where cities have become peaceful and serene because cars and buses are whisper quiet, vehicles exhaust only water vapor, and parks and greenways have replaced unneeded urban freeways. OPEC has ceased to function because the price of oil has fallen to five dollars a barrel, but there are few buyers for it because cheaper and better ways now exist to get the services people once turned to oil to provide. Living standards for all people have dramatically improved, particularly for the poor and those in developing countries. Involuntary unemployment no longer exists, and income taxes have largely been eliminated. Houses, even low-income housing units, can pay part of their mortgage costs by the energy they produce; there are few if any active landfills; worldwide forest cover is increasing; dams are being dismantled; atmospheric C02 levels are decreasing for the first time in two hundred years; and effluent water leaving factories is cleaner than the water coming into them. Industrialized countries have reduced resource use by 80 percent while improving the quality of life. Among these technological changes, there are important social changes. The frayed social nets of Western countries have been repaired. With the explosion of family-wage jobs, welfare demand has fallen. A progressive and active union movement has taken the lead to work with business, environmentalists, and government to create “just transitions” for workers as society phases out coal, nuclear energy, and oil. In communities and towns, churches, corporations, and labor groups promote a new living-wage social contract as the least expensive way to ensure the growth and preservation of valuable social capital. Is this the vision of a utopia? In fact, the changes described here could come about in the decades to come as the result of economic and technological trends already in place.

This book is about these and many other possibilities.

It is about the possibilities that will arise from the birth of a new type of industrialism, one that differs in its philosophy, goals, and fundamental processes from the industrial system that is the standard today. In the next century, as human population doubles and the resources available per person drop by one-half to three-fourths, a remarkable transformation of industry and commerce can occur. Through this transformation, society will be able to create a vital economy that uses radically less material and energy. This economy can free up resources, reduce taxes on personal income, increase per-capita spending on social ills (while simultaneously reducing those ills), and begin to restore the damaged environment of the earth. These necessary changes done properly can promote economic efficiency, ecological conservation, and social equity.

The industrial revolution that gave rise to modern capitalism greatly expanded the possibilities for the material development of humankind. It continues to do so today, but at a severe price. Since the mid-eighteenth century, more of nature has been destroyed than in all prior history. While industrial systems have reached pinnacles of success, able to muster and accumulate human-made capital on vast levels, natural capital, on which civilization depends to create economic prosperity, is rapidly declining, and the rate of loss is increasing proportionate to gains in material well-being. Natural capital includes all the familiar resources used by humankind: water, minerals, oil, trees, fish, soil, air, et cetera. But it also encompasses living systems, which include grasslands, savannas, wetlands, estuaries, oceans, coral reefs, riparian corridors, tundras, and rainforests. These are deteriorating worldwide at an unprecedented rate. Within these ecological communities are the fungi, ponds, mammals, humus, amphibians, bacteria, trees, flagellates, insects, songbirds, ferns, starfish, and flowers that make life possible and worth living on this planet.

As more people and businesses place greater strain on living systems, limits to prosperity are coming to be determined by natural capital rather than industrial prowess. This is not to say that the world is running out of commodities in the near future. The prices for most raw materials are at a twenty-eight-year low and are still falling. Supplies are cheap and appear to be abundant, due to a number of reasons: the collapse of the Asian economies, globalization of trade, cheaper transport costs, imbalances in market power that enable commodity traders and middlemen to squeeze producers, and in large measure the success of powerful new extractive technologies, whose correspondingly extensive damage to ecosystems is seldom given a monetary value. After richer ores are exhausted, skilled mining companies can now level and grind up whole mountains of poorer-quality ores to extract the metals desired. But while technology keeps ahead of depletion, providing what appear to be ever-cheaper metals, they only appear cheap, because the stripped rainforest and the mountain of toxic tailings spilling into rivers, the impoverished villages and eroded indigenous cultures—all the consequences they leave in their wake—are not factored into the cost of production.

It is not the supplies of oil or copper that are beginning to limit our development but life itself. Today, our continuing progress is restricted not by the number of fishing boats but by the decreasing numbers of fish; not by the power of pumps but by the depletion of aquifers; not by the number of chainsaws but by the disappearance of primary forests. While living systems are the source of such desired materials as wood, fish, or food, of utmost importance are the services that they offer, services that are far more critical to human prosperity than are nonrenewable resources. A forest provides not only the resource of wood but also the services of water storage and flood management. A healthy environment automatically supplies not only clean air and water, rainfall, ocean productivity, fertile soil, and watershed resilience but also such less-appreciated functions as waste processing (both natural and industrial), buffering against the extremes of weather, and regeneration of the atmosphere.

Humankind has inherited a 3.8-billion-year store of natural capital. At present rates of use and degradation, there will be little left by the end of the next century. This is not only a matter of aesthetics and morality, it is of the utmost practical concern to society and all people. Despite reams of press about the state of the environment and rafts of laws attempting to prevent further loss, the stock of natural capital is plummeting and the vital life-giving services that flow from it are critical to our prosperity.

Natural capitalism recognizes the critical interdependency between the production and use of human-made capital and the maintenance and supply of natural capital. The traditional definition of capital is accumulated wealth in the form of investments, factories, and equipment. Actually, an economy needs four types of capital to function properly:

• human capital, in the form of labor and intelligence, culture, and organization
• financial capital, consisting of cash, investments, and monetary instruments
• manufactured capital, including infrastructure, machines, tools, and factories
• natural capital, made up of resources, living systems, and ecosystem services

The industrial system uses the first three forms of capital to transform natural capital into the stuff of our daily lives: cars, highways, cities, bridges, houses, food, medicine, hospitals, and schools.

The climate debate is a public issue in which the assets at risk are not specific resources, like oil, fish, or timber, but a life-supporting system. One of nature’s most critical cycles is the continual exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen among plants and animals. This “recycling service” is provided by nature free of charge. But today carbon dioxide is building up in the atmosphere, due in part to combustion of fossil fuels. In effect, the capacity of the natural system to recycle carbon dioxide has been exceeded, just as overfishing can exceed the capacity of a fishery to replenish stocks. But what is especially important to realize is that there is no known alternative to nature’s carbon cycle service.

Besides climate, the changes in the biosphere are widespread. In the past half century, the world has a lost a fourth of its topsoil and a third of its forest cover. At present rates of destruction, we will lose 70 percent of the world’s coral reefs in our lifetime, host to 25 percent of marine life. In the past three decades, one-third of the planet’s resources, its “natural wealth,” has been consumed. We are losing freshwater ecosystems at the rate of 6 percent a year, marine ecosystems by 4 percent a year. There is no longer any serious scientific dispute that the decline in every living system in the world is reaching such levels that an increasing number of them are starting to lose, often at a pace accelerated by the interactions of their decline, their assured ability to sustain the continuity of the life process. We have reached an extraordinary threshold.

Recognition of this shadow side of the success of industrial production has triggered the second of the two great intellectual shifts of the late twentieth century. The end of the Cold War and the fall of communism was the first such shift; the second, now quietly emerging, is the end of the war against life on earth, and the eventual ascendance of what we call natural capitalism.

Capitalism, as practiced, is a financially profitable, nonsustainable aberration in human development. What might be called “industrial capitalism” does not fully conform to its own accounting principles. It liquidates its capital and calls it income. It neglects to assign any value to the largest stocks of capital it employs—the natural resources and living systems, as well as the social and cultural systems that are the basis of human capital.

But this deficiency in business operations cannot be corrected simply by assigning monetary values to natural capital, for three reasons. First, many of the services we receive from living systems have no known substitutes at any price; for example, oxygen production by green plants. This was demonstrated memorably in 1991–93 when the scientists operating the $200 million Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona discovered that it was unable to maintain life-supporting oxygen levels for the eight people living inside. Biosphere 1, a.k.a. Planet Earth, performs this task daily at no charge for 6 billion people.

Second, valuing natural capital is a difficult and imprecise exercise at best. Nonetheless, several recent assessments have estimated that biological services flowing directly into society from the stock of natural capital are worth at least $36 trillion annually. That figure is close to the annual gross world product of approximately $39 trillion—a striking measure of the value of natural capital to the economy. If natural capital stocks were given a monetary value, assuming the assets yielded “interest” of $36 trillion annually, the world’s natural capital would be valued at somewhere between $400 and $500 trillion—tens of thousands of dollars for every person on the planet. That is undoubtedly a conservative figure given the fact that anything we can’t live without and can’t replace at any price could be said to have an infinite value.

Additionally, just as technology cannot replace the planet’s life-support systems, so, too, are machines unable to provide a substitute for human intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, organizational abilities, and culture. The World Bank’s 1995 Wealth Index found the sum value of human capital to be three times greater than all the financial and manufactured capital reflected on global balance sheets. This, too, appears to be a conservative estimate, since it counts only the market value of human employment, not uncompensated effort or cultural resources.

It is not the aim of this book to assess how to determine value for such unaccounted-for forms of capital. It is clear, however, that behaving as though they are valueless has brought us to the verge of disaster. But if it is in practice difficult to tabulate the value of natural and human capital on balance sheets, how can governments and conscientious businesspersons make decisions about the responsible use of earth’s living systems?

CONVENTIONAL CAPITALISM
Following Einstein’s dictum that problems can’t be solved within the mind-set that created them, the first step toward any comprehensive economic and ecological change is to understand the mental model that forms the basis of present economic thinking. The mind-set of the present capitalist system might be summarized as follows:

• Economic progress can best occur in free-market systems of production and distribution where reinvested profits make labor and capital increasingly productive.
• Competitive advantage is gained when bigger, more efficient plants manufacture more products for sale to expanding markets.
• Growth in total output (GDP) maximizes human well-being.
• Any resource shortages that do occur will elicit the development of substitutes.
• Concerns for a healthy environment are important but must be balanced against the requirements of economic growth, if a high standard of living is to be maintained.
• Free enterprise and market forces will allocate people and resources to their highest and best uses.

The origins of this worldview go back centuries, but it took the industrial revolution to establish it as the primary economic ideology. This sudden, almost violent, change in the means of production and distribution of goods, in sector after economic sector, introduced a new element that redefined the basic formula for the creation of material products: Machines powered by water, wood, charcoal, coal, oil, and eventually electricity accelerated or accomplished some or all of the work formerly performed by laborers. Human productive capabilities began to grow exponentially. What took two hundred workers in 1770 could be done by a single spinner in the British textile industry by 1812. With such astonishingly improved productivity, the labor force was able to manufacture a vastly larger volume of basic necessities like cloth at greatly reduced cost. This in turn rapidly raised standards of living and real wages, increasing demand for other products in other industries. Further technological breakthroughs proliferated, and as industry after industry became mechanized, leading to even lower prices and higher incomes, all of these factors fueled a self-sustaining and increasing demand for transportation, housing, education, clothing, and other goods, creating the foundation of modern commerce.

The past two hundred years of massive growth in prosperity and manufactured capital have been accompanied by a prodigious body of economic theory analyzing it, all based on the fallacy that natural and human capital have little value as compared to final output. In the standard industrial model, the creation of value is portrayed as a linear sequence of extraction, production, and distribution: Raw materials are introduced. (Enter nature, stage left.) Labor uses technologies to transform these resources into products, which are sold to create profits. The wastes from production processes, and soon the products themselves, are somehow disposed of somewhere else. (Exit waste, stage right.) The “somewheres” in this scenario are not the concern of classical economics: Enough money can buy enough resources, so the theory goes, and enough “elsewheres” to dispose of them afterward.

This conventional view of value creation is not without its critics. Viewing the economic process as a disembodied, circular flow of value between production and consumption, argues economist Herman Daly, is like trying to understand an animal only in terms of its circulatory system, without taking into account the fact it also has a digestive tract that ties it firmly to its environment at both ends. But there is an even more fundamental critique to be applied here, and it is one based on simple logic. The evidence of our senses is sufficient to tell us that all economic activity—all that human beings are, all that they can ever accomplish—is embedded within the workings of a particular planet. That planet is not growing, so the somewheres and elsewheres are always with us. The increasing removal of resources, their transport and use, and their replacement with waste steadily erodes our stock of natural capital.

With nearly ten thousand new people arriving on earth every hour, a new and unfamiliar pattern of scarcity is now emerging. At the beginning of the industrial revolution, labor was overworked and relatively scarce (the population was about one-tenth of current totals), while global stocks of natural capital were abundant and unexploited. But today the situation has been reversed: After two centuries of rises in labor productivity, the liquidation of natural resources at their extraction cost rather than their replacement value, and the exploitation of living systems as if they were free, infinite, and in perpetual renewal, it is people who have become an abundant resource, while nature is becoming disturbingly scarce.

Applying the same economic logic that drove the industrial revolution to this newly emerging pattern of scarcity implies that, if there is to be prosperity in the future, society must make its use of resources vastly more productive—deriving four, ten, or even a hundred times as much benefit from each unit of energy, water, materials, or anything else borrowed from the planet and consumed. Achieving this degree of efficiency may not be as difficult as it might seem because from a materials and energy perspective, the economy is massively inefficient. In the United States, the materials used by the metabolism of industry amount to more than twenty times every citizen’s weight per day—more than one million pounds per American per year. The global flow of matter, some 500 billion tons per year, most of it wasted, is largely invisible. Yet obtaining, moving, using, and disposing of it is steadily undermining the health of the planet, which is showing ever greater signs of stress, even of biological breakdown. Human beings already use over half the world’s accessible surface freshwater, have transformed one-third to one-half of its land surface, fix more nitrogen than do all natural systems on land, and appropriate more than two-fifths of the planet’s entire land-based primary biological productivity. The doubling of these burdens with rising population will displace many of the millions of other species, undermining the very web of life.

The resulting ecological strains are also causing or exacerbating many forms of social distress and conflict. For example, grinding poverty, hunger, malnutrition, and rampant disease affect one-third of the world and are growing in absolute numbers; not surprisingly, crime, corruption, lawlessness, and anarchy are also on the rise (the fastest-growing industry in the world is security and private police protection); fleeing refugee populations have increased throughout the nineties to about a hundred million; over a billion people in the world who need to work cannot find jobs, or toil at such menial work that they cannot support themselves or their families; meanwhile, the loss of forests, topsoil, fisheries, and freshwater is, in some cases, exacerbating regional and national conflicts.

What would our economy look like if it fully valued all forms of capital, including human and natural capital? What if our economy were organized not around the lifeless abstractions of neoclassical economics and accountancy but around the biological realities of nature? What if Generally Accepted Accounting Practice booked natural and human capital not as a free amenity in putative inexhaustible supply but as a finite and integrally valuable factor of production? What if, in the absence of a rigorous way to practice such accounting, companies started to act as if such principles were in force? This choice is possible and such an economy would offer a stunning new set of opportunities for all of society, amounting to no less than the next industrial revolution.

CAPITALISM AS IF LIVING SYSTEMS MATTERED
Natural capitalism and the possibility of a new industrial system are based on a very different mind-set and set of values than conventional capitalism. Its fundamental assumptions include the following:

• The environment is not a minor factor of production but rather is “an envelope containing, provisioning, and sustaining the entire economy.”
• The limiting factor to future economic development is the availability and functionality of natural capital, in particular, life-supporting services that have no substitutes and currently have no market value.
• Misconceived or badly designed business systems, population growth, and wasteful patterns of consumption are the primary causes of the loss of natural capital, and all three must be addressed to achieve a sustainable economy.
• Future economic progress can best take place in democratic, market-based systems of production and distribution in which all forms of capital are fully valued, including human, manufactured, financial, and natural capital.
• One of the keys to the most beneficial employment of people, money, and the environment is radical increases in resource productivity.
• Human welfare is best served by improving the quality and flow of desired services delivered, rather than by merely increasing the total dollar flow.
• Economic and environmental sustainability depends on redressing global inequities of income and material well-being. The best long-term environment for commerce is provided by true democratic systems of governance that are based on the needs of people rather than business.

This book introduces four central strategies of natural capitalism that are a means to enable countries, companies, and communities to operate by behaving as if all forms of capital were valued. Ensuring a perpetual annuity of valuable social and natural processes to serve a growing population is not just a prudent investment but a critical need in the coming decades. Doing so can avert scarcity, perpetuate abundance, and provide a solid basis for social development; it is the basis of responsible stewardship and prosperity for the next century and beyond.

1. RADICAL RESOURCE PRODUCTIVITY. Radically increased resource productivity is the cornerstone of natural capitalism because using resources more effectively has three significant benefits: It slows resource depletion at one end of the value chain, lowers pollution at the other end, and provides a basis to increase worldwide employment with meaningful jobs. The result can be lower costs for business and society, which no longer has to pay for the chief causes of ecosystem and social disruption. Nearly all environmental and social harm is an artifact of the uneconomically wasteful use of human and natural resources, but radical resource productivity strategies can nearly halt the degradation of the biosphere, make it more profitable to employ people, and thus safeguard against the loss of vital living systems and social cohesion.

2. BIOMIMICRY. Reducing the wasteful throughput of materials—indeed, eliminating the very idea of waste—can be accomplished by redesigning industrial systems on biological lines that change the nature of industrial processes and materials, enabling the constant reuse of materials in continuous closed cycles, and often the elimination of toxicity.

3. SERVICE AND FLOW ECONOMY. This calls for a fundamental change in the relationship between producer and consumer, a shift from an economy of goods and purchases to one of service and flow. In essence, an economy that is based on a flow of economic services can better protect the ecosystem services upon which it depends. This will entail a new perception of value, a shift from the acquisition of goods as a measure of affluence to an economy where the continuous receipt of quality, utility, and performance promotes well-being. This concept offers incentives to put into practice the first two innovations of natural capitalism by restructuring the economy to focus on relationships that better meet customers’ changing value needs and to reward automatically both resource productivity and closed-loop cycles of materials use.

4. INVESTING IN NATURAL CAPITAL. This works toward reversing worldwide planetary destruction through reinvestments in sustaining, restoring, and expanding stocks of natural capital, so that the biosphere can produce more abundant ecosystem services and natural resources. All four changes are interrelated and interdependent; all four generate numerous benefits and opportunities in markets, finance, materials, distribution, and employment. Together, they can reduce environmental harm, create economic growth, and increase meaningful employment.

RESOURCE PRODUCTIVITY
Imagine giving a speech to Parliament in 1750 predicting that within seventy years human productivity would rise to the point that one person could do the work of two hundred. The speaker would have been branded as daft or worse. Imagine a similar scene today. Experts are testifying in Congress, predicting that we will increase the productivity of our resources in the next seventy years by a factor of four, ten, even one hundred. Just as it was impossible 250 years ago to conceive of an individual’s doing two hundred times more work, it is equally difficult for us today to imagine a kilowatt-hour or board foot being ten or a hundred times more productive than it is now.

Although the movement toward radical resource productivity has been under way for decades, its clarion call came in the fall of 1994,when a group of sixteen scientists, economists, government officials, and businesspeople convened and, sponsored by Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, and Energy in Germany, published the “Carnoules Declaration.” Participants had come from Europe, the United States, Japan, England, Canada, and India to the French village of Carnoules to discuss their belief that human activities were at risk from the ecological and social impact of materials and energy use. The Factor Ten Club, as the group came to call itself, called for a leap in resource productivity to reverse the growing damage. The declaration began with these prophetic words: “Within one generation, nations can achieve a tenfold increase in the efficiency with which they use energy, natural resources and other materials.”

In the years since, Factor Ten (a 90 percent reduction in energy and materials intensity) and Factor Four (a 75 percent reduction) have entered the vocabulary of government officials, planners, academics, and businesspeople throughout the world. The governments of Austria, the Netherlands, and Norway have publicly committed to pursuing Factor Four efficiencies. The same approach has been endorsed by the European Union as the new paradigm for sustainable development. Austria, Sweden, and OECD environment ministers have urged the adoption of Factor Ten goals, as have the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). The concept is not only common parlance for most environmental ministers in the world, but such leading corporations as Dow Europe and Mitsubishi Electric see it as a powerful strategy to gain a competitive advantage. Among all major industrial nations, the United States probably has the least familiarity with and understanding of these ideas.

At its simplest, increasing resource productivity means obtaining the same amount of utility or work from a product or process while using less material and energy. In manufacturing, transportation, forestry, construction, energy, and other industrial sectors, mounting empirical evidence suggests that radical improvements in resource productivity are both practical and cost-effective, even in the most modern industries. Companies and designers are developing ways to make natural resources—energy, metals, water, and forests—work five, ten, even one hundred times harder than they do today. These efficiencies transcend the marginal gains in performance that industry constantly seeks as part of its evolution. Instead, revolutionary leaps in design and technology will alter industry itself as demonstrated in the following chapters. Investments in the productivity revolution are not only repaid over time by the saved resources but in many cases can reduce initial capital investments.

When engineers speak of “efficiency,” they refer to the amount of output a process provides per unit of input. Higher efficiency thus means doing more with less, measuring both factors in physical terms. When economists refer to efficiency, however, their definition differs in two ways. First, they usually measure a process or outcome in terms of expenditure of money—how the market value of what was produced compares to the market cost of the labor and other inputs used to create it. Second, “economic efficiency” typically refers to how fully and perfectly market mechanisms are being harnessed to minimize the monetary total factor cost of production. Of course it’s important to harness economically efficient market mechanisms, and we share economists’ devotion to that goal. But to avoid confusion, when we suggest using market tools to achieve “resource productivity” and “resource efficiency,” we use those terms in the engineering sense.

Resource productivity doesn’t just save resources and money; it can also improve the quality of life. Listen to the din of daily existence—the city and freeway traffic, the airplanes, the garbage trucks outside urban windows—and consider this: The waste and the noise are signs of inefficiency, and they represent money being thrown away. They will disappear as surely as did manure from the nineteenth-century streets of London and New York. Inevitably, industry will redesign everything it makes and does, in order to participate in the coming productivity revolution. We will be able to see better with resource-efficient lighting systems, produce higher-quality goods in efficient factories, travel more safely and comfortably in efficient vehicles, feel more comfortable (and do substantially more and better work) in efficient buildings, and be better nourished by efficiently grown food. An air-conditioning system that uses 90 percent less energy or a building so efficient that it needs no air-conditioning at all may not fascinate the average citizen, but the fact that they are quiet and produce greater comfort while reducing energy costs should appeal even to technophobes. That such options save money should interest everyone.

As subsequent chapters will show, the unexpectedly large improvements to be gained by resource productivity offer an entirely new terrain for business invention, growth, and development. Its advantages can also dispel the long-held belief that core business values and environmental responsibility are incompatible or at odds. In fact, the massive inefficiencies that are causing environmental degradation almost always cost more than the measures that would reverse them.

But even as Factor Ten goals are driving reductions in materials and energy flows, some governments are continuing to create and administer laws, policies, taxes, and subsidies that have quite the opposite effect. Hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money are annually diverted to promote inefficient and unproductive material and energy use. These include subsidies to mining, oil, coal, fishing, and forest industries as well as agricultural practices that degrade soil fertility and use wasteful amounts of water and chemicals. Many of these subsidies are vestigial, some dating as far back as the eighteenth century, when European powers provided entrepreneurs with incentives to find and exploit colonial resources. Taxes extracted from labor subsidize patterns of resource use that in turn displace workers, an ironic situation that is becoming increasingly apparent and unacceptable, particularly in Europe, where there is chronically high unemployment. Already, tax reforms aimed at increasing employment by shifting taxes away from people to the use of resources have started to be instituted in the Netherlands, Germany, Britain, Sweden, and Denmark, and are being seriously proposed across Europe.

In less developed countries, people need realistic and achievable means to better their lives. The world’s growing population cannot attain a Western standard of living by following traditional industrial paths to development, for the resources required are too vast, too expensive, and too damaging to local and global systems. Instead, radical improvements in resource productivity expand their possibilities for growth, and can help to ameliorate the polarization of wealth between rich and poor segments of the globe. When the world’s nations met in Brazil at the Earth Summit in 1992 to discuss the environment and human development, some treaties and proposals proved to be highly divisive because it appeared that they put a lid on the ability of nonindustrialized countries to pursue development. Natural capitalism provides a practical agenda for development wherein the actions of both developed and developing nations are mutually supportive.

BIOMIMICRY
To appreciate the potential of radical resource productivity, it is helpful to recognize that the present industrial system is, practically speaking, a couch potato: It eats too much junk food and gets insufficient exercise. In its late maturity, industrial society runs on life-support systems that require enormous heat and pressure, are petrochemically dependent and materials-intensive, and require large flows of toxic and hazardous chemicals. These industrial “empty calories” end up as pollution, acid rain, and greenhouse gases, harming environmental, social, and financial systems. Even though all the reengineering and downsizing trends of the past decade were supposed to sweep away corporate inefficiency, the U.S. economy remains astoundingly inefficient: It has been estimated that only 6 percent of its vast flows of materials actually end up in products. Overall, the ratio of waste to the durable products that constitute material wealth may be closer to one hundred to one. The whole economy is less than 10 percent—probably only a few percent—as energy-efficient as the laws of physics permit.

This waste is currently rewarded by deliberate distortions in the marketplace, in the form of policies like subsidies to industries that extract raw materials from the earth and damage the biosphere. As long as that damage goes unaccounted for, as long as virgin resource prices are maintained at artificially low levels, it makes sense to continue to use virgin materials rather than reuse resources discarded from previous products. As long as it is assumed that there are “free goods” in the world—pure water, clean air, hydrocarbon combustion, virgin forests, veins of minerals—large-scale, energy- and materials-intensive manufacturing methods will dominate, and labor will be increasingly marginalized. In contrast, if the subsidies distorting resource prices were removed or reversed, it would be advantageous to employ more people and use fewer virgin materials.

Even without the removal of subsidies, the economics of resource productivity are already encouraging industry to reinvent itself to be more in accord with biological systems. Growing competitive pressures to save resources are opening up exciting frontiers for chemists, physicists, process engineers, biologists, and industrial designers. They are reexamining the energy, materials, and manufacturing systems required to provide the specific qualities (strength, warmth, structure, protection, function, speed, tension, motion, skin) required by products and end users and are turning away from mechanical systems requiring heavy metals, combustion, and petroleum to seek solutions that use minimal inputs, lower temperatures, and enzymatic reactions. Business is switching to imitating biological and ecosystem processes replicating natural methods of production and engineering to manufacture chemicals, materials, and compounds, and soon maybe even microprocessors. Some of the most exciting developments have resulted from emulating nature’s life-temperature, low-pressure, solar-powered assembly techniques, whose products rival anything human-made. Science writer Janine Benyus points out that spiders make silk, strong as Kevlar but much tougher, from digested crickets and flies, without needing boiling sulfuric acid and high-temperature extruders. The abalone generates an inner shell twice as tough as our best ceramics, and diatoms make glass, both processes employing seawater with no furnaces. Trees turn sunlight, water, and air into cellulose, a sugar stiffer and stronger than nylon, and bind it into wood, a natural composite with a higher bending strength and stiffness than concrete or steel. We may never grow as skillful as spiders, abalone, diatoms, or trees, but smart designers are apprenticing themselves to nature to learn the benign chemistry of its processes.

Pharmaceutical companies are becoming microbial ranchers managing herds of enzymes. Biological farming manages soil ecosystems in order to increase the amount of biota and life per acre by keen knowledge of food chains, species interactions, and nutrient flows, minimizing crop losses and maximizing yields by fostering diversity. Meta-industrial engineers are creating “zero-emission” industrial parks whose tenants will constitute an industrial ecosystem in which one company will feed upon the nontoxic and useful wastes of another. Architects and builders are creating structures that process their own wastewater, capture light, create energy, and provide habitat for wildlife and wealth for the community, all the while improving worker productivity, morale, and health. High-temperature, centralized power plants are starting to be replaced by smaller-scale, renewable power generation. In chemistry, we can look forward to the end of the witches’ brew of dangerous substances invented this century, from DDT, PCB, CFCs, and Thalidomide to Dieldrin and xeno-estrogens. The eighty thousand different chemicals now manufactured end up everywhere, as Donella Meadows remarks, from our “stratosphere to our sperm.” They were created to accomplish functions that can now be carried out far more efficiently with biodegradable and naturally occurring compounds.

SERVICE AND FLOW
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Swiss industry analyst Walter Stahel and German chemist Michael Braungart independently proposed a new industrial model that is now gradually taking shape. Rather than an economy in which goods are made and sold, these visionaries imagined a service economy wherein consumers obtain services by leasing or renting goods rather than buying them outright. (Their plan should not be confused with the conventional definition of a service economy, in which burger-flippers outnumber steelworkers.) Manufacturers cease thinking of themselves as sellers of products and become, instead, deliverers of service, provided by long-lasting, upgradeable durables. Their goal is selling results rather than equipment, performance and satisfaction rather than motors, fans, plastics, or condensers.

The system can be demonstrated by a familiar example. Instead of purchasing a washing machine, consumers could pay a monthly fee to obtain the service of having their clothes cleaned. The washer would have a counter on it, just like an office photocopier, and would be maintained by the manufacturer on a regular basis, much the way mainframe computers are. If the machine ceased to provide its specific service, the manufacturer would be responsible for replacing or repairing it at no charge to the customer, because the washing machine would remain the property of the manufacturer. The concept could likewise be applied to computers, cars, VCRs, refrigerators, and almost every other durable that people now buy, use up, and ultimately throw away. Because products would be returned to the manufacturer for continuous repair, reuse, and remanufacturing, Stahel called the process “cradle-to-cradle.”

Many companies are adopting Stahel’s principles. Agfa Gaevert pioneered the leasing of copier services, which spread to the entire industry. The Carrier Corporation, a division of United Technologies, is creating a program to sell coolth (the opposite of warmth) to companies while retaining ownership of the air-conditioning equipment. The Interface Corporation is beginning to lease the warmth, beauty, and comfort of its floor-covering services rather than selling carpets.

Braungart’s model of a service economy focuses on the nature of material cycles. In this perspective, if a given product lasts a long time but its waste materials cannot be reincorporated into new manufacturing or biological cycles, then the producer must accept responsibility for the waste with all its attendant problems of toxicity, resource overuse, worker safety, and environmental damage. Braungart views the world as a series of metabolisms in which the creations of human beings, like the creations of nature, become “food” for interdependent systems, returning to either an industrial or a biological cycle after their useful life is completed. To some, especially frugal Scots and New Englanders, this might not sound a novel concept at all. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service.” In simpler times, such proverbial wisdom had highly practical applications. Today, the complexity of modern materials makes this almost impossible. Thus, Braungart proposed an Intelligent Product System whereby those products that do not degrade back into natural nutrient cycles be designed so that they can be deconstructed and completely reincorporated into technical nutrient cycles of industry.

Another way to conceive of this method is to imagine an industrial system that has no provision for landfills, outfalls, or smokestacks. If a company knew that nothing that came into its factory could be thrown away, and that everything it produced would eventually return, how would it design its components and products? The question is more than a theoretical construct, because the earth works under precisely these strictures.

In a service economy, the product is a means, not an end. The manufacturer’s leasing and ultimate recovery of the product means that the product remains an asset. The minimization of materials use, the maximization of product durability, and enhanced ease of maintenance not only improve the customer’s experience and value but also protect the manufacturer’s investment and hence its bottom line. Both producer and customer have an incentive for continuously improving resource productivity, which in turn further protects ecosystems. Under this shared incentive, both parties form a relationship that continuously anticipates and meets the customer’s evolving value needs—and meanwhile rewards both parties for reducing the burdens on the planet.

The service paradigm has other benefits as well: It increases employment, because when products are designed to be reincorporated into manufacturing cycles, waste declines, and demand for labor increases. In manufacturing, about one-fourth of the labor force is engaged in the fabrication of basic raw materials such as steel, glass, cement, silicon, and resins, while three-quarters are in the production phase. The reverse is true for energy inputs: Three times as much energy is used to extract virgin or primary materials as is used to manufacture products from those materials. Substituting reused or more durable manufactured goods for primary materials therefore uses less energy but provides more jobs.

An economy based on a service-and-flow model could also help stabilize the business cycle, because customers would be purchasing flows of services, which they need continuously, rather than durable equipment that’s affordable only in good years. Service providers would have an incentive to keep their assets productive for as long as possible, rather than prematurely scrapping them in order to sell replacements. Over- and undercapacity would largely disappear, as business would no longer have to be concerned about delivery or backlogs if it is contracting from a service provider. Gone would be end-of-year rebates to move excess automobile inventory, built for customers who never ordered them because managerial production quotas were increased in order to amortize expensive capital equipment that was never needed in the first place. As it stands now, durables manufacturers have a love-hate relationship with durability. But when they become service providers, their long- and short-term incentives become perfectly attuned to what customers want, the environment deserves, labor needs, and the economy can support.

INVESTING IN NATURAL CAPITAL
When a manufacturer realizes that a supplier of key components is overextended and running behind on deliveries, it takes immediate action lest its own production lines come to a halt. Living systems are a supplier of key components for the life of the planet, and they are now falling behind on their orders. Until recently, business could ignore such shortages because they didn’t affect production and didn’t increase costs. That situation may be changing, however, as rising weather-related claims come to burden insurance companies and world agriculture. (In 1998, violent weather caused upward of $90 billion worth of damage worldwide, a figure that represented more weather-related losses than were accounted for through the entire decade of the 1980s. The losses were greatly compounded by deforestation and climate change, factors that increase the frequency and severity of disasters. In human terms, 300 million people were permanently or temporarily displaced from their homes; this figure includes the dislocations caused by Hurricane Mitch, the deadliest Atlantic storm in two centuries.) If the flow of services from industrial systems is to be sustained or increased in the future for a growing population, the vital flow of life-supporting services from living systems will have to be maintained and increased. For this to be possible will require investments in natural capital.

As both globalization and Balkanization proceed, and as the per-capita availability of water, arable land, and fish continue to decline (as they have done since 1980), the world faces the danger of being torn apart by regional conflicts instigated at least in part by resource shortages or imbalances and associated income polarization. Whether it involves oil or water, cobalt or fish, access to resources is playing an ever more prominent role in generating conflict. In addition, many social instabilities and refugee populations—twelve million refugees now wander the world—are created or worsened by ecological destruction, from Haiti to Somalia to Jordan. On April 9, 1996, Secretary of State Warren Christopher gave perhaps the first speech by an American cabinet officer that linked global security with the environment. His words may become prophetic for future foreign policy decisions: “. . . [E]nvironmental forces transcend borders and oceans to threaten directly the health, prosperity and jobs of American citizens….[A]ddressing natural resource issues is frequently critical to achieving political and economic stability, and to pursuing our strategic goals around the world.”

Societies need to adopt shared goals that enhance social welfare but that are not the prerogatives of specific value or belief systems. Natural capitalism is one such objective. It is neither conservative nor liberal in its ideology, but appeals to both constituencies. Since it is a means, and not an end, it doesn’t advocate a particular social outcome but rather makes possible many different ends. Therefore, whatever the various visions different parties or factions espouse, society can work toward resource productivity now, without waiting to resolve disputes about policy.

The chapters that follow describe an array of opportunities and possibilities that are real, practical, measured, and documented. Engineers have already designed hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered cars to be plug-in electric generators that may become the power plants of the future. Buildings already exist that make oxygen, solar power, and drinking water and can help pay the mortgage while their tenants work inside them. Deprintable and reprintable papers and inks, together with other innovative ways to use fiber, could enable the world’s supply of lumber and pulp to be grown in an area about the size of Iowa. Weeds can yield potent pharmaceuticals; cellulose-based plastics have been shown to be strong, reusable, and compostable; and luxurious carpets can be made from landfilled scrap. Roofs and windows, even roads, can do double duty as solar-electric collectors, and efficient car-free cities are being designed so that men and women no longer spend their days driving to obtain the goods and services of daily life. These are among the thousands of innovations that are resulting from natural capitalism.

This book is both an overview of the remarkable technologies that are already in practice and a call to action. Many of the techniques and methods described here can be used by individuals and small businesses. Other approaches are more suitable for corporations, even whole industrial sectors; still others better suit local or central governments. Collectively, these techniques offer a powerful menu of new ways to make resource productivity the foundation of a lasting and prosperous economy—from Main Street to Wall Street, from your house to the White House, and from the village to the globe. Although there is an overwhelming emphasis in this book on what we do with our machines, manufacturing processes, and materials, its purpose is to support the human community and all life-support systems. There is a large body of literature that addresses the nature of specific living systems, from coral reefs to estuarine systems to worldwide topsoil formation. Our focus is to bring about those changes in the human side of the economy that can help preserve and reconstitute these systems, to try and show for now and all time to come that there is no true separation between how we support life economically and ecologically.

Copyright 2003–2004 by the Rocky Mountain Institute

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Reposted from the Rocky Mountain Institute.

From the Understanding in Time Reading List, this article is an excerpt from GETTING DOWN TO EARTH: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics pubished in 1996.

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Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies

Joseph A. Tainter

Historical knowledge is essential to practical applications of ecological economics. Systems of problem solving develop greater complexity and higher costs over long periods. In time such systems either require increasing energy subsidies or they collapse. Diminishing returns to complexity in problem solving limited the abilities of earlier societies to respond sustainably to challenges, and will shape contemporary responses to global change. To confront this dilemma we must understand both the role of energy in sustaining problem solving, and our historical position in systems of increasing complexity.

In our quest to understand sustainability we have rushed to comprehend such factors as energy transformations, biophysical constraints, and environmental deterioration, as well as the human characteristics that drive production and consumption, and the assumptions of neoclassical economics. As our knowledge of these matters increases, practical applications of ecological economics are emerging. Yet amidst these advances something important is missing. Any human problem is but a moment of reaction to prior events and processes. Historical patterns develop over generations or even centuries. Rarely will the experience of a lifetime disclose fully the origin of an event or a process. Employment levels in natural resource production, for example, may respond to a capital investment cycle with a lag time of several decades (Watt 1992). The factors that cause societies to collapse take centuries to develop (Tainter 1988). To design policies for today and the future we need to understand social and economic processes at all temporal scales, and comprehend where we are in historical patterns. Historical knowledge is essential to sustainability (Tainter 1995a). No program to enhance sustainability can be considered practical if it does not incorporate such fundamental knowledge.

In this era of global environmental change we face what may be humanity’s greatest crisis. The cluster of transformations labeled global change dwarfs all previous experiences in its speed. in the geographical scale of its consequences, and in the numbers of people who will be affected (Norgaard 1994). Yet many times past human populations faced extraordinary challenges, and the difference between their problems and ours is only one of degree. One might expect that in a rational, problem-solving society, we would eagerly seek to understand historical experiences. In actuality, our approaches to education and our impatience for innovation have made us averse to historical knowledge (Tainter 1995a). In ignorance, policy makers tend to look for the causes of events only in the recent past (Watt 1992). As a result, while we have a greater opportunity than the people of any previous era to understand the long-term reasons for our problems, that opportunity is largely ignored. Not only do we not know where we are in history, most of our citizens and policy makers are not aware that we ought to.

A recurring constraint faced by previous societies has been complexity in problem solving. It is a constraint that is usually unrecognized in contemporary economic analyses. For the past 12,000 years human societies have seemed almost inexorably to grow more complex. For the most part this has been successful: complexity confers advantages, and one of the reasons for our success as a species has been our ability to ‘Increase rapidly the complexity of our behavior (Tainter 1992, 1995b). Yet complexity can also be detrimental to sustainability. Since our approach to resolving our problems has been to develop the most complex society and economy of human history, it is important to understand how previous societies fared when they pursued analogous strategies. In this chapter I will discuss the factors that caused previous societies to collapse, the economics of complexity in problem solving, and some implications of historical patterns for our efforts at problem solving today. This discussion indicates that part of our response to global change must be to understand the long-term evolution of problem-solving systems.

The Development of Socioeconomic Complexity

Complexity is a key concept of this essay. In an earlier study I characterized it as follows:

Complexity is generally understood to refer to such things as the size of a society, the number and distinctiveness of its parts, the variety of specialized social roles that it incorporates, the number of distinct social personalities present, and the variety of mechanisms for organizing these into a coherent, functioning whole. Augmenting any of these dimensions increases the complexity of a society. Hunter-gatherer societies (by way of illustrating one contrast in complexity) contain no more than a few dozen distinct social personalities, while modern European censuses recognize 10,000 to 20,000 unique occupational roles, and industrial societies may contain overall more than 1,000,000 different kinds of social personalities (McGuire 1983; Tainter 1988). 1

As a simple illustration of differences in complexity, Julian Steward pointed out the contrast between the native peoples of western North America, among whom early ethnographers documented 3,000 to 6,000 cultural elements, and the U.S. Army, which landed 500,000+ artifact types at Casablanca in World War 11 (Steward 1955). Complexity is quantifiable.

For over 99% of the history of humanity we lived as low-density foragers or farmers in egalitarian communities of no more than a few dozen persons (Carneiro 1978). Leslie White pointed out that such a cultural system, based primarily on human labor, can generate only about 1/20 horsepower per capita per year (White 1949, 1959). From this base of undifferentiated societies requiring small amounts of energy, the development of complex cultural systems was, a priori, unlikely. The conventional view has been that human societies have a latent tendency towards greater complexity. Complexity was assumed to be a desirable thing, and the logical result of surplus food, leisure time, and human creativity. Although this scenario is popular, it is inadequate to explain the evolution of complexity. In the world of cultural complexity there is, to use a colloquial expression, no free lunch. More complex societies are costlier to maintain than simpler ones and require higher support levels per capita. A society that is more complex has more sub-groups and social roles, more networks among groups and individuals, more horizontal and vertical controls, higher flow of information, greater centralization of information, more specialization, and greater interdependence of parts. Increasing any of these dimensions requires biological, mechanical, or chemical energy. In the days before fossil fuel subsidies, increasing the complexity of a society usually meant that the majority of its population had to work harder (Tainter 1988, 1992, 1994a, 1995a, 1995b).

Many aspects of human behavior appear to be complexity averse (Tainter 1995b). The so-called “complexity of modern life” is a regular complaint in popular discourse. Some of the public discontent with government stems from the fact that government adds complexity to people’s lives. In science, the Principle of Occam’s Razor has enduring appeal because it states that simplicity in explanation is preferable to complexity.

Complexity has always been inhibited by the burdens of time and energy that it imposes, and by complexity aversion (which is no doubt related to cost). Thus explaining why human societies have become increasingly complex presents more of a challenge than ‘Is customarily thought. The reason why complexity increases is that, most of the time, it works. Complexity is a problemsolving strategy that emerges under conditions of compelling need or perceived benefit. Throughout history, the stresses and challenges that human populations have faced have often been resolved by becoming more complex. While a complete review is not possible here, this trend is evident in such spheres as:

1. Foraging and agriculture (Boserup 1965; Clark and Haswell 1966-1 Asch et al. 1972; Wilkinson 1973; Cohen 1977; Minnis 1995; Nelson 1995);
2. Technology (Wilkinson 1973; Nelson 1995);
3. Competition, warfare, and arms races (Parker 1988; Tainter 1992);
4. Sociopolitical control and specialization (Olson 1982; Tainter 1988); and
5. Research and development (Price 1963; Rescher 1978, 1980; Rostow 1980; Tainter 1988, 1995a).

In each of these areas, complexity increases through greater differentiation, specialization, and integration.

The development of complexity is thus an economic process: complexity levies costs and yields benefits. It is an investment, and it gives a variable return. Complexity can be both beneficial and detrimental. Its destructive potential is evident in historical cases where increased expenditures on socioeconomic complexity reached diminishing returns, and ultimately, in some instances, negative returns (Tainter 1988, 1994b). This outcome emerges from the normal economic process: simple, inexpensive solutions are adopted before more complex, expensive ones. Thus, as human populations have increased, hunting and gathering has given way to increasingly intensive agriculture, and to industrialized food production that consumes more energy than it produces (Clark and Haswell 1966; Cohen 1977; Hall et al. 1992). Minerals and energy production move consistently from easily accessible, inexpensively exploited reserves to ones that are costlier to find, extract, process, and distribute. Socioeconomic organization has evolved from egalitarian reciprocity, short-term leadership, and generalized roles to complex hierarchies with increasing specialization.

The graph in Figure 4.1 is based on these arguments. As a society increases in complexity, it expands investment in such things as resource production, information processing, administration, and defense. The benefit/cost curve for these expenditures may at first increase favorably, as the most simple, general, and inexpensive solutions are adopted (a phase not shown on this chart). Yet as a society encounters new stresses, and inexpensive solutions no longer suffice, its evolution proceeds in a more costly direction. Ultimately a growing society reaches a point where continued investment in complexity yields higher returns, but at a declining marginal rate. At a point such as B1, C1 on this chart a society has entered the phase where it starts to become vulnerable to collapse. [2]

Figure 4.1. Deminishing returns to increasing complexity (after Tainter 1988).

Two things make a society liable to collapse at this point. First new emergencies impinge on a people who are investing in a strategy that yields less and less marginal return. As such a society becomes economically weakened it has fewer reserves with which to counter major adversities. A crisis that the society might have survived in its earlier days now becomes insurmountable.

Second, diminishing returns make complexity less attractive and breed disaffection. As taxes and other costs rise and there are fewer benefits at the local level, more and more people are attracted by the idea of being independent. The society “decomposes” as people pursue their immediate needs rather than the long-term goals of the leadership. [3]

As such a society evolves along the marginal return curve beyond B2, C2, it crosses a continuum of points, such as B1, C3, where costs are increasing, but the benefits have actually declined to those previously available at a lower level of complexity. This is a realm of negative returns to investment in complexity. A society at such a point would find that, upon collapsing, its return on investment in complexity would noticeably rise. A society in this condition is extremely vulnerable to collapse.

This argument, developed and tested to explain why societies collapse (Tainter 1988), is also an account of historical trends in the economics of problem solving. The history of cultural complexity is the history of human problem solving. In many sectors of investment, such as resource production, technology, competition, political organization, and research, complexity is increased by a continual need to solve problems. As easier solutions are exhausted, problem solving moves inexorably to greater complexity, higher costs, and diminishing returns. This need not lead to collapse, but it is important to understand the conditions under which it might. To illustrate these conditions it is useful to review three examples of increasing complexity and costliness in problem solving: the collapse of the Roman Empire, the development of industrialism, and trends in contemporary science.

The Collapse of The Roman Empire

One outcome of diminishing returns to complexity is illustrated by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. As a solar-energy based society which taxed heavily, the empire had little fiscal reserve. When confronted with military crises, Roman Emperors often had to respond by debasing the silver currency (Figure 4.2) and trying to raise new funds. In the third century A.D. constant crises forced the emperors to double the size of the army and increase both the size and complexity of the government. To pay for this, masses of worthless coins were produced, supplies were commandeered from peasants, and the level of taxation was made even more oppressive (up to two-thirds of the net yield after payment of rent). Inflation devastated the economy. Lands and population were surveyed across the empire and assessed for taxes. Communities were held corporately liable for any unpaid amounts. While peasants went hungry or sold their children into slavery, massive fortifications were built, the size of the bureaucracy doubled, provincial administration was made more complex, large subsidies in gold were paid to Germanic tribes, and new imperial cities and courts were established. With rising taxes, marginal lands were abandoned and population declined. Peasants could no longer support large families. To avoid oppressive civic obligations, the wealthy fled from cities to establish self-sufficient rural estates. Ultimately, to escape taxation, peasants voluntarily entered into feudal relationships with these land holders. A few wealthy families came to own much of the land in the western empire, and were able to defy the imperial government. The empire came to sustain itself by consuming its capital resources; producing lands and peasant population (Jones 1964, 1974; Wickham 1984; Tainter 1988, 1994b). The Roman Empire provides history’s best-documented example of how increasing complexity to resolve problems leads to higher costs, diminishing returns, alienation of a support population, economic weakness, and collapse. In the end it could no longer afford to solve the problems of its own existence.

Figure 4.2. Debasement of the Roman silver currency, 0-269 A.D. (after Tainter 1994b with modifications). The chart shows grams of silver per denarius (the basic silver coin) from 0 to 237 A.D., and per 1/2 denarius from 238-269 A.D. (when the denarius was replaced by a larger coin tariffed at two denarii).

Population, Resources, and Industrialism

The fate of the Roman Empire is not the unavoidable destiny of complex societies. It is useful to discuss a historical case that turned out quite differently. In one of the most interesting works of economic history, Richard Wilkinson (1973) showed that in late-and post-medieval England, population growth and deforestation stimulated economic development, and were at least partly responsible for the Industrial Revolution. Major increases in population, at around 1300, 1600, and in the late 18th century, led to intensification in agriculture and industry. As forests were cut to provide agricultural land and fuel for a growing population, England’s heating, cooking, and manufacturing needs could no longer be met by burning wood. Coal came to be increasingly important, although it was adopted reluctantly. Coal was costlier to obtain and distribute than wood, and restricted in its occurrence. It required a new, costly distribution system. As coal gained importance in the economy the most accessible deposits were depleted. Mines had to be sunk ever deeper, until groundwater came to be a problem. Ultimately, the steam engine was developed and put to use pumping water from mines. With the development of a coal-based economy, a distribution system, and the steam engine, several of the most important technical elements of the Industrial Revolution were in place. Industrialism, that great generator of economic well-being, came in part from steps to counteract the consequences of resource depletion, supposedly a generator of poverty and collapse. Yet it was a system of increasing complexity that did not take long to show diminishing returns in some sectors. This point will be raised again later.

Science and Problem Solving

Contemporary science is humanity’s greatest exercise in problem solving. Science is an institutional aspect of society, and research is an activity that we like to think has a high return. Yet as generalized knowledge is established early in the history of a discipline, the work that remains to be done is increasingly specialized. These types of problems tend to be increasingly costly and difficult to resolve, and on average advance knowledge only by small increments (Rescher 1978, 1980; Tainter 1988). Increasing investments in research yield declining marginal returns.

Some notable scholars have commented upon this. Walter Rostow once argued that marginal productivity first rises and then declines in individual fields (1980). The great physicist Max Planck, in a statement that Nicholas Rescher calls ‘Planck’s Principle of Increasing Effort, observed that “…with every advance [in science] the difficulty of the task is increased” (Rescher 1980). As easier questions are resolved, science moves inevitably to more complex research areas and to larger, costlier organizations (Rescher 1980). Rescher suggests that “As science progresses within any of its specialized branches, there is a marked increase in the overall resource-cost to realizing scientific findings of a given level [of] intrinsic significance…” (1978). Exponential growth in the size and costliness of science is necessary simply to maintain a constant rate of progress (Rescher 1980). Derek de Solla Price noted that in 1963 science was, even then, growing faster than either the population or the economy, and of all scientists who had ever lived, 80-90% were still alive at the time of his writing (Price 1963). In the same period, such matters prompted Dael Wolfle to publish a query in Science titled “How Much Research for a Dollar?” (Wolfle 1960).

Scientists rarely think about the benefit/cost ratio to investment in their research. Yet if we assess the productivity of our investment in science by some measure such as the issuance of patents (Figure 4.3), the productivity of certain kinds of research appears to be declining. Patenting is a controversial indicator among those who study such matters (Machlup 1962; Schmookler 1966; Griliches 1984), and does not by itself indicate the economic return to the expenditures. Medicine is a field of applied science where the return to investment can be determined more readily. Over the 52-year period shown in Figure 4.4, from 1930-1982, the productivity of the United States health care system for improving life expectancy declined by nearly 60%.

The declining productivity of the United States health care system illustrates clearly the historical development of a problem-solving field. Rescher (1980) points out: Once all of the findings at a given state-of-the-art level of investigative technology have been realized, one must move to a more expensive level…. In natural science we are involved in a technological arms race: with every victory over nature the difficulty of achieving the breakthroughs which lie ahead is increased.

The declining productivity of medicine is due to the fact that the inexpensive diseases and ailments were conquered first (the basic research that led to penicillin costing no more than $20,000), so that those remaining are more difficult and costly to resolve (Rescher 1978). And as each increasingly expensive disease is conquered, the increment to average life expectancy becomes ever smaller.

Figure 4.3. Patent applicatications in respect to research inputs, 1942-1958 (data from Machlup 1962)

Figure 4.4. Productivity of the U.S. health care system, 1930-1982 (data from Worthington 1975; U.S. Bureau of Census 1983). Productivity index = (Life expentancy)/(National health expenditures as percent of GNP).

Implications of the Examples

The Roman Empire, industrialism, and science are important, not only for their own merits, but also because they exemplify: (1) how problem solving evolves along a path of increasing complexity, higher costs, and declining marginal returns (Tainter 1988), and (2) some different outcomes of that process. In the next section, I discuss what these patterns imply for our efforts to address contemporary problems.

Problem Solving, Energy and Sustainability

This historical discussion gives a perspective on what it means to be practical and sustainable. A few years ago I described about two dozen societies that have collapsed (Tainter 1988). In no case is it evident or even likely that any of these societies collapsed because its members or leaders did not take practical steps to resolve its problems (Tainter 1988). The experience of the Roman Empire is again instructive. Most actions that the Roman government took in response to crises-such as debasing the currency, raising taxes, expanding the army, and conscripting labor-were practical solutions to immediate problems. It would have been unthinkable not to adopt such measures. Cumulatively, however, these practical steps made the empire ever weaker, as the capital stock (agricultural land and peasants) was depleted through taxation and conscription. Over time, devising practical solutions drove the Roman Empire into diminishing, then negative, returns to complexity. The implication is that to focus a problem-solving system, such as ecological economics, on practical applications will not automatically increase its value to society, nor enhance sustainability. The historical development of problem-solving systems needs to be understood and taken into consideration.

Most who study contemporary issues certainly would agree that solving environmental and economic problems requires both knowledge and education. A major part of our response to current problems has been to increase our level of research into environmental matters, including global change. As our knowledge increases and practical solutions emerge, governments will implement solutions and bureaucracies will enforce them. New technologies will be developed. Each of these steps will appear to be a practical solution to a specific problem. Yet cumulatively these practical steps are likely to bring increased complexity, higher costs, and diminishing returns to problem solving.’ Richard Norgaard has stated the problem well: “Assuring sustainability by extending the modem agenda … will require, by several orders of magnitude, more data collection, interpretation, planning, political decision-making, and bureaucratic control” (Norgaard 1994).

Donella Meadows and her colleagues have given excellent examples of the economic constraints of contemporary problem solving. To raise world food production from 1951-1966 by 34%, for example, required increasing expenditures on tractors of 63%, on nitrate fertilizers of 146%, and on pesticides of 300%. To remove all organic wastes from a sugar-processing plant costs 100 times more than removing 30%. To reduce sulfur dioxide in the air of a U.S. city by 9.6 times, or particulates by 3.1 times, raises the cost of pollution control by 520 times (Meadows et al. 1972). All environmental problem solving will face constraints of this kind.

Bureaucratic regulation itself generates further complexity and costs. As regulations are issued and taxes established, those who are regulated or taxed seek loopholes and lawmakers strive to close these. A competitive spiral of loophole discovery and closure unfolds, with complexity continuously increasing (Olson 1982). In these days when the cost of government lacks political support, such a strategy is unsustainable. It is often suggested that environmentally benign behavior should be elicited through taxation incentives rather than through regulations. While this approach has some advantages, it does not address the problem of complexity, and may not reduce overall regulatory costs as much as is thought. Those costs may only be shifted to the taxation authorities, and to the society as a whole.

It is not that research, education, regulation, and new technologies cannot potentially alleviate our problems. With enough investment perhaps they can. The difficulty is that these investments will be costly, and may require an increasing share of each nation’s gross domestic product. With diminishing returns to problem solving, addressing environmental issues in our conventional way means that more resources will have to be allocated to science, engineering, and government. In the absence of high economic growth this would require at least a temporary decline in the standard of living, as people would have comparatively less to spend on food, housing, clothing, medical care, transportation, and entertainment.

To circumvent costliness in problem solving it is often suggested that we use resources more intelligently and efficiently. Timothy Allen and Thomas Hoekstra, for example, have suggested that in managing ecosystems for sustainability, managers should identify what is missing from natural regulatory process and provide only that. The ecosystem will do the rest. Let the ecosystem (i.e., solar energy) subsidize the management effort rather than the other way around (Allen and Hoekstra 1992). It is an intelligent suggestion. At the same time, to implement it would require much knowledge that we do not now possess. That means we need research that is complex and costly, and requires fossil-fuel subsidies. Lowering the costs of complexity in one sphere causes them to rise in another.

Agricultural pest control illustrates this dilemma. As the spraying of pesticides exacted higher costs and yielded fewer benefits, integrated pest management was developed. This system relies on biological knowledge to reduce the need for chemicals, and employs monitoring of pest populations, use of biological controls, judicious application of chemicals, and careful selection of crop types and planting dates (Norgaard 1994). It is an approach that requires both esoteric research by scientists and careful monitoring by farmers. Integrated pest management violates the principle of complexity aversion, which may partly explain why it is not more widely used.

Such issues help to clarify what constitutes a sustainable society. The fact that problem-solving systems seem to evolve to greater complexity, higher costs, and diminishing returns has significant implications for sustainability. In time, systems that develop in this way are either cut off from further finances, fail to solve problems, collapse, or come to require large energy subsidies. This has been the pattern historically in such cases as the Roman Empire, the Lowland Classic Maya, Chacoan Society of the American Southwest, warfare in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and some aspects of contemporary problem solving (that is, in every case that I have investigated in detail) (Tainter 1988, 1992, 1994b, 1995a). These historical patterns suggest that one of the characteristics of a sustainable society will be that it has a sustainable system of problem solving-one with increasing or stable returns, or diminishing returns that can be financed with energy subsidies of assured supply, cost, and quality.

Industrialism illustrates this point. It generated its own problems of complexity and costliness. These included railways and canals to distribute coal and manufactured goods, the development of an economy increasingly based on money and wages, and the development of new technologies. While such elements of complexity are usually thought to facilitate economic growth, in fact they can do so only when subsidized by energy. Some of the new technologies, such as the steam engine, showed diminishing returns to innovation quite early in their development (Wilkinson 1973; Giarini and Louberge 1978; Giarini 1984). What set industrialism apart from all of the previous history of our species was its reliance on abundant, concentrated, high-quality energy (Hall et al. 1992). 5 With subsidies of inexpensive fossil fuels, for a long time many consequences of industrialism effectively did not matter. Industrial societies could afford them. When energy costs are met easily and painlessly,  benefit/cost ratio to social investments can be substantially ignored (as it has been in contemporary industrial agriculture). Fossil fuels made industrialism, and all that flowed from it (such as science, transportation, medicine, employment, consumerism, high-technology war, and contemporary political organization), a system of problem solving that was sustainable for several generations.

Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. If our efforts to understand and resolve such matters as global change involve increasing political, technological, economic, and scientific complexity, as it seems they will, then the availability of energy per capita will be a constraining factor. To increase complexity on the basis of static or declining energy supplies would require lowering the standard of living throughout the world. In the absence of a clear crisis very few people would support this. To maintain political support for our current and future investments in complexity thus requires an increase in the effective per capita supply of energy-either by increasing the physical availability of energy, or by technical, political, or economic innovations that lower the energy cost of our standard of living. Of course, to discover such innovations requires energy, which underscores the constraints in the energy-complexity relation.

Conclusions

This chapter on the past clarifies potential paths to the future. One often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the “crash” that many fear-a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the “soft landing” that many people hope for-a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology.

The more likely option is a future of greater investments in problem solving, increasing overall complexity, and greater use of energy. This option is driven by the material comforts it provides, by vested interests, by lack of alternatives, and by our conviction that it is good. If the trajectory of problem solving that humanity has followed for much of the last 12,000 years should continue, it is the path that we are likely to take in the near future.

Regardless of when our efforts to understand and resolve contemporary problems reach diminishing returns, one point should be clear. It is essential to know where we are in history (Tainter 1995a). If macroeconomic patterns develop over periods of generations or centuries, it is not possible to comprehend our current conditions unless we understand where we are in this process. We have the the opportunity to become the first people in history to understand how a society’s problem-solving abilities change. To know that this is possible yet not to act upon it would be a great failure of the practical application of ecological economics.

 

Acknowledgments

This- chapter is revised from a plenary address to the Third International Meeting of the International Society for Ecological Economics, San Jose, Costa Rica, 28 October 1994. 1 am grateful to Cutler J. Cleveland, Robert Costanza, and Olman Segura for the invitation to present the address, to Maureen Garita Matamoros for assistance during the conference, to Denver Burns, John Faux, Charles A. S. Hall, Thomas Hoekstra, Joe Kerkvliet, and Daniel Underwood for comments on the plenary address, and to Richard Periman and Carol Raish for reviewing this version.

Notes

1. In some literature of the physical sciences, striving for a definition as objective as possible, the complexity of a system is considered to be the length of a description of its regularities (Gell-Mann 1992, 1994). This is compatible with the definition employed here. A society with fewer parts, less differentiated parts, and fewer or simpler integrative systems can certainly be described more succinctly than can a society with more of these (Tainter 1995b).
2. Collapse is a rapid transformation to a lower degree of complexity, typically involving significantly less energy consumption (Tainter 1988).
3. This is part of the process responsible for contemporary separatist movements in the U.S.
4. I have not considered so-called “green” alternatives in this analysis. There are two reasons why these appear to be impractical in the short-term. Firstly, industrial economies are closely coupled to the existing production system and resource base, including conventional energy (Hall et al. 1992; Watt 1992). The capital costs of massive, rapid industrial conversion would be very high. Secondly, experience since 1973 indicates that most members of industrial societies will not change their consumption patterns merely because of abstract projections about the long-term supply of energy or other resources. They will do so only when the prices of energy, and of goods and services that rely on energy, rise sharply for an extended time. It takes protracted hardship to convince people that the world to which they have been accustomed has changed irrevocably. Hardship that is minor or episodic merely allows leaders to exploit popular discontent for personal gain. Economic growth has become mythologized as part of our ideology, which makes it particularly difficult to discuss objectively in the public arena (Giarini and Louberge 1978).
5. Coal of course was not the only element that promoted industrialism. Other factors included declining supplies of fuelwood (Wilkinson 1973), changes in land-use laws. and availability of laborers who could be employed in manufacturing.

References

Allen, T. F. H. and T. W. Hoekstra. 1992. Toward a Unified Ecology. New York: Columbia University Press.
Asch, N. B., R. I. Ford, and D. L. Asch. 1972. Paleoethnobotany of the Koster site: The Archaic horizons. Illinois State Museum Reports of Investigations 24. Illinois Valley Archeological Program, Research Papers 6.
Boserup, E. 1965. The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure. Chicago: Aldine.
Carneiro, R. L. 1978. Political expansion as an expression of the principle of competitive exclusion. In Origins of the State: the Anthropology of Political Evolution, eds. Ronald Cohen and Elman R. Service. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.
Clark, C and M. Haswell. 1966. The Economics of Subsistence Agriculture. London: MacMillan.
Cohen, M. N. 1977. The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gell-Mann, M. 1992. Complexity and complex adaptive systems. In The Evolution of Human Languages, eds. J. A. Hawkins and M. Gell-Mann, pp. 3-18. Santa Fe Institute. Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proceedings Volume X1. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
Gell-Mann, M. 1994. The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Giarini, O. ed. 1984. Cycles, Value and Employment: Responses to the Economic Crisis. Oxford: Pergamon.
Giarini, O. and H. Louberge. 1978. The Diminishing Returns of Technology: An Essay on the Crisis in Economic Growth. Oxford: Pergamon.
Griliches, Z. 1984. Introduction. In Research and Development, Patents, and Productivity, ed. Zvi Griliches, pp. 1- 19. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Hall, Charles A. S., C. J, Cleveland, and R. Kaufmann. 1992. Energy and Resource Quality:The Ecology of the Economic Process. Niwot: University Press of Colorado.
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Machlup, Fritz. 1962. The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
McGuire, R. H. 1983. Breaking down cultural complexity: inequality and heterogeneity. In Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, Volume 6, ed. Michael B. Schiffer, pp. 91-142. New York: Academic Press.
Meadows, D., H. Dennis, L. Meadows, J. Randers, and W. W. Behrens 111. 1972. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books.
Minnis, P. E. 1995. Notes on economic uncertainty and human behavior in the prehistoric North American southwest. In Evolving Complexity and Environmental Risk in the Prehistoric Southwest, eds. J. A. Tainter and B. B. Tainter, pp. 57-78. Santa Fe Institute, Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proceedings Volume XXIV. Reading: Addison Wesley.
Nelson, M. C. 1995. Technological strategies responsive to subsistence stress. In Evolving Complexity and Environmental Risk in the Prehistoric Southwest, eds. J. A. Tainter and B. B. Tainter, pp. 107-144. Santa Fe Institute, Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proceedings Volume XXIV. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
Norgaard, R. B. 1994. Development Betrayed: The End of Progress and a Coevolutionary Revisioning of the Future. London and New York: Routledge.
Olson, M. 1982. The Rise and Decline of Nations. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Parker, G. 1988. The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Price, Derek de Solla. 1963. Little Science, Big Science. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Steward, J. H. 1955. Theory of Culture Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Tainter, J. A. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tainter, J. A. 1992. Evolutionary consequences of war. In Effects of War on Society, ed. G. Ausenda, pp. 103-130. San Marino: Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Stress.
Tainter, J. A. 1994a. Southwestern contributions to the understanding of core-periphery relations. In Understanding Complexity in the Prehistoric Southwest, eds. G. J. Gumerman, and M. Gell-Mann, pp. 25-36. Santa Fe Institute, Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proceedings Volume XVI. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
Tainter, Joseph A. 1994b. La fine dell’amministrazione centrale: il collaso dell’Impero romano in Occidente. In Storia d’Europa, Volume Secondo: Preistoria e Antichita, eds. Jean Guilaine and Salvatore Settis, pp. 1207-1255. Turin: Einaudi.
Tainter, J. A. 1995a. Sustainability of complex societies. Futures 27: 397-407.
Tainter, J. A. 1995b. Introduction: prehistoric societies as evolving complex systems. In: Evolving Complexity and Environmental Risk in the Prehistoric Southwest, eds. J. A. Tainter and B. B. Tainter. pp 1-23 Santa Fe Institute, Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proceedings Volume XXIV. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1983. Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1984 104d Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Watt, K. E. E. 1992. Taming the Future: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Scientific Forecasting. Davis: Contextured Webb Press.
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White, L. A. 1959. The Evolution of Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Wickham, C. 1984. The other transition: From the ancient world to feudalism. Past and Present 103: 3-36.
Wilkinson, R. G. 1973. Poverty and Progress: An Ecological Model of Economic Development. London: Methuen.
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Worthington, N. L. 1975. National health expenditures, 1929-1974. Social Security Bulletin 38(2): 3-20.

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Reposted from www.dieoff.org.

From the SynEARTH Archives.

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Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

A Gorilla’s Version of The Meaning of Life (And Why We Should Listen)

a review by Reason Wilken

Imagine this scene: A man is sitting in the dimly lit office of his adopted professor. The professor is explaining, in great detail, the origin of man and the course of human evolution. To illustrate his points, the professor draws various maps of the so-called “Fertile Crescent” in the Middle East and references biblical stories with the ease of an Ivy League historian. His student listens intently as the professor makes complex inferences and analyses of where man has been and where he is going. The professor is a gorilla. What is wrong with this picture?

In a word, nothing. Though one might not expect much in the way of cultural insight from a gorilla, Ishmael is clearly different. He has apparently taken to educating himself during the long hours in his cage, and as a result has become well-versed in human civilization. His area of expertise is, fittingly enough, captivity. Exactly what the concept of captivity has to do with the course of human evolution is not immediately obvious, but it quickly becomes clear.

Humans today associate themselves with a number of characteristics: “independent”, “productive”, “advanced” and “intelligent” to name a few. But captive? Captivity is for animals, or at most for the “less advanced” nomadic tribes who are dependant on their environment for food and shelter.

As we see it, us children of the Industrial Age are not at the mercy of anything or anyone. If we want food, we simply go to the store and purchase vegetables that we have grown or meat from animals that we have raised. If we need shelter from an approaching storm, we take cover in one of the weatherproofed, heated homes that we have built. Nothing can touch us, and we are capable of providing for ourselves and growing without limit. The world is our oyster, and there is no end to what our incredibly intelligent, productive and self-supporting civilization can accomplish.

Or is there? Especially in recent years, evidence has been piling up that our industrial civilization is not exactly living in a bubble. First it was global warming due to the destruction of the ozone, then came the lists of species that had become endangered or extinct due to our control of land, and most recently it is the energy crisis. Evidently, the current incarnation of humanity, however glorious, comes with strings attached. It is all too easy to continue to sail along with our current ways until we hit a wall. Most of us are quite aware of the adverse effects industrialization has on the planet, and we are just as tired of hearing about them. Frankly, it is quite depressing to know that as you are just going about your life on this earth you are destroying it in the process. Short of giving up all the advancements that modern civilization has made and reverting to a “primitive” hunter-gatherer society, it does not seem like there is much that can be done. Like a patient who is diagnosed with a terminal and seemingly unbeatable illness, part of humanity has simply given up on the hope that the world will ever be saved.

Giving up the hope of change and continuing blindly on our chosen path brings us back to the dreaded “captivity issue”. Ishmael describes humans as being “captives of a story told by ‘Mother Culture’” that portrays industrialization as a natural, desirable progression from a hunter-gatherer style of living. All of us are exposed to this ideology on a daily basis, from reading about the latest technological achievements to watching nature documentaries of “primitive” societies in remote parts of the world that are “still doing things the old way”. Meanwhile, our generation is running around extolling the benefits of the “new” industrial society and the freedom it affords. Granted, it would be almost impossible to put as much effort as we do into advancing technology if we did not believe, on some level, that it was morally right.

Ishmael likens our current cultural situation to an attempt for man to fly on homemade wings. He describes industrial society as a man-powered aircraft, one that was devised to allow us experience “freedom from the restraints that bind and limit the rest of the biological community”. These restraints might include population limits (based on available food), predation, and the inability to set up a stable society in one locale (due to hunting and gathering requirements). Our society pushes this “cultural craft” off a very tall cliff, and for a while it seems like our mission has been accomplished. We are flying high and have a vantage point over the rest of the world. None of the rules apply to us, and we are able to enjoy a feeling of superiority over all the other species. But while we perceive ourselves as flying gloriously, we are actually falling. As more time passes, we begin to see the ground we are rapidly approaching. Clues of our dilemma begin to appear like trees becoming visible on the landscape: Elimination of scores of species, global warming, starvation, overpopulation. Also visible according to Ishmael are “the remains of craft very like their own…merely abandoned—by the Maya, by the Hokoham, by the Anasazi…”. Even with such evidence, industrialized peoples do not realize their fate. They wonder “Why are these craft on the ground instead of in the air? Why would any people prefer to be earthbound when they could have the freedom of the air, as we do?”. They say “We must have faith in our craft. After all, it has brought us this far in safety” even as the end rises up to meet them head-on.

When one looks at our situation this way, it becomes clear why we might be described as “captives” of our culture even though we could not feel more free. We have invested so much in our current way of life in terms of time, energy and faith. We have put out the message to the world that our way of living is superior to any other way that has ever existed. We have tied ourselves almost inextricably to this craft, to be taken as willing prisoners of whatever may come of it.

For generations we have embraced the notion that industrial civilization evolved naturally from hunter-gatherer societies, when in reality it was a distinct split that began with the dawn of the Agricultural Age. Hunter-gatherer societies have not been entirely replaced by industrial civilization, and there a number existing today. Despite this fact, our cultural attitude has created a stigma surrounding smaller self-sustaining societies like these. Non-industrial people are “uncivilized”, “primitive” and “ignorant” no matter how organized or self-sufficient they are.

Gradually, our culture is beginning to realize that we are flawed in some ways and we cannot sustain our current drain on natural resources indefinitely. But even if it were widely accepted that industrial culture has a finite lifespan (which is quickly running out), it is unlikely that we would all be capable of adopting a simpler style of life. Even if the life of the earth were at stake (as it might soon be), it is still not plausible to believe that we would make the switch. The very philosophy underlying industrial (or as Ishmael calls it, “Taker”) culture runs contrary to hunter-gatherer ( “Leaver”) principles. This is not to say that Takers are bad and Leavers are good, just that their respective ideals are not complementary.

At the core of the Taker culture is a strong desire to care for and advance humanity. This is accomplished by growing enough food to support a large population, expanding the areas of the world in which humans can live, and making extensive use of natural resources to sustain our growing needs. Technologically, a great many advances have been made by industrial peoples: the invention of the steam engine (and subsequently the airplane and automobile), the ability to utilize the full potential of land through agriculture, and the ability to treat many diseases through discovery of new drugs. Unfortunately, most of this has been at great expense to the environment. At the core of Leaver culture is a strong desire to care for and respect the biological environment that sustains them. The majority of the time, Leaver peoples take not what they need but what is available. This may mean moving around in order to find more animals to hunt or food to gather. It may also mean that some members of the population will perish in the event that enough food cannot be found.

In principle, this is absolutely unacceptable to industrialized people. To the Takers, it seems obvious that we have to utilize every resource and milk the earth for everything we can in order to sustain and expand our race. Who in their right mind would allow members of their society to perish just because enough food could not be found? If supplies are tight, the answer is not to cut back consumption, but to increase supplies! If resources do eventually run out and the industrialized peoples do perish, then it will be with honor while trying to advance humanity. As Takers, we would almost rather die in glory while trying to further our race than to “revert” to hunting and gathering. Accepting the earth’s limitations and switching to a simpler life that could be supported on available resources would be conceding to failure.

So, how does one convince people to change without resorting to a dictatorial approach? How can today’s society truly be altered? Ishmael is a fairly perceptive gorilla, and he realizes that an important part of implementing change is getting others to listen. He realizes that people are not going to listen to cries of “You must fix your errant ways now before it’s too late! Save the world!” any more than they would listen to someone nagging them to do their laundry. Nagging and giving people ultimatums are not notoriously good ways of getting things accomplished. It is clear that we must be truly convinced, and not just told, to change our ways.

Ishmael is as much a salesman as he is a philosopher, and he understands the importance of packaging. Since most of us enjoy hearing good news and are inclined to listen to whomever bears it, he puts a positive spin on our dilemma. Instead of chastising Takers for their behavior and belittling them for their ignorance, he kindly offers to explain why the Taker way might not be the only (or the best) way of life.

Through explaining human cultural evolution in the context of the rest of the community of life, Ishmael shows us how man fits in and motivates us to work with the rest of the species for the greater good. He explains that we do not have to become a hunter-gatherer society in order to live like we “belong to the world” (as opposed to living like the world belongs to us). In order to reap the long-term benefits of the Leaver lifestyle (such as continued evolution and preservation of the earth’s resources) all we have to do is practice a few general (albeit challenging) principles. Among these are invoking a Peace-Keeping law, allowing the creatures around us to live and grow, and realizing that even Takers cannot speak with authority as to how others should live. According to Ishmael, the gods are the only ones who can do that, and the Takers must give back the title of Ruler to its rightful place. None of this means that we can no longer be agriculturalists or industrialists. It only means that we can no longer be ignorant.

(Reviewed 09-27-01)

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Reason Wilken is a 2001 honors graduate from UCLA with a BS degree in Biochemistry. She is currently working with an Investment Bank in New York City.  She offers original essays and reviews of books speaking to the creation of a Positive Future.

Ishmael is available in bookstores everywhere and online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders. You can find links here.

Seeking a Definition of God

Timothy Wilken, MD

I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking about God recently. What is the role of God in Humanity’s future? It would seem that any serious inquiry into that question must start with a definition of God.

I found the following definitions of God on a website about the various religions of the world:

Taoism

Tao, the subtle reality of the universe cannot be described, That which can be described in words is mearly a conception of the mind. Although names and descriptions have been applied to it, the subtle reality is beyond the description.
Tao Teh Ching – beginning of chapter 1

The subtle essense of the universe is elusive and evasive.
…
It is the subtle origin of the whole of creation and non-creation. It existed prior to the beginning of time as the deep and subtle reality of the universe. It brings all into being.
Tao Teh Ching – portions of chapter 21

Buddhism

“There is, O monks, an unborn, unoriginated, uncreated, unformed. Were there not, O monks, this unborn, unoriginated, uncreated, unformed, there would be no escape from the world of the born, originated, created, formed.

“Since, O monks, there is an unborn, unoriginated, uncreated, and unformed, therefore is there an escape from the born, originated, created, formed.”
The Gospel of Buddha – Sermon at the bamboo grove at Rajagaha

Hinduism

Neither the multitude of gods nor great sages know of my origin, for I am the source of all the gods and great sages.

A mortal who knows me as the unborn, beginningless great lord of the worlds is freed from all delusion and all evils.
The Bhagavad-Gita – The tenth teaching, verses 2 & 3

Sihkism

There is One, only One Supreme Being, Truth Eternal, Creator of all seen & unseen, Fearless, Without hatred, Timeless Being, Non-Incarnated, Self created, Realized by the Grace of Guru (Perfect Master Only.)
Guru Granth Sahib Page 1

Judaism

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1:1

For thus saith the Eternal that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the self existent One; and there is none else.
Isaiah 45:18

Christianity

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God Himself. He was present originally with God. All things were made and came into existence through Him; and without him was not one thing made that has come into being.
Gospel of John 1:1-3

Sufism

You are the Absolute Existence which causes (our) transient (existences) to appear.
Masnavi – Book 1 – Creator and Creation

Elsewhere I have written: Humanity has used the term God to represent ‘that’ in universe that is larger than ourselves. We have used the term God to represent ‘that’ which is the source of Universe — ‘that’ which is the source of Heaven and Earth — ‘that’ which is the source of Life and Humanity.

I make no argument against the existence of God. I am in full belief that there exists ‘that’ in universe that is larger than ourselves. I am in full belief that there is a ‘source’. And I also call that source God. Let us agree then that the source of Universe — the source of Heaven and Earth — the source of Life and Humanity — is God. This agreement does not require that we describe God in anyway.

Harry Rathbun in Creative Initiative writes:

We use the word God to designate that which is beyond description or definition. That which is ineffable, unutterable. That which is the Ultimate Reality, the Ultimate Mystery, which stands both behind and within the universe, behind Creation; that which is at once both immanent and transcendent. By the word “God” we refer to that which is source, direction, intelligence, and will; to that spirit which encompasses the supreme values of truth, beauty, and goodness; to that reality on which we are totally dependent and to which we are totally subject; and to that before which we stand in awe, wonder, and reverence, but with which we can communicate.

God is that which draws man up toward the heights, whose plan and intention call for all of us to rise to that level of being which is our destiny and our fulfillment.

This seems quite positive to me. Life’s power is to create syntropy. This ability to ever increase order, organization, pattern, and form is a defining characteristic of life. Life evolves towards ever-increasing syntropy — ever increasing order — ever increasing organization, form, pattern, and heterogeneity.

Young’s Theory of Process explains that this transition is from simple process to complex process — from light to particles, from particles to atoms, from atoms to molecules, from molecules to plants, from plants to animals, and from animals to humans. This process of synergic evolution then is another of the defining characteristics of life. This brings us to a new definition of evolution:

Evolution—def—> The transition of process from a state of lower syntropy—order, organization, pattern, and form to a state of higher syntropy—order, organization, pattern and form.

Science in 2004 has discovered that evolution is synergic. Then the purpose of life is to evolve. To transition from a state of lower syntropy to a state of higher syntropy. And so perhaps God is that which pulls us towards oneness–that which pulls us to be the best we can be. This seems an appropriate definition of God for a Future Positive.

 

Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15, April 1452.

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Happy Leonardo Day

It was five years ago yesterday, that I published the first volume of the UnCommon Sense Library. It was titled We Can All Win!, and provided the basic principles of synergic science as applied to human relationships.

It was gifted to humanity, and published as TrustWare online without cost or obligation.

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The Future Will Be Different

It’s early in the 1900’s along the East Coast of America and two young brothers are traveling to their secluded laboratory in an open motor car. They have recently invented a new vehicle of transport. With them is a wealthy railroad man, one of the many potential investors to whom they’ve pitched their invention. The three men talk as they drive along.

Hoping to influence the potential investor, the taller brother predicts the impact of their newly invented vehicle on society, “Our invention, will change the way humans travel in this world. We will go faster, farther, and quicker than ever before. And, people will use our vehicle to go all over the world. Someday, you will travel to London in a just a few hours.”

“Yes,” added the younger brother, “and travel won’t be expensive either. Our invention is highly efficient, with very little mechanical friction compared to all other methods of transport.”

By the time they arrive at the laboratory, the railroad man seems friendly if not a little skeptical of their project. Within a few minutes the vehicle was ready for a demonstration. They seated the railroad man comfortably in the center of the vehicle and took up their operating positions near the front.

Soon the motor was warmed up and running hard. The vehicle vibrated considerably and was also quite noisy. There were two long spinning devices that made it frightfully windy. The potential investor began to wonder to himself. “How could this device be any real improvement over the train or the motorcar?”

Then the vehicle began to slide along the ground on what appeared to the investor to be some type of track. Suddenly, the ride improved, the sound from the track was gone.

“Oh,” thought the railroad man, “this is much nicer than I thought.” Not even his best railcars rode this smoothly. And then ,for the first time, the railroad man realized they were rising into the air. Panic replaced curiosity, and soon his screams drowned out even the sound of the motors. The younger of the inventors, noticing the investor’s distress, signaled his brother to get back on the ground right away. Later, safe on the ground, he asked his brother what had happened. The older brother replied, “I should have told him about leaving the ground.”

“You didn’t tell him the Flyer was an aeroplane?” Asked Orville in disbelief.

Wilbur replied in frustration, “So many of these investors won’t even come to the laboratory if I tell them it’s an aeroplane. So, I told him what it would do, and let him experience the “how” for himself.

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I invented this story about the Wright brothers as an introduction to some recent scientific discoveries and inventions that will allow us to do something that has been thought impossible for all of human history.

Scientific discoveries have the power to turn the world upside down. Prior to the first flight of the Wright’s Aeroplane, when one believed something was impossible it was common to say, “You could no more do that than you could fly.”

We are now 100 years later, and no one would say such a thing today. In those 100 years, humanity has continued to make scientific discoveries and invent evermore powerful tools. Many other things that were once thought impossible have become common place today.

The ability to make scientific discoveries and create inventions is one of the defining characteristics of being human. This ability results from the little known fact that we humans are Time-binders. (1) Time-binders adapt to the stressors in their lives by analyzing and understanding their world. It is this unique awareness of time that grants us humans the ability to analyze and understand our world. By observing change over time, we come to understand process. And this understanding of process is the basis of knowledge. When humans act with knowledge they gain the ability to control. As our knowledge increases, the control we can exert in and on our lives increases as well.

With the growth of the human population and with the ever increasing knowledge, humans now exercise ever increasing control over their lives, and over the lives of others and the environment as well. And, whether for good or for bad humanity now dominates the planet earth.

This unique human power of dominion is made possible by the human ability called time-binding. It is through the binding of time that humans come to find themselves, in turn, bound together. Humans are bound by their mutual beliefs, bound together by their ability to store beliefs and to pass these beliefs onto their children.

Humans are bound together by their common ‘knowing’ in the form of science, art, religion, language, music, history, and myths that are passed from generation to generation. We humans are bound by a powerful inheritance. Our inherited legacy is alive. This legacy is constantly and continually growing; constantly and continually advancing. Every generation of humans refine, improve, and expand the knowing of their fathers and mothers; refine, improve, and expand the knowing of all the other humans who have ever lived.

Time-binders do this by living and thinking; by thinking and deciding. And not only is this legacy of human ‘knowing’ alive and growing, it is growing at an ever increasing rate. The rate of knowledge growth is never greater than it is right now. The scientific discoveries presented in UnCommon Sense are based on the knowledge available now in 1999. Understanding time-binding is the key to understanding ourselves and explaining time-binding will be an important focus of this book. Time-binding is one of a group of discoveries that I will designate as the “synergic sciences”.

The term synergic comes from the root word synergy. The dictionary defines synergy as the working together of two things to produce an effect greater than the sum of their individual effects. A simple example might be two muscles working together or two medications combined to treat a medical illness. R. Buckminster Fuller writing in 1975 explained:

“Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately. Synergy means behavior of integral, aggregate, whole systems unpredicted by behaviors of any of their components or subassemblies of their components taken separately from the whole. Synergy is the only word that means this. The fact that we humans are unfamiliar with the word means that we do not think there are behaviors of “wholes” unpredicted by the behavior of “parts”.

“Synergy can best be illustrated I think, by chrome-nickel-steel – chromium, nickel, and iron. The most important characteristic of strength of a material is its ability to stay in one piece when it is pulled – this is called tensile strength, it is measured as pounds per square inch, PSI. The commercially available strength of iron at the very highest level is approximately sixty thousand PSI; of chromium about seventy thousand PSI; and of nickel about eighty thousand PSI. The weakest of the three is iron.

“We all know the saying, “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link”. Well, experiment on chrome-nickel-steel, pull it apart, and you will find that it is much stronger than its weakest link of sixty thousand PSI. In fact it is much stronger than the eighty thousand PSI of its stronger link. Thus the saying that a chain is as strong as its weakest link doesn’t hold. So, let me say something that really sounds funny: Maybe a chain is as strong as the sum of the strength of all its links. Let’s add up the strengths of the components of chrome-nickel-steel and see. Sixty thousand PSI for iron and seventy thousand PSI for chromium and then and eighty thousand PSI for the nickel, that gives you two hundred and ten thousand PSI. If we add in the minor constituency of carbon and manganese we will add another forty thousand PSI giving us a total of two hundred and fifty thousand PSI. “Now the fact is that under testing, chrome-nickel-steel shows three hundred and fifty thousand PSI–or one hundred thousand PSI more than the combined strength of all the links.

“This is typical of synergy, and it is the synergy of the various metal alloys that have enabled industry to do all kinds of things that man never knew would be able to be done based on the characteristic of the parts.” (2)

The synergic sciences focuses on the whole system to understand the relationships between the parts. These relationships can be positive – synergic, they can be indifferent – neutral, or they can be negative – adversary.

Using the synergic sciences, we humans can restructure our relationships so they are positive. This means that we can be more happy, more effective, and more productive though synergic relationship.

Then we will see, as with the Wright brother’s aeroplane, that the synergic sciences will allow us to accomplish many things never before thought possible.

Like the Wright’s aeroplane, the synergic sciences can solve enormous problems for humankind. And, like the Wright’s aeroplane, the synergic sciences can bring many positive and wonderful changes to our lives, but the “how” will be very different from the way things are done today. The synergic sciences present us with a remarkably new view of humanity and of our human potential. This new view may challenge many of your current beliefs and some of your basic values. But this is good news, because without a major change in beliefs and basic values our human problems are not solvable.

Therefore, as you read, I ask only that you suspend judgement a little while. The synergic sciences are not hard to understand, but like all new knowledge they require some investment of your time. I ask only that you take this opportunity to think carefully and consider fully.

The synergic sciences allow the creation of tools that can turn the world upside down in the most positive of ways. They offer a basis for finally understanding humanity, the human condition, and ourselves. UnCommon Sense brings good news of a better way for humanity – a way in which we can all win. A way that will allow us to create a positive, safe and comfortable future for all of humanity. This is not a partial solution. The synergic sciences can be used to create a safe and positive future for all of us. They will allow us to make a world that works for all humans living today – all six billion of us. And they promise a world that could work for even more of us. If all solutions were synergic solutions, the carrying capacity of planet earth could approach 50 billion humans.

And this is without any need to damage the earth, or degrade our environment. This is the enormous promise of the synergic sciences. UnCommon Sense will explain how this can be accomplished. But to reach that safe and positive future, we will have to change the way in which we relate to each other.

Today most human relationships are either adversary or neutral. Adversary and neutral relationships by their very structure must result in conflict, loss and indifference.

The first discovery I will present is that of the synergic relationship. Synergic relationship enables human individuals to interact with each other in a new way. A way that creates positive alliances marked by strong commitment and trust. The synergic relationship offers us the choice of co-Operation as an alternative to conflict and indifference.

UnCommon Sense will reveal the methods and techniques for creating synergic relationships. Synergic relationship allows you to build strong mutually beneficial alliances with others and to effect corroborative solutions to even the most difficult of problems. This new way of relating can be applied to oneself as an individual, to our spouses–husband or wife, to our children and our extended families, and perhaps more importantly to everyone else – our local and global communities, and finally it can be applied to our relationship with the earth, and eventually even to the universe itself.

However, today we humans are not safe. Today our human world is filled with conflict, loss, and indifference. We have the potential for a positive and safe future, but that potential provides us no guarantees.

Tomorrow may be neither safe, nor positive.

UnCommon Sense points to the opportunity for us to transform ourselves, to change our relationships with each other, to choose synergy, and in so doing transcend our problems.

UnCommon Sense is written as a guide and includes the necessary knowledge and information to safely pass through this stage of human evolution.

Asked of one respected futurist in 1962, “What will the human population be in one hundred years?” He answered, “It will either be very large or it will be zero.” (3)  . . . 

In the hope that it will not be zero, let us begin.

Earth, 1999, April 15
Leonardo Day

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1)  Alfred Korzybski, The Manhood of Humanity, E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1921

2)  R. Buckminster Fuller, SYNERGETICS–Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, Volumes I & II, New York, Macmillan Publishing Co, 1975, 1979

3)  Andrew J. Galambos, V50–Introduction to Volitional Science, Free Enterprise Institute, Los Angeles, 1962

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UnCommon Sense—Introduction

UnCommon Sense—We Can All Win !

The Timebinding Trust

From the SynEARTH Archives.

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What is an Indicator of Sustainablity? 

Maureen Hart

An indicator is something that helps you understand where you are, which way you are going and how far you are from where you want to be. A good indicator alerts you to a problem before it gets too bad and helps you recognize what needs to be done to fix the problem. Indicators of a sustainable community point to areas where the links between the economy, environment and society are weak. They allow you to see where the problem areas are and help show the way to fix those problems.
 
Indicators of sustainability are different from traditional indicators of economic, social, and environmental progress. Traditional indicators — such as stockholder profits, asthma rates, and water quality — measure changes in one part of a community as if they were entirely independent of the other parts. Sustainability indicators reflect the reality that the three different segments are very tightly interconnected, as shown in the figure below:
 

	Communities are a web of interactions among the environment, the economy and society.

 
As this figure illustrates, the natural resource base provides the materials for production on which jobs and stockholder profits depend. Jobs affect the poverty rate and the poverty rate is related to crime. Air quality, water quality and materials used for production have an effect on health. They may also have an effect on stockholder profits: if a process requires clean water as an input, cleaning up poor quality water prior to processing is an extra expense, which reduces profits. Likewise, health problems, whether due to general air quality problems or exposure to toxic materials, have an effect on worker productivity and contribute to the rising costs of health insurance.
 
Sustainability requires this type of integrated view of the world — it requires multidimensional indicators that show the links among a community’s economy, environment, and society. For example, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a well-publicized traditional indicator, measures the amount of money being spent in a country. It is generally reported as a measure of the country’s economic well-being: the more money being spent, the higher the GDP and the better the overall economic well-being is assumed to be. However, because GDP reflects only the amount of economic activity, regardless of the effect of that activity on the community’s social and environmental health, GDP can go up when overall community health goes down. For example, when there is a ten-car pileup on the highway, the GDP goes up because of the money spent on medical fees and repair costs. On the other hand, if ten people decide not to buy cars and instead walk to work, their health and wealth may increase but the GDP goes down.
 

“Trying to run a complex society on a single indicator like the Gross National product is like trying to fly a 747 with only one gauge on the instrument panel … imagine if your doctor, when giving you a checkup, did no more than check your blood pressure.”   Hazel Henderson, Paradigms of Progress

In contrast, a comparable sustainability indicator is the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare. In order to get a more complete picture of what is economic progress, the ISEW subtracts from the GDP corrections for harmful bases or consequences of economic activity and adds to the GDP corrections for significant activities such as unpaid domestic labor. For instance, the ISEW accounts for air pollution by estimating the cost of damage per ton of five key air pollutants. It accounts for depletion of resources by estimating the cost to replace a barrel of oil equivalent with the same amount of energy from a renewable source. It estimates the cost of climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions per ton of emissions. The cost of ozone depletion is also calculated per ton of ozone depleting substance produced. Additionally, adjustments are made to reflect concern about unequal income distribution. The correction for unpaid domestic labor is based on the average domestic pay rate. Some health expenses are considered as not contributing to welfare, as well as some education expenses. (See Indicator Spotlight for more on the ISEW as a sustainability indicator.)
 
Like the GDP, the ISEW bundles together in one index tremendous amounts of information, but the key difference is that the information takes into account the links between environment, economy and society.
 
Indicators of sustainable community are useful to different communities for different reasons. For a healthy, vibrant community, indicators help monitor that health so that negative trends are caught and dealt with before they become a problem. For communities with economic, social, or environmental problems, indicators can point the way to a better future. For all communities, indicators can generate discussion among people with different backgrounds and viewpoints, and, in the process, help create a shared vision of what the community should be.

Traditional Versus Sustainability Indicators

The tables below compare traditional indicators with sustainable community indicators.
 

Economic Indicators
Traditional Indicators	Sustainability Indicators	Emphasis of Sustainability Indicators
Median income   Per capita income relative to the U.S. average	Number of hours of paid employment at the average wage required to support basic needs	What wage can buy   Defines basic needs in terms of sustainable consumption
Unemployment rate   Number of companies   Number of jobs	Diversity and vitality of local job base   Number and variability in size of companies   Number and variability of industry types   Variability of skill levels required for jobs	Resilience of the job market   Ability of the job market to be flexible in times of economic change
Size of the economy as measured by GNP and GDP	Wages paid in the local economy that are spent in the local economy   Dollars spent in the local economy which pay for local labor and local natural resources   Percent of local economy based on renewable local resources	Local financial resilience

 

Environmental Indicators
Traditional Indicators	Sustainability Indicators	Emphasis of Sustainability Indicators
Ambient levels of pollution in air and water	Use and generation of toxic materials (both in production and by end user)   Vehicle miles traveled	Measuring activities causing pollution
Tons of solid waste generated	Percent of products produced which are durable, repairable, or readily recyclable or compostable	Conservative and cyclical use of materials
Cost of fuel	Total energy used from all sources   Ratio of renewable energy used at renewable rate compared to nonrenewable energy	Use of resources at sustainable rate

 

Social Indicators
Traditional Indicators	Sustainability Indicators	Emphasis of Sustainability Indicators
SAT and other standardized test scores	Number of students trained for jobs that are available in the local economy   Number of students who go to college and come back to the community	Matching job skills and training to needs of the local economy
Number of registered voters	Number of voters who vote in elections   Number of voters who attend town meetings	Participation in democratic process   Ability to participate in the democratic process

 

Characteristics of Effective Indicators

An indicator is something that points to an issue or condition. Its purpose is to show you how well a system is working. If there is a problem, an indicator can help you determine what direction to take to address the issue. Indicators are as varied as the types of systems they monitor. However, there are certain characteristics that effective indicators have in common:

• Effective indicators are relevant; they show you something about the system that you need to know.
   
  
• Effective indicators are easy to understand, even by people who are not experts.
   
  
• Effective indicators are reliable; you can trust the information that the indicator is providing.
   
  
• Lastly, effective indicators are based on accessible data; the information is available or can be gathered while there is still time to act.
  

An example of an indicator is the gas gauge in your car. The gas gauge shows you how much gasoline is left in your car. If the gauge shows the tank is almost empty, you know it’s time to fill up. Another example of an indicator is a midterm report card. It shows you whether a student is doing well enough to go to the next grade or if extra help is needed. Both of these indicators provide information to help prevent or solve problems, hopefully before they become too severe.
 
Indicators can be useful as proxies or substitutes for measuring conditions that are so complex that there is no direct measurement. For instance, it is hard to measure the ‘quality of life in my town’ because there are many different things that make up quality of life and people may have different opinions on which conditions count most. A very simple substitute indicator is ‘Number of people moving into the town compared to the number moving out.’
 
Examples of familiar measurements used as indicators in everyday life include:

• Wave height and wind speed are indicators of storm severity
   
  
• Barometric pressure and wind direction are indicators of upcoming weather changes
   
  
• Won-lost record is an indicator of player skills
   
  
• Credit-card debt is an indicator of money-management skills
   
  
• Pulse and blood pressure are indicators of fitness
  

Note that these are all numeric measurements. Indicators are quantifiable. An indicator is not the same thing as an indication, which is generally not quantifiable, but just a vague clue. In addition to being quantifiable, effective indicators have the four basic characteristics noted above. These characteristics are:
 
Relevant
An indicator must be relevant, that is, it must fit the purpose for measuring. As indicators, the gas gauge and the report card both measure facts that are relevant. If, instead of measuring the amount of gas in the tank, the gas gauge showed the octane rating of the gasoline, it would not help you decide when to refill the tank. Likewise, a report card that measured the number of pencils used by the student would be a poor indicator of academic performance.
 
Understandable
An indicator must be understandable. You need to know what it is telling you. There are many different types of gas gauges. Some gauges have a lever that moves between ‘full’ and ‘empty’ marks. Other gauges use lights to achieve the same effect. Some gauges show the number of gallons of gasoline left in the tank. Although different, each gauge is understandable to the driver. Similarly, with the report card, different schools have different ways of reporting academic progress. Some schools have letter grades A through F. Other schools use numbers from 100 to 0. Still other schools use written comments. Like the gas gauge, these different measures all express the student’s progress or lack of progress in a way that is understandable to the person reading the report card.
 
On the other hand, a gas gauge that showed the number of BTU’s left in the tank would probably not be very useful to you in deciding when to fill up the tank. Likewise, a report card that gave grades in ancient Greek script would be a mystery to most people. In order for you to know when action is needed, you must be able to understand what an indicator is telling you.
 
Reliable
An indicator must be reliable. You must trust what the indicator shows. A good gas gauge and an accurate report card give information that can be relied on. A gas gauge that shows the tank is empty when in fact it is half full would make you stop for gasoline before it is needed. A gas gauge that shows the tank is half full when in fact it is empty would cause you to run out of gas in an inconvenient place. Similarly, if a student’s grade were reported wrong, an honors student could be sent for remedial work and a student who needs help would not get it. An indicator is only useful if you know you can believe what it is showing you.
 
Reliability is not the same as precision. When your gas gauge registers empty, you know there is still a gallon or so of gasoline left as a reserve. The gas gauge reliably under-reports the amount of gasoline. An indicator does not necessarily need to be precise; it just needs to give a reliable picture of the system it is measuring.
 
Accessible Data
Indicators must provide timely information. They must give you information while there is time to act. For example, imagine a gas gauge that only gave you the amount of gasoline in the tank when the engine was started. After you have been driving for several hours, that reading is no longer useful. You need to know how much gasoline is in the tank at each moment. Similarly, a report card distributed a week before graduation arrives too late to give a student remedial help. In order for an indicator to be useful in preventing or solving a problem, it must give you the information while there is still time to correct the problem.
 
One of the biggest problems with developing indicators of sustainability is that frequently the best indicators are those for which there is no data, while the indicators for which there is data are the least able to measure sustainability. This has led many communities to choose traditional data sources and measures for indicators. There are several advantages to traditional indicators. First, the data is readily available and can be used to compare communities. Second, traditional indicators can help to define problem areas. Third, traditional indicators can be combined to create sustainability indicators.
 
However, there is a real danger that traditional data sources and traditional indicators will focus attention on the traditional solutions that created an unsustainable community in the first place. It may be tempting to keep measuring ‘number of jobs,’ but measuring ‘number of jobs that pay a livable wage and include benefits’ will lead to better solutions. Discussions that include the phrase ‘but you can’t get that data’ are not going to lead to indicators of sustainability. In fact, if you define a list of indicators and find that the data is readily available for every one of them, you probably have not thought hard enough about sustainability. Try to define the best indicators and only settle for less as an interim step while developing data sources for better indicators.

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Reposted from Sustainable Measures.

Easter is a time to think about Jesus of Nazareth. He is arguably the most important human who has ever lived. That seems certainly true in western societies. Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of The Christ has further brought the world’s focus back to the suffering of Christ, but is it the right focus?

Reposted from the April 10th issue of the New York Times.

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A Most Virtuous Death

Peter Steinfels

Christ Crucified by the Virtues.” To contemporary eyes, it is a strange and thought-provoking image, particularly at a moment of impassioned discussions about who was responsible for the death of Jesus.

This full-page frontispiece of a 13th-century volume of readings for saints’ days shows Jesus being crucified not by Roman soldiers or Jewish authorities or even the sins of humanity — but by virtues.

The figure of Jesus, peacefully, almost elegantly slumped on the cross, is familiar. So are the large figures standing on either side of the cross: his mother, Mary, and the apostle John. But who are those smaller female figures with halos?

Above the crossbeam, two of them labeled Misericordia (mercy) and Sapientia (wisdom) are hammering nails into Jesus’ hands. Below, a figure labeled Obedientia (obedience) is hammering a nail into his feet. Sponsa (bride, symbol of the soul, the church or both) is piercing Jesus’ side with a lance, while just beneath his right arm, wearing a crown and floating on a cloud, Fides (faith) holds a chalice to catch the sacred blood.

“At some level a very violent as well as lyrical image,” said Jeffrey Hamburger, a professor in Harvard University’s department of history of art and architecture, who will include this manuscript illustration in “Crown and Veil, the Art of Female Monasticism in the Middle Ages,” a major exhibition that will open in Germany next year.

Beneath Jesus’ left arm, an angel pushes away a figure labeled Synagoga (synagogue). The role of Jewish authorities in the death of Jesus, like the Roman role, may be missing from this picture, but Christianity’s claim to have superseded Judaism is not.

This image, produced for a convent of Dominican nuns in Regensburg, Germany, is not unique. The motif of the virtues crucifying Jesus had a wide enough currency in the 13th and 14th centuries that dozens of examples survive, in manuscripts, paintings and stained-of examples survive, in manuscripts, paintings and stained-glass windows.

The theology behind these images is complex. In giving himself over to death, Jesus was thought to have brought to perfection such virtues as obedience, humility, patience and perseverance.

Much of the imagery was rooted in a spiritual reading of the Song of Songs, said Bernard McGinn, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School and author of many works on Christian mysticism.

That biblical love poem’s passages, in its old Latin translation, about the “wound of love,” or wounding the heart, inspired the images of bride, soul or church piercing Christ’s side and receiving Christ’s love in return.

Even the briefest of conversations with Professor Hamburger or Professor McGinn reveal how rich this iconography is. But at a much simpler level, these images are reminders of the extraordinary variety of ways in which Christianity has sought to portray and understand the Crucifixion.

It is a commonplace that between the 11th and the 15th centuries, Western Christian piety shifted its focus from the divinity of Jesus to his humanity. Of the earlier period, Giles Constable, a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, writes, “The cross signified Christ’s Second Coming rather than his suffering and death.” Christ’s body on the cross, he adds, “was always erect, alive, and indifferent to suffering.” This was Jesus resurrected and triumphant, king and victor over death rather than its victim.

But as the Middle Ages progressed, Jesus’ royal crown was replaced by a crown of thorns, Jesus’ head dropped to one side, his eyes fell closed, his arms curved under the weight of his dying body. The images are more and more calculated to elicit an emotional response. The pain-racked renditions of Jesus’ death on the cross are the counterparts to the glowing presentations of his birth in the manger.

Certainly, where once the emphasis was on the deification of humanity by sharing in Christ’s divine nature, increasingly the emphasis shifted to sharing in Christ’s sufferings and imitating his earthly way of life. But scholars warn against oversimplifying this transition. It never excluded a multiplicity of ways to portray and understand the meaning of Jesus’ death.

The Regensburg frontispiece is “right on the cusp” of one aspect of this transition, Professor Hamburger said. On the one hand, it is allegorical and didactic, directed toward intellectual reflection and theological meditation. On the other hand, not only does Jesus’ lifeless body elicit the viewer’s pity, but, as Professor Hamburger pointed out, the fact that the active protagonists in the scene have become female figures invited the nuns’ identification with the drama. Many representations of this theme were, in fact, created for nunneries.

The multiplicity of images of the Crucifixion should also recall that although Christians have always believed that Jesus’ death and resurrection somehow healed a world broken and enslaved by sin, they still differ over how exactly this process of atonement should be understood. Why was Jesus’ death necessary — or was it? What important ideas should govern thinking about it: expiatory sacrifice, ransom from slavery, feudal satisfaction, legal justification, exemplary action?

Envisaging Jesus’ crucifixion literally as the result of his faithfulness to virtues actually has some parallels with contemporary thinking about atonement that tries to connect closely his words, deeds, and death: because Jesus did not waver from proclaiming, in speech, acts of healing and fellowship with sinners, a new reign of God in which social hierarchies, violent practices and even death itself would be overturned, the inevitable outcome was his condemnation and execution — and affirmation by God on the third day.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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The Scientific Basis for The Golden Rule 

The Uncertainty of Human Knowing

We can never know all there is to know about anything — this is a fundamental ‘law’ of Nature. This is in fact is the only cause of mistakes. Ignorance is the word that best describes the human condition. Alfred Korzybski explained this condition scientifically as the  Principle of Non-Allness. By this he meant that we humans make all of our decisions with incomplete and imperfect knowing. We make every choice without all the information. All humans live and act in state of ignorance. Korzybski felt that developing an awareness of this ‘law’ of Nature was so fundamentally important to all humans, that he developed a lesson especially for children. Korzybski would explain:

“Children, today we want to learn all about the apple.”

He would place an apple in view of the children, “Do you children know about the apple?”

“I do!”, “I do!”, “Yes, I know about apples!”

“Good” Korzybski moved to the blackboard. , “Come, tell me about the apple?”

“The Apple is a fruit.”, “The apple is red.”, “The apple grows on a tree.”

Korzybski would begin to list the characteristics described by the children on the blackboard.

The children continued, “An apple a day keeps the Doctor away.”

Korzybski continued listing the children’s answers until they run out of ideas, then he would ask, “Is that all we can say about the apple?

When the children answered in the affirmative, Korzybski would remove his pocket-knife and cut the apple in half, passing the parts among the children.

“Now, children can we say more about the apple?

“The apple smells good.” “The juices are sweet.” “The apple has seeds.” “Its pulp is white.” “Mother makes apple pie.

Finally when the children had again run out of answers, Korzybski would ask, “Now, is that all-we can say about the apple?” When the children agreed that it was all that could be said, he would again go into his pocket only this time he removed a ten power magnifying lens and passed it to the children. The children would examine the apple, and again respond:

“The apple pulp has a pattern and a structure.” “The skin of the apple has pores.” “The leaves have fuzz on them.” “The seeds have coats.”

Thus Korzybski would teach the children the lesson of Non-ALLness. Now we could continue to examine the apple—with a light microscope, x-ray crystallography, and eventually the electron microscope. We would continue to discover more to say about the apple. However, we can never know ALL there is to know about anything in Nature. We humans have the power to know about Nature, but not to know ALL. Knowing is without limit, but knowing is not total. Universe is our human model of Nature. Our ‘knowing’ can grow evermore complete. It can grow closer and closer to the ‘Truth’, but it cannot equal the ‘Truth’. It must always be incomplete.

The following essay is reposted from EDGE.

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Learning to Expect the Unexpected

Nassim Taleb

The 9/11 commission has drawn more attention for the testimony it has gathered than for the purpose it has set for itself. Today the commission will hear from Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser to President Bush, and her account of the administration’s policies before Sept. 11 is likely to differ from that of Richard Clarke, the president’s former counterterrorism chief, in most particulars except one: it will be disputed.

There is more than politics at work here, although politics explains a lot. The commission itself, with its mandate, may have compromised its report before it is even delivered. That mandate is “to provide a ‘full and complete accounting’ of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and recommendations as to how to prevent such attacks in the future.”

It sounds uncontroversial, reasonable, even admirable, yet it contains at least three flaws that are common to most such inquiries into past events. To recognize those flaws, it is necessary to understand the concept of the “black swan.”

A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that’s what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.

Black swans can have extreme effects: just a few explain almost everything, from the success of some ideas and religions to events in our personal lives. Moreover, their influence seems to have grown in the 20th century, while ordinary events — the ones we study and discuss and learn about in history or from the news — are becoming increasingly inconsequential.

Consider: How would an understanding of the world on June 27, 1914, have helped anyone guess what was to happen next? The rise of Hitler, the demise of the Soviet bloc, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the Internet bubble: not only were these events unpredictable, but anyone who correctly forecast any of them would have been deemed a lunatic (indeed, some were). This accusation of lunacy would have also applied to a correct prediction of the events of 9/11 — a black swan of the vicious variety.

A vicious black swan has an additional elusive property: its very unexpectedness helps create the conditions for it to occur. Had a terrorist attack been a conceivable risk on Sept. 10, 2001, it would likely not have happened. Jet fighters would have been on alert to intercept hijacked planes, airplanes would have had locks on their cockpit doors, airports would have carefully checked all passenger luggage. None of that happened, of course, until after 9/11.

Much of the research into humans’ risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave. Yet vicious black swans by definition do not repeat themselves. We cannot learn from them easily.
All of which brings us to the 9/11 commission. America will not have another chance to hold a first inquiry into 9/11. With its flawed mandate, however, the commission is in jeopardy of squandering this opportunity.

The first flaw is the error of excessive and naÔve specificity. By focusing on the details of the past event, we may be diverting attention from the question of how to prevent future tragedies, which are still abstract in our mind. To defend ourselves against black swans, general knowledge is a crucial first step.
The mandate is also a prime example of the phenomenon known as hindsight distortion. To paraphrase Kirkegaard, history runs forward but is seen backward. An investigation should avoid the mistake of overestimating cases of possible negligence, a chronic flaw of hindsight analyses. Unfortunately, the hearings show that the commission appears to be looking for precise and narrowly defined accountability.

Yet infinite vigilance is not possible. Negligence in any specific case needs to be compared with the normal rate of negligence for all possible events at the time of the tragedy — including those events that did not take place but could have. Before 9/11, the risk of terrorism was not as obvious as it seems today to a reasonable person in government (which is part of the reason 9/11 occurred). Therefore the government might have used its resources to protect against other risks — with invisible but perhaps effective results.

The third flaw is related. Our system of rewards is not adapted to black swans. We can set up rewards for activity that reduces the risk of certain measurable events, like cancer rates. But it is more difficult to reward the prevention (or even reduction) of a chain of bad events (war, for instance). Job-performance assessments in these matters are not just tricky, they may be biased in favor of measurable events. Sometimes, as any good manager knows, avoiding a certain outcome is an achievement.

The greatest flaw in the commission’s mandate, regrettably, mirrors one of the greatest flaws in modern society: it does not understand risk. The focus of the investigation should not be on how to avoid any specific black swan, for we don’t know where the next one is coming from. The focus should be on what general lessons can be learned from them. And the most important lesson may be that we should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible. After a black swan like 9/11, we must look ahead, not in the rear-view mirror.

[Editor's Note: First published as an Op-Ed Page article in The New York Times on April 8th.]

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NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB is an essayist and mathematical trader and the author of Dynamic Hedging and Fooled by Randomness (2nd Edition, published April 9th).

Nassim Taleb’s Edge Bio Page

Read the full article on the Uncertainty of Human Knowing