[*PG229]THE CONSTITUTIONS OF SUSTAINABLE CAPITALISM AND BEYOND
Abstract: As environmental crises mount, the law and forms of governance must change. This article explores the challenges provided by recent sustainability literature to the law. As the article demonstrates, the sustainability literature, while it contains economic analysis and solutions to environmental problems, does not systematically address the questions pertaining to the design of law and political institutions. To that end, this article poses the challenge to the legal profession, particularly law schools and their students, to incorporate sustainability into their worldview.
The state of the world1 is not good, or, since the world will be here long after we are gone, I should say the state of the world upon which people depend is not good. Long predicted and feared environmental problems are now cascading upon us. Not a day goes by, it seems, without news of catastrophic global warming or collapsed fisheries or depleted resources or diminished topsoil or lack of fresh water or diminished biological diversity—and on and on.2
Recently, environmentalism has embraced various forms of “sustainability” as potential responses to these global environmental crises. These forms of sustainability anticipate changes in the way we live in the industrialized West to protect the long-term health of Earth’s ecosystems. They see us as currently spending environmental “capital” that took many thousands or millions of years to accumulate. This “spending of capital” creates the false impression that we are wealthier than we in fact are. According to sustainability practitioners we must match our production and growth to the resources that we in [*PG230]some sense create or which are renewably created by the Earth’s eco-systems.
The West is likely to move to some form of sustainability, at least as an interim response to an increasingly grim environmental context. It is not my task in this article, however, to convince anyone of that. Rather, the question raised here is one that the practitioners of sustainability have not yet addressed: what are the likely or even possible forms of governance that might function in a sustainable world?
I will answer this question in the context of “sustainable capitalism,” and its close relative, “natural capitalism.”3 Because it has quickly become a standard and a staple of this movement,4 I will begin with the book Natural Capitalism as a standard reference in considering issues of future governance. I will then contrast Natural Capitalism with other voices in the sustainability movement.
To speak of the Constitution of Sustainable Capitalism raises the question, what is a constitution? The average American law school class in constitutional law investigates primarily, probably exclusively, decisions by the United States Supreme Court interpreting a document known as the Constitution. Even advanced courses in constitutional jurisprudence generally take, as the only proper subject for such a course, either the controversies over interpretation of the written constitution in particular areas like substantive due process, or controversies over interpretive theories in general.5 A book like Consti[*PG231]tutional Theory by Michael Gerhardt and Thomas Rowe,6 which I have used in constitutional jurisprudence courses, might as well be entitled: “How Justices on the United States Supreme Court Ought to Interpret the Constitution in Important Cases.” The book sets forth the familiar disputes among legal constitutional theorists concerning interpretivism, textualism, natural law, liberal theory and so forth. Even the arguments about Bush v. Gore7 assume that the subject of constitutional jurisprudence is interpretation of the written constitution.8
But this account of interpreting a constitution, which is so familiar to us, is misleading. It obscures what it means to constitute a society. In all discussions of how judges ought to interpret the Constitution there are underlying assumptions that undergird particular interpretive arguments. For example, Justice Antonin Scalia’s book, A Matter of Interpretation,9 which contains a defense of textualism—the way Justice Scalia implies he interprets the Constitution in actual cases—presents some justification for why Justices should interpret the [*PG232]Constitution this way.10 If one looks closely and fills in the argument, one can see that Justice Scalia presents certain assumptions, either impliedly or expressly, about the nature of language—for example, that a word can have a determinate meaning depending on how closely it represents something accurately11—and the nature of politics—that most differences between people over policy reflect irreducible differences of opinion.12 Justice Scalia suggests that, since in the realm of political life there is no truth, governmental practices like constitutional interpretation should be objective and formal.13 Whether or not Justice Scalia’s account is persuasive, in order to evaluate it, or even to understand it, a course in constitutional jurisprudence would have to deal seriously with the nature of language and the meaning of political life.
But even this simplified picture of textualism understates the breadth of a constitution. For Justice Scalia does not bother to explain or justify the interpretive assumptions that all of the Justices share and that are shared as well by all other mainstream commentators, law professors, journalists, pundits and so forth. Justice Scalia does not bother to say, for example, that the point of doing constitutional interpretation in a certain way is to benefit people, rather than, say, to benefit insects. Human welfare broadly conceived is “known” to be at [*PG233]the heart of government, including the governmental task of how judges interpret a constitution. Justice Scalia also does not bother to say that, in interpreting the Constitution, no omens or signs should be looked for, nor oracles consulted. These “truths” are known by everyone already.
So, constitution in a broad sense means all that we “know” to be true: our form of life, including our form of political life, of religious life, of intellectual life, of social life, of economic life, of aesthetic life and so forth. Although certainly in referring to “The Constitution,” we sometimes intend to refer only to a document and its interpretation by a government official, that specialized meaning is usually reserved for professional and technical contexts. In contrast to that usage, Bruno Latour calls the constitution in the broad sense, the “full constitution” of modernity. Latour refers to the other constitution as the political constitution of jurists.14 For Latour, the main determinant of our full constitution is the relation between the human and the non-human. Latour states that “[j]ust as the constitution of jurists defines the rights and duties of citizens and the State, the working of justice and the transfer of power, so this Constitution . . . defines humans and non–humans, their properties and their relations, their abilities and their groupings.”15 Latour’s insight about the centrality of the human/non-human distinction in our full constitution is amply borne out by the sorts of issues that come before the courts as well as by the constitutional assumptions of writers like Justice Scalia. The fact that the legality of abortion, for example, was thought by Justice Blackmun in Roe v. Wade16 to turn on whether the fetus is a person17 shows the centrality of the human/non-human distinction. The fact that the destruction of a species of animal, in and of itself, is not thought by the United States Supreme Court to provide a sufficient basis for standing also illustrates the human/non-human distinction.18 So, to understand the political constitution of jurists, the traditional object of law school study, we must understand our full constitution.
As Latour shows by reference to anthropology, it is difficult to describe the full constitution of modern, western society.19 Anthropology has done a good job at writing the full constitution of other [*PG234]societies. Doing so in our own case is harder. The problem is that everything must be tackled at once. All aspects of our form of life must be included. Also, what is closest to us can be the hardest to see. In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour does an effective job of identifying our most determinative aspects. That is why the book is important for understanding ourselves and why it has a place in a law school class in constitutional jurisprudence.
In trying to describe the full constitution of sustainable capitalism, there is the added problem that no sustainable, industrial society as yet exists. This problem is not really surmountable, but one can hint at what a sustainable society might be like. I will lessen the difficulty of the task by concentrating on very few visions of sustainable capitalism and by focusing on only a partial aspect of that form of life. I will emphasize here, as law school usually does, the institutions of governance of sustainable capitalism. While this will give a truncated idea of these forms of life, it will allow lawyers the greatest opportunity to bring their expertise to bear in helping to solve our looming environmental problems.
Since the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972,20 and literally since the 1987 report of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development,21 the concept of sustainable development has been in widespread technical use. The Commission report, Our Common Future, but known as the Brundtland Report22 defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”23 This definition has been called “purposely vague” in order to generate international support and [*PG235]provoke international debate about sustainability.24 Clearly, the formula foresees continuing growth and consumption and does not, in and of itself, address issues of equity beyond, impliedly, intergenerational equity.25 Nor does the formula endorse the inherent value of the natural world, including the place of species other than human.26
The phrase “sustainable development” has dominated the discussion of sustainability at the international level. The two documents that emerged from the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Agenda 2127 and the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development,28 both embrace the concept of sustainable development.29 In the 1997 review of progress since the Rio Conference, the members of the United Nations General Assembly again pledged themselves to “achieving sustainable development,”30 although no real progress toward that result had in fact been achieved.31
In the United States, sustainable development achieved something of a breakthrough into popular consciousness in 1993, when President Clinton created The President’s Council on Sustainable Development.32 Nevertheless, the concept has not influenced policy here, remaining, as John Dernbach calls it, “something of a mystery to domestic policy makers . . . .”33
[*PG236] It is because of the gap between the international context and domestic debate that I am using the term “sustainable capitalism” in this paper to describe a recent trend in the United States to address sustainability in a tone somewhat different, and certainly more business-oriented, than is the case internationally. The works I emphasize here, most notably the book, Natural Capitalism,34 lack the flavor of developmental economics and are clearly aimed at policymakers within a developed capitalist market and at a public generally committed to such an economic system. In choosing this terminology, I am consciously suggesting that this American tendency will become more influential in the future than will the international alternative. While sustainable development and sustainable capitalism are not antagonistic concepts,35 they are not identical either.
Natural Capitalism is the best known of the recent sustainability literature. The book begins, as does all sustainability work, with acknowledgment of the deep and profound environmental crisis currently facing humankind. What distinguishes Natural Capitalism from the rest of the field is the resolutely positive tone of its message. The book describes a win-win situation in which business, government, and the public may fruitfully cooperate.36 The looming environmental crisis, or crises, can be met, not only successfully, but practically painlessly, improving environment, economy and social equity at the same time. Perhaps this optimistic tone is responsible for the book’s influence. The tone is evident in the very opening passage of Natural Capitalism:
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 oil once provided. 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 [*PG237]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 CO2 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.37
There are even more promises in the first few pages of the book, including social improvements such as higher real wages, a reinvigorated union movement, and a new level of cooperation among corporations and other groups.38 The authors acknowledge that this may sound like the vision of a utopia but, they respond that these results can come about from economic and technological trends “already in place.”39
The authors are aware of the skepticism that such language engenders. They intend to justify these expansive claims. Whether they succeed is not my focus here. The question that concerns lawyers in particular is what sort of political structures and institutions these authors envision as part of this new system. To answer that question, it is first necessary to examine the tenets of Natural Capitalism.
The starting point of Natural Capitalism is the “relentless loss of living systems” in the world today.40 The old industrial revolution that gave rise to modern capitalism greatly increased the wealth available to humans. But, today that material expansion comes at a price that literally can no longer be paid because of the rapid decline of natural capital, which is the basis of future economic prosperity.41 For the first time in human history, the limit to prosperity will be defined by natural, rather than by human–generated, capital.42
The authors note the sobering fact that, in the past 30 years, one-third of Earth’s resources—its natural wealth—has been consumed.43 What we are losing are not commodities themselves—more oil and [*PG238]ore can always be found—but the living systems that automatically produced certain services we take for granted and cannot live without: water storage and flood control, clean air and water, rainfall, ocean productivity, fertile soil, watersheds, waste management, stable climate, and regeneration of the atmosphere.44 Some of these living systems are on the verge of collapse today.
The authors attribute this dangerous state of affairs to capitalism, which they describe as “a financially profitable, non–sustainable aberration in human development.”45 But the source of the harm and of non–sustainability is not capitalism inherently but the industrial capitalism practiced in the West.46 According to the authors, the fundamental problem in industrial capitalism is that only manufactured and financial capital are fully valued by the market: the destruction of natural systems upon which economic and other forms of human health ultimately depend is not counted as a cost in our current accounting.
A new form of capitalism—natural capitalism—based on radically increasing resource productivity in the economy, will end the traditional notion of an inherent trade-off between business values and environmental values.47 In natural capitalism, all forms of capital are fully valued, including human and natural capital.48 Further, moving toward a system of natural capitalism creates opportunities for companies to profit, and indeed thrive, by acting “as if” the healthier accounting approach of natural capitalism were already in effect.
The authors introduce “four central strategies” that will enable countries, companies, and communities to behave in this “as if” fashion.49 The first strategy is radical resource productivity, which is, for the most part, available already and which by itself “can nearly halt the degradation of the biosphere.”50 The second strategy is biomimicry—redesigning industrial systems on biological lines—which elimi[*PG239]nates the very idea of waste.51 The third strategy is a shift from an economy of goods and purchases to one of service and flow that provides not products but the services that the consumer wants from the product, as in purchasing clothes cleaning services rather than buying a washing machine.52 The fourth strategy is investing in natural capital “so that the biosphere can produce more abundant ecosystem services and natural resources” and actually reverse the damage already done to the natural capital.53
The sustainable system the authors have in mind as necessary for the future is both radically different from our current ways, and quite familiar. The book presents many examples of currently attainable savings in resource and energy use. There are too many examples to list here, but the authors summarize their findings in the first chapter:
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; and luxurious carpets can be made from land-filled scrap. Roofs and window, 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.54
For those of us who are not familiar with recent advances in engineering resource use, some of the chapters in the book are truly astounding. Of course it is the inefficiency of current production and consumption that actually drives these savings. A good example is the automobile,55 which uses only 20 percent of the energy derived from fuel to actually turn the wheels. The rest is lost to heat and exhaust. [*PG240]Of the force derived from that 20 percent, 95 percent moves the car, while 5 percent moves the driver. That amounts to only 1 percent of fuel use. The authors suggest that radically redesigned cars and propulsion systems already known and in use are creating competitive hypercars, which will use 85 percent less fuel and 90 percent less material than conventional cars.56
This 99 percent gap in energy use in cars is considered by the authors to be waste—a major theme of the book. In terms of domestic materials, “Americans waste or cause to be wasted nearly 1 million pounds of materials per person per year.”57 This amount includes carpet discarded in landfills, CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, polystyrene peanuts, discarded food, organic and inorganic chemicals that cannot be reused, hazardous waste and construction debris.58 There is also a reference to the waste we cause to be generated elsewhere, for example, a gold mine in Indonesia, which “annually generates 400 pounds of tailings and toxic waste for every man, woman, and child in the United States.”59
Waste also takes the form of unemployment and underemployment. Prisons in the United States also take some of the wasted “human resources” out of the system.60 A billion workers in the world cannot find productive work.61 This economic system “has no need for them.”62
All of this waste adds up to enormous costs—financial as well as environmental. The authors estimate that of the $9 trillion spent every year in the United States, $2 trillion is wasted.63 These are costs that produce no value for anyone.64
The effects of all of this waste is insidious. The most obvious result is the deterioration of the environment. But the effect on people is worse, for it limits our ability to address our environmental problems. The wastefulness of our economic system produces “dissolution of civil societies into lawlessness, despair, and apathy; and the lack of public will needed to address human suffering and social welfare.”65
[*PG241] Readers may quibble with some of what the authors count as waste. Disagreements in particular instances of waste may result from differing views of whether the “waste” is truly avoidable. Even lawyers would agree, for example, that the $300 billion spent on lawsuits in the United States is wasted66 in the sense that it produces no wealth for people. Obviously, the economy would be more productive if the harms these lawsuits addressed could be eliminated without litigation. The problem is how to attain a materially high standard of living in a much more efficient way—the authors are not advocating “living with less.” Lawyers would like to think that their activities promote efficiency in the long run and cannot be eliminated without harm to the system as a whole. In any event, the vast forms of waste pointed out by the authors are not subject to any such disagreement.
Chapters 4 through 7 in Natural Capitalism give many examples of how revolutionary business and design techniques are addressing the waste problem. Chapter 4 addresses production techniques.67 In general, one-through flow of materials is no a longer competitive method of production. Similarly, increased energy efficiencies in recent years have allowed even high-tech industry to amass major savings. Some of the changes are in materials used in production—as in fabrics so safe they can be eaten and which will then biodegrade. Some of the changes are in system and design, such as “self organizing systems” versus hierarchical command structures.68 Chapter 5 addresses buildings and construction, both commercial and residential.69 Among the examples is the Rocky Mountain Institute’s own headquarters in Colorado, which, through insulation and two small wood stoves, eliminated furnace and ductwork and recovered the expenses of its energy improvements in the first 10 months of lower energy and water bills.70 Not all changes are physical. Designing communities in which people can walk to work and recreation is a major strategy as well.71 Chapter 6 highlights changes in system design, some of which seem embarrassingly obvious.72 In one example, an engineer using whole system design installed pipes with larger diameters laid out in straighter configurations to reduce the need for pumping by 92 per[*PG242]cent.73 Chapter 7 describes a fundamental rethinking of business, away from production of goods for purchase to provision of services to people.74 Partly this results from already accepted techniques pioneered by Taiichi Ohno, the creator of the Toyota Production System, and publicized by the book Lean Thinking.75 The service flow partly results from “cradle to cradle” production. The business goal becomes to provide for consumers the service they want rather than the goods they now purchase.76 Service leasing is not new, of course, but its logic is being applied in novel ways. In one example, Carrier provides a certain level of comfort in hot weather, rather than selling an air conditioning system.77 The savings accrue because now the manufacturer and the user have the same goal of efficient use of air conditioning equipment in the surrounding environment.78
The next portion of Natural Capitalism, Chapters 8 through 12, address particular environmental issues and include, which the earlier chapters do not, some of the governmental and structural barriers that encourage waste and inefficiency and burden attempts to change.79 In Chapter 8, the authors describe the value of natural capital in the world and the recent decline in natural capital that threatens us.80 The price system currently in use does not inform producers and users of natural capital of its value. For example, though living coral systems are more valuable than the fish that are caught through fishing techniques that harm or destroy such systems, prices and current accounting techniques falsely count such fish production as a gain in wealth. Current tax and subsidy policies also give us more of what we don’t want—sprawl, waste and overuse—and less of what we do want—efficient use of valuable and irreplaceable resources.81 Partly this is the result of the lobbying industry.82 Chapter 9 looks at the paper and fiber industries.83 Fiber recovery, both wood and paper, is already advanced and can become even more attractive to consumers. The advances already gaining use can help protect the remaining [*PG243]forests of the world.84 Chapter 10 looks at food production and consumption, including the need to reduce reliance on animal protein, for health as well as land and water use issues, and the need to reduce the expensive and increasingly self-defeating use of massive pesticides.85 Chapter 11 raises the issue of the growing scarcity of fresh water.86 In this Chapter, the industrial and managerial mindset is on its most dramatic display, often proposing to put water where it isn’t rather to adapt to water limits. In this Chapter the authors begin to address the question of “behavior” and not just technology.87 The fresh water crisis is in large part the result of irrational price signals and lack of education. As with energy, large savings are within reach. From 1970 to 1995, nonagricultural industry in the United States actually reduced its water use by 38 percent.88 Finally, Chapter 12 addresses global warming, probably the best known of the environmental threats the authors discuss.89 The point in this Chapter is that the truth of global warming does not have to be proved absolutely. The climate can be protected at a profit.90 What we need to do to protect ourselves against the possibility of global warming, we would be better off doing anyway.91
In Chapter 12, the authors also raise an issue that has probably already occurred to readers in a number of contexts in the book. “[I]f such big energy savings are both feasible and profitable, [why] haven’t [they] all been exploited?”92 Why, for that matter, have not most of the changes the authors promote taken place?
As we will see below, the authors are ambivalent about the market. The 1986 energy price crash did thwart further energy savings after remarkable improvements in energy efficiency during the period 1975–1985. Nevertheless, “costly energy” is not the only way to return to rapid energy savings. Even at current prices, more efficient energy use is profitable. The problem is “subtle imperfections” in the mar[*PG244]ket.93 Chapter 13 is then dedicated to the topic, “Making Markets Work.”94
Markets operate to allocate scarce resources efficiently in the short run. That is a limited role. But, even within that limited province, markets do not operate perfectly because the conditions of perfect competition never exist. Corporations benefit from subsidies, externalities, the lack of transparency, monopoly, lobbying and influence peddling. In addition, individuals do not always act rationally. The authors cite particular imperfections in the market—capital misallocation, organizational failures, regulatory failures, informational failures, value chain risks, false or absent prices, and incomplete markets and property rights and the authors suggest ways that business could benefit from reconciling these imperfections. As one small, but telling example of how business actually works, many firms make small purchases based on initial cost alone. Thus, 90 percent of the 1.5 million electric distribution transformers bought every year fail to minimize long-term costs. The misallocation to the economy from this series of “small” decisions is estimated to be $1 billion a year. Economic theory would suggest that this cannot be. But it is, say the authors and there are many more examples given in the book. Business does not purchase “enough” efficiency by the usual rules of profitability. Fortunately, many of these market imperfections can be cured, often simply by encouraging more firms to make money from them.
The last two chapters in the book set forth the author’s essentially optimistic view of the future. Chapter 14 introduces the role of design in the creation of human community.95 The reference set forth is that of the Brazilian city of Curitiba,96 using descriptions contained in Bill McKibben’s book, Hope, Human and Wild.97 The authors describe the “effectiveness, common sense, and political resonance” of the policies pursued in Curitiba by Mayor Jaime Lerner, whose reliance on wide public participation led to the formation of an enduring political consensus.98 A number of the leaders of the City were architects, engineers or planners, who treated the City and its political leadership as a [*PG245]“design problem.”99 In Curitiba, “the healing of the natural world” has also led to the healing of society and its politics. Curitiba shows what good design can do because “design mentality treats a wide variety of needs not as competing priorities to be traded off and compromised but rather as interlinked opportunities for synergies to be optimized.”100 For example, transportation policies—adapting existing streets to bus corridors—became the centerpiece of a coordinated land, recreation, housing, job strategy.101 Similarly, flood control also served as park expansion and pollution abatement.102
In the final chapter, the authors turn from the healthy politics of Curitiba to the unhealthy politics of our own system.103 The authors are dismayed by the battle of experts portrayed by the media around every environmental issue104 because “[m]ediagenic arguments allow little room for consensus or shared frameworks.”105 There cannot or should not be much debate about whether we can, over the long term, exceed the carrying capacity of the Earth. Obviously we cannot. Clearly a more scientific understanding of the environment would assist political discussion. It needs only “common sense” to see that all capital must count if we are to avoid disaster.106 Eventually, the authors expect this to happen. “Away from the shrill divisiveness of media and politics, people are remarkably consistent in what kind of future they envision for their children and grandchildren.”107 Here, in this sentence, we have the starting point of the understanding of political life that animates Natural Capitalism.
Natural Capitalism does not address the political system sustainability requires or the political system that would hasten its arrival and nurture its tenets. In part, this is because the authors are not political scientists or politicians. To translate sustainability into prac[*PG246]tice, one must determine what methods and institutions of political life will be needed in the future. As a first step in this task, we must tease out the authors’ expectations of political life.
Natural Capitalism implies a description of the political life this society suffers from now compared to the political life we could have. This contrast is implied even though it is never quite clear what political life needs to accomplish in order to establish or retain sustainability. I will return in part 2 to these latter ambiguities. For now, let us look at the political life we know compared to at least an outline of what we might experience as political life under sustainable capitalism.
The authors summarize their view of current political life:
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. . . . [T]he public feels paralyzed.108
In this, the political process is a “cacophony” characterized by the “expert’s dilemma.”109 Rather than producing pragmatic policies, political life engages in “media-devised wrangling.”110 The authors’ negative view of political life is bolstered by their further characterization of politics as “fractious,”111 “petty and small,”112 “shrill,”113 and devisiv[e].”114
The authors illustrate their characterization of politics with the media’s reception of Worldwatch Institute’s 1998 State of the World re[*PG247]port.115 The media minimized the downward trends in important environmental indicators illustrated by the report by highlighting the response of critics that other indicators, such as life expectancy, are rising as population grows.116 As long as life expectancy is increasing, why should politics be concerned with sustainability? But, the media ignored the “likelihood” that both sets of data are correct and evidence “the ability to exceed temporarily the carrying capacity of the earth.”117Hence the basic frustration encountered when trying to advance public knowledge of the environmental challenges that confront us: politics is not proactive and only addresses environmental problems when harm is apparent and imminent.
The authors adequately describe current political life; however, the authors do not provide a systematic explanation of the root of the political problem. Why does the political system fail to inform the public and to provide helpful discussion?
The closest the authors come to identifying the root of the problem, which might have to be changed in natural capitalism, is the power of special interest money.118 The authors refer to “the thousands of trade organizations, 60,000 lawyers, and 90,000 lobbyists clustered in Washington, D.C., who spend $100 million a month in direct lobbying expenses.”119 The result of the power of these interests is the debasement of political life to the extent that we find “the ongoing dissolution of civil societies into lawlessness, despair, and apathy; and the lack of public will needed to address human suffering.”120 To solve the environmental problem, then, these interests, presumably not the Sierra Club, but the energy companies, will have to be overcome.
One way to overcome the hurdles created by special interests to needed reform is to show business that there is money to be made in the changes natural capitalism will bring. The authors also point out that there is also money to be made in influencing the government to pass regulations that benefit environmentally progressive companies and penalize companies that lag behind.121 In this, the authors seek to enlist corporate political power on behalf of the environment.
[*PG248] It is important to note, though, that however difficult it is to deal with these problems, the authors view our political failures as correctable. That is, today’s political paralysis is not rooted in inherent and unalterable human nature, or in inevitable conflict in political life. Thus, whatever political reforms are needed to attain natural capitalism can actually be accomplished.
The authors also describe, or at least name, what a better political life could be like. One of the fundamental assumptions of Natural Capitalism is that “[t]he 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.”122 This formulation is not very helpful by itself, except to suggest that our current political system does not, or does not optimally, serve the needs of people rather than business. The authors also endorse the government of the Brazilian City of Curitiba, calling its government “transparent, honest, and accountable.”123 In this context it is not quite clear whether the authors believe that our current government in the United States also qualifies as a good government. These are generalizations. They do not tell us what we can or must do to create healthy, indeed sustainable, political systems.
What is the fundamental nature of a good political system, as opposed to the one that we have now? We have seen that the authors find current political life in the United States to be fragmented and ideological. Conversely, healthy political life begins with what is real: a realistic understanding of the limits of environmental resources and a realistic understanding of the incentives that motivate political actors. Natural Capitalism is interested in what is real and the policies of Natural Capitalism are described as “necessary, possible and practical.”124 In one area after another—from food to water—Natural Capitalism describes the inherent limits of natural systems. The authors scorn the tendency they see in political disputes today of ignoring such natural limits in favor of ideological interests. They quote Bill McKibben on this point with approval: “‘The laws of Congress and the laws of phys[*PG249]ics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.”125
I have to note here that I think the authors are a little cavalier in this way of thinking. We sometimes feel that the people who oppose us politically just do not understand the situation. But sometimes they do understand and still disagree. It isn’t quite true, as the authors imply, that we absolutely cannot go on as we have been. We probably can go on more or less as we have been for quite some time. It’s just that if we do go on the way we are, our way of life will cause tremendous suffering to others and to ourselves. But that is a matter of judgment, not logic or necessity. It is not literally the case that our current way of life violates the laws of physics.
The authors believe that the design professions provide a model for healthy political decision-making that will adequately focus on the realities of political problems. .126 The authors note that the mayors of Curitiba, especially Jaime Lerner, provided strong political leadership because, in part, they were from the design professions: architecture, engineering, and city planning.127 For Lerner, Curitiba was “a living laboratory to test their novel concept” of applying design principals to the political process.128
There is a small irony in treating design as good political leadership because earlier in the book, in discussing design itself as a way of solving economic and engineering problems, the authors promote design precisely because it is superior to what might be considered political ways of doing things. In Chapter 6, the authors argue that design is “applied foresight” and that there is no better investment for this society than in better design education in achieving the improvements of Natural Capitalism.129
Unfortunately, however, designers are often given poor design educations, which explains why so many of the changes in production and use that the authors recommend have yet to be adopted.130 The design education that designers actually receive teaches them that “‘design is the art of compromise’” and that they must choose “the least unsatisfactory trade-off between many desirable but incompati[*PG250]ble goals.”131 The authors agree with one critic who calls this sort of design mentality “‘a political technique masquerading as a design process.’”132
This quote suggests the authors’ view both of what design can be and of what political decisions too often are.133 A political decision, at its best, is a compromise attempting to ameliorate the harms and distribute the benefits of a particular situation. Such a decision can be compassionate, but it cannot be rational. And, in general, one would expect such compromises to tend to serve the interests of the most influential—the most powerful. This sounds like traditional interest group politics.
The authors say good design, like nature, does not compromise but optimizes: “[f]or the past 3.8 billion years, nature has been running a successful design laboratory in which everything is continually improved and rigorously retested. . . . Whatever doesn’t work gets recalled by the Manufacturer.”134 The successful application of design allows “whole-system engineering” in which greater energy savings can cost less than any other alternative, as when more effective insulation and windows eliminate the need for a furnace.
So, when the authors praise design as a model for political leadership, as they do with regard to Curitiba, they are presuming a change from the politics we know now.135 What then are the authors pointing to when they use design language in relation to political leadership?
We may infer some differences between design and ordinary politics from their language. For one thing, design is dispassionate. Our political system is shrill and media driven in contrast. Design is rational. It defines a problem and works toward the optimal overall solution. Our political system simply muddles through, compromising but not deciding. Finally, design is effective. Because it defines problems and tests results, it selects what works. In the give and take of the politics we know, problems are managed but are never solved.
The authors do not say how a change in political orientation from compromise to design could come about. In the example of the design orientation of Curitiba, it came about seemingly as the result of the vision of a small number of far-sighted designers. That experi[*PG251]ence does not seem to be very much help in attempting to bring about enlightened leadership as a general matter. We return to the question of making democracy work below. First, we must ask what there is for such enlightened leadership to try to do under natural capitalism.
Whatever political life is like in natural capitalism, it is not clear what there is for it to do. In reviewing Natural Capitalism, Larry Edelman found the book’s “suggestion” that natural capitalism is “inevitable . . . unconvincing.”136 While the authors do not say forthrightly that their vision of the future is coming whether we like it or not, and that whatever policies we adopt will have to bend to the realities of the decline in natural capital, that does seem to be their view. So if we do nothing at all, our inaction, while it may add to the overall suffering, will not alter the future very much.
Consistent with the theme of inevitability, the authors of Natural Capitalism are not concerned about our current political deadlock on significant environmental issues. As the subtitle of the book suggests, just as the political authorities did not intend the results of the first industrial revolution,137 the next industrial revolution—natural capitalism—also will not depend primarily on the actions of political authorities.
In other words, the authors believe that natural capitalism is already in the process of happening. Recent changes in the automobile industry provide an example of this process:
The industry is well on its way to a Factor Four or greater breakthrough in resource productivity. . . . This restructuring [*PG252]. . . is gaining its momentum not from regulatory mandates, taxes, or subsidies but rather from newly unleashed forces of advanced technology, customer demands, competition, and entrepreneurship.”138
All it takes is a “wakeup call” to bring about a change in design mentality, allowing radical improvements in resource productivity and environmental protection.139 In the future, buildings that fail to maximize user satisfaction “will simply stand empty.”140
The authors’ discussion of these changes in the automotive industry suggests that we would be better off without any government interference with the market. These anticipated changes require little if any assistance from any level of government to be effective. They require only a functioning market, a high level of technological advance and alert and aggressive consumers. A certain amount of government functioning may be necessary for orderly commercial life, but not any change in the structure of government. Indeed, in terms of acceptance by business, the absence of government involvement in the attainment of natural capitalism would have to be considered a plus. This eye toward business is also present in the implied criticism of “regulatory mandates, taxes or subsidies” in the above quote.141 We In terms of the goals of natural capitalism, government action may have done more harm on balance than good.
This is a startling observation since legislation like the Clean Water Act142 and the Clean Air Act143 have done so much good for the environment.144 Nevertheless, in the eyes of the authors, most government regulation has been like the requirement of parking spaces145 or taxes that discourage employment146 or subsidies like “underpricing or not pricing road . . . resources.”147 “Americans sub[*PG253]sidize environmental degradation, cars, the wealthy, corporations and any number of technological boondoggles . . . .”148 These sorts of government actions skew the market toward over consumption of natural capital and are a major cause of environmental harms like global warming. Ironically, currently, only the development of clean technologies has been left to the market. The authors’ observations here are not inconsistent with some of the critiques of government action in mainstream economics. Public choice theory suggests that private interests will attempt and often succeed in turning government action to private rather than public benefit.149
This insight into public life makes the transition to natural capitalism murky and obscures the nature of political life the authors favor. The political impasse of today is not presented in Natural Capitalism as a permanent fact of life built into the essence of human nature and political and economic life. Rather, it is a function of the flawed political system we have now and must change. But, if these flaws are deeply rooted, how could they be reformed without some sort of fundamental, structural political change? Yet, no such change is suggested.
Perhaps the authors do not feel the necessity to resolve these issues because of the momentum they see toward natural capitalism. This is precisely what Edelman objects to. Edelman finds the implication that the changes promoted in Natural Capitalism could come about without changes in “policies”—tax, labor, trade and so forth that only political struggle could bring—unconvincing. Indeed, in light of the results and tone of the Presidential election of 2000, such changes are not imminent. If such changes are necessary, perhaps natural capitalism is not inevitable after all. If such changes are necessary, perhaps the reform of political institutions is necessary.
[*PG254] Despite the authors’ seeming indifference to political life, their own program requires that the problems of Western political life be addressed comprehensively and fundamentally. No matter how inevitable natural capitalism seems and no matter how counterproductive politics is, natural capitalism will not come about without serious political struggle. Government action and thus political engagement is necessary in the short run for two reasons. First, as the authors imply, the currently skewed regulatory State has to be undone. Removing the direct and indirect subsidies for cars and fresh water, for example letting people know how much water they are using and with what effect through charging marginal cost and education150 will likely involve enormous political strife. The growth of population in the American Southwest depends on cheap water and surely those people are not going to move just because the environmental facts of life are explained to them. The authors seem unaware of the political implications of their own formulation—“Letting water flow wherever it belongs.”151
The other necessary arena for political life would seem to be pricing of natural capital. At several points, the authors point to the creation of such a pricing mechanism to improve fundamental economic and environmental performance. “To make people better off requires no new theories, and needs only common sense. It is based on the simple proposition that all capital be valued.”152 A fundamental problem in the accounting of industrial capitalism is that “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.”153 This failure allows industrial capitalism to call income what is really just liquidation of capital. This liquidation is not just overuse, but degradation of what is irreplaceable at any price.
While the authors say that this lack cannot be made up by “assigning monetary values to natural capital”154 because among other reasons, there is no proper value for what humanity cannot provide for itself, nevertheless, “the wrong way is to give it no value at all.”155 [*PG255]So, one way or another, some mechanism must be found to add true costs to the prices of industrial capitalism.
Such a change, however, whether it is accomplished through changes in the accounting of the GDP,156 through a massive “tax shift,”157 or through direct price adjustments, cannot occur without highly controversial changes in government policy. In fact, such needed policy changes are hardly foreseeable today specifically because of likely political opposition. The authors indirectly point to this political reality when they admit that any large-scale tax changes would have to be implemented over a long period of time, to allow for expected depreciation.158 Certainly that is so, but simply slowing the change will not, by itself, ensure political success.
There are, then, in the world of Natural Capitalism important and crucial tasks for political life to accomplish. Without such public action, the movement toward natural capitalism will not occur. But we also see that our current political system seems incapable of such action—incapable even of promoting coherent discussion of these issues. The authors do not suggest directly what we are to do to improve political life, but their response can be imagined by considering their approach to reform of the market.
In an important chapter in Natural Capitalism, the authors acknowledge that the market economy, though extremely good at what it does, has flaws and imperfections that require public reform and action in order for it to operate properly.159 This chapter is entitled, “Making Markets Work.” In similar fashion, as the authors acknowledge, democracy requires diligence and corrective action to keep it functioning for the good of society rather than “being subverted or distorted by those who wish to turn [it] to other ends.”160 Unfortunately, Natural Capitalism lacks a chapter called “Making Democracy Work.” Nevertheless, given the goals the authors set forth and the problems they enumerate, we can imagine an outline of the chapter they might have written.
The first thing to notice about Natural Capitalism and governance is that it is “democracy” that the authors want to make work. They say they agree with Winston Churchill that democracy is the worst form of government “except for all the rest.”161 Since they never suggest anything else, the democracy to which they refer is probably the Anglo-American form of representative government.
It also turns out that the democracy that the authors want to function better does not need any fundamental institutional changes. There is nothing in the book about amending the Constitution, or instituting representation of the interests of future generations or even endorsement of rule by expert, despite the praise of design as a model for government. Nor is there any challenge to rights theory, whether in terms of private property or free speech.
This is all to be contrasted with the treatment of the market in Natural Capitalism. As described above,162 there are many suggestions in the book about the various sorts of market failures we experience and how they might be dealt with. The authors consider this a serious matter. The failure to deal with market imperfections might undermine the whole prospect of natural capitalism. Yet, even though the failures of public policy described in the book are at least as egregious as are the failures of the market, there is no suggestion of parallel political reform.
How is one to account for this imbalance in the thrust to reform? To prevent the distortion of democracy, citizens must be informed and must employ “ceaseless political vigilance.”163 Given the poor performance of public policy today, the authors presumably feel that the political system has been distorted by selfish special—corporate—interests. The authors might have then asked what factors prevent the citizenry from performing their watchdog function. Are citizens now not “informed?” If not, why not? Are they informed but not vigilant? Again, why should that be? The reader is not told.
Part of the reason for the authors’ lack of interest in the reform of political institutions is the ultimate confidence of the authors in national dialogue. This confidence does not root in anything explained in the book itself. The authors must know, for example, that the enormous sums—$100 million per month—that they describe [*PG257]lobbyists spending on influencing public policy164 make it difficult for anti-consumption views to get a hearing among the body politic. President Clinton’s ill-fated 1994 proposals on national health insurance were never even seriously debated because of the clever and expensive advertising campaign waged against even the notion of public health care.165 Even if the power of money does not totally erode a level of public control over government, it certainly gives the views of the wealthy and powerful more of a hearing.166
Yet, despite these realities, the authors do not call for limits on lobbying or campaign financing. They do not even mention advertising, though surely our current massive level of advertising is connected to the beliefs of a society out of harmony with natural systems. Far from radical democracy, the authors expect business, not government and, by extension, not the public through political debate, to be the major implementor of sustainable economic practices. This is not because of the virtue of business, but because sustainable practices “work better and cost less.”167
The authors apparently believe that when business finally sees the economic advantage in sustainability, political battles over government regulation will be reduced, if not eliminated. In such a future world, which the authors say only “may” be the future,
the central issues for thoughtful and successful industries . . . relate not to how best to produce goods . . . that’s now pretty well worked out—but rather to what is worth producing, what will make us better human beings, how we can stop trying to meet nonmaterial needs by material means, and how much is enough.168
If the authors expect business, which can only make money if someone buys something, to decide that enough is enough, the authors must feel that our fundamental interests are not in conflict—or even that we have important differences in beliefs and values. The role of political life in such a world need only be to appeal to reason [*PG258]and dialogue. It is not hard to make democracy work in such a world. This is presumably why the authors do not press structural political changes.
The authors also treat differences between workers and managers with the same benign confidence. Chapter 7 of the book, which deals directly with waste, might be thought to require that people work harder. After all, having more employees than one needs is also a form of waste, as is standing around the coffeepot or water cooler. The authors do not say that we should all work harder, to which people might object. Instead, they report conclusions from psychological research that “people all over the world feel best when their activity involves a clear objective, intense concentration, no distractions, immediate feedback on their progress, and a sense of challenge.”169 Language like this makes me nervous, especially from authors who have little sense of the abuse that people can suffer from those in authority over them.
Another indication of the confidence of the authors in political dialogue is the criticism of “compromise” in the book. Design is the term the authors use to describe efficient problem solving. Compromise, on the other hand, is something we do when we cannot come to useful and reliable responses to difficult problems. The authors presumably are of the view that we have the capacity to do better in democratic problem-solving—that we can do with less compromise.
In general, the authors are challenging the predominant model in American political life of interests in conflict.170 While they do not organize their understanding of political life in one place—the book is, after all, not primarily about political life—they do seem to view all of us as having more needs in common than we have differences. Out of those common needs, the authors see general directions into the future as either right or wrong—beneficial or disastrous—rather than as matters of opinion. This is why the tone of the book is so upbeat—we can choose correctly.
[*PG259] We may call the new era the authors seem to expect “the politics of nature.”171 Nature, in the form of global warming and the general decline of natural systems, will increasingly set the political agenda, in the same way that natural capital rather than human capital increasingly limits human prosperity. Nature gives the final grade, so to speak, not business or the voters. To show dramatically the difference between interest group politics and the politics of nature, let us say that while voters can vote to “end welfare as we know it”—even though that reform struck many as brutal and uncaring—voters cannot vote to end our interrelated environmental crises, even if solutions are unpopular.
The politics of nature even limits the role of narrow self-interest, a concept whose excesses have interfered with the development of humane American political thinking.172 Planet Earth does not know nations, tribes, groups, corporations or even families. So, although there may be relative winners and losers in environmental policies and results, no nation can make itself exempt from the current environmental crisis.
The pressure from nature is perhaps how the authors expect, or at least hope to, move from the politics of industrial capitalism, with its compromises, wrangling and interest group alignments, to the politics that takes place in natural capitalism, which the authors associate with the best of design. In the authors’ account of nature’s design, one of the reasons that nature works as a design laboratory is that success is rewarded and failure is punished. Poor designs tend to disappear. In current political life, on the other hand, there are not usually any recognizable consequences of poor decision-making, at least in the short run. What, for example, is the consequence of the “wrong” social decision about the death penalty or abortion? Some people may believe that society will be coarsened by such policies, but it would be difficult to show any such cause and effect. The Bible sug[*PG260]gests that if the people sin, the rains will fail,173 but modern people do not believe in such relationship between morality and nature. We may not believe that politics, or even actual political decisions, have any long-term consequences at all. A decision that seems to actually have consequences, like setting interest rates, we do not assign to political decision-making.174 Politics may mostly have entertainment value in this culture.
In contrast, in light of real and inexorable environmental threats, our politics may have to be more like design by nature, in which the poorly designed result is recalled. If humanity fails radically to improve its energy efficiency, the climate will alter with results so disastrous that no amount of spin will save a political party that fails to respond in time. If humanity fails to conserve water, people will go without water. In other words, it is possible now to be on the demonstrably wrong side of history. Politics is no longer just something we do. Politics may increasingly be recognized as something that accomplishes good results or bad results for society. While the authors of Natural Capitalism do not draw this specific conclusion, others have done so, including Daniel Quinn in the book, Ishmael, where it is pointed out that a civilization that does not live in accordance with the basic laws of nature “automatically eliminates [itself].”175
The authors of Natural Capitalism must see something like this when they say at the end of the book that they offer what everyone really wants. Surely the authors realize that people both agree and disagree in describing fundamental goals. Yes, as the authors say, everyone wants “better schools” and “more economic security.” But often people mean different things when they use the same words. It would be just as accurate to say that everyone wants people to be happy.
The limits in natural systems we are coming to face, however, really do define goals almost everyone shares—as foreign invasion and war sometimes do. This may be the point of the quote by Bill [*PG261]McKibben about the laws of Congress and the laws of physics. No one wants the dislocation and suffering that global climate change promises. Global warming skeptics disagree only about whether we are causing such warming or whether the harm will be great. There is no great clash of values in this debate, only disagreement over facts. No one is actually willing to run out of fresh water either. So it may be possible in the future to define problems and propose solutions that go beyond mere political rhetoric. Here we have the promise of a new sort of “natural law”, one arising out of the politics of nature and one more deserving of the name in our time than the traditional formulations of natural law.176
The effect of pressure from nature is perhaps already observable in more serious political dialogue. For example, President Bush has been brought unwillingly to address the greenhouse effect.177 Automobile and energy companies have changed their tune in regard to global warming.178 Certainly the endorsement of the reality of global climate change by the National Academy of Sciences in response to President Bush’s own request for information represents the kind of reality check the authors of Natural Capitalism envision.
While it is to be hoped that the authors are right that people in general, and elites in particular, are not so irrational as to maintain ideological denials of reality even in the face of disaster, nature does not decide political issues directly. Even natural disaster must be interpreted. That interpretation will remain skewed if the voters and participants in political debate in the United States are poorly trained scientifically.179 It is in this sense that they may not be “informed” as the authors feel the citizenry must be in order to maintain a healthy [*PG262]democratic system. Perhaps this would explain why public policy has not yet gone in the direction the authors expected. Design solutions are impossible without knowledge.
What designers bring to problem solving is a willingness to experiment and to learn. The designers in Curitiba had a knowledge base, particularly with regard to the sorts of issues the City had to face. With regard to the problems that we face, the authors would no doubt suggest that only a scientifically literate electorate is going to be able to make credible decisions. Also, only a scientifically literate culture is going to be able to resist media sensationalism in order to make rational policy.
But, even if such knowledge were widespread, the authors’ endorsement of “design” as one of the reasons for the success of Curitiba180 overstates the potency of design as a formal problem solving tool. Theorists of design have themselves seriously questioned whether design can be transferred from an object in a limited context to the societal scale and the political arena.181 Design is not a way out of political conflict.
The question is how inevitable and intractable are political conflicts? The authors feel that basically there is a common interest that people will recognize. The absence in Natural Capitalism of appreciation for peoples’ fears and self-interest may render the authors’ political understanding false. Conventional wisdom would certainly say so. But what does our current political life, based as it is on conventional wisdom, offer? There is nothing in our politics today but the relentless model of interest groups in endless conflict over nothing more profound and lasting than their own transient desires and the [*PG263]benumbing insistence that there can be no truth and the unreal grounding of all reality in the individual’s search for happiness. All of that, which represents the American Law School’s tacit curriculum, has led to isolation, alienation and a reckless disregard for the long-term health and needs not only of our own children and grandchildren, but of the planet itself. So, who is an American lawyer or politician or pundit or journalist to point fingers at someone trying to do something about it?
But there is one realm it is certain the authors have not taken into consideration—the realm of ideas. As if they were Marxists, the authors apparently feel that only physical phenomena count—in Natural Capitalism, the physical determinant is the decline of natural capital. Yet, the authors do, at one point, acknowledge the power of ideas to block needed action. In discussing the difficulty of achieving great improvement in resource productivity, the authors point to the concept of “‘diminishing returns’”182 as one that “has taken a death grip on our consciousness” and which thereby makes it difficult to take the possibility seriously that spending more on resource conservation might reduce overall costs.
There is another idea at large in the culture, one much more dominant than is the concept of diminishing returns. It is the idea of growth.183 Economic growth in particular—unrestricted and forever—is the goal of Western society. When President Bush had to decide how to respond to the energy problem early in his term, he decided to do so not by sustainable measures, but by increases in energy supply. When asked about that, Presidential spokesperson Ari Fleischer replied, “‘The president believes that [high-energy consumption] is an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one.’ [T]he country should address the energy crisis through supply, not demand.”184
If every effort to live lightly on the Earth is viewed—that is, really felt-to-be—a kind of defeat, sustainability will not come for a very long time. Furthermore, the voters may, and probably do, share the President’s feelings about growth. So, instead of the purported rational decision-making of the designer, democratic results are often those of [*PG264]symbol and emotion. Our politics are based on the way we look at things.
The problem, then, is one of orientation or perception. The real flaw of Natural Capitalism, and perhaps of sustainability in general, is that it presents no alternative orientation to what we have now. There is nothing in the book that the average CEO would find objectionable, except perhaps the empirical assumption that environmental problems pose a serious, long-term threat to our well being. Without a different vision, there may be no way to make democracy work to attain natural capitalism.
But if it is the case that Natural Capitalism shares all or most of the assumptions of industrial capitalism, then that presents a more fundamental problem than even the likely failure of democratic change. Perhaps these assumptions assure that sustainability itself could not really be sustainable.
The concept of sustainability in Natural Capitalism does not go beyond “the maintenance and supply of natural capital.”185 Despite reference in the book to “social equity”186 there is little in Natural Capitalism that directly improves the lot of workers or promotes a more equal distribution of income.
Industrial Capitalism does not promote social equity. The way in which people are “wasted” in industrial capitalism is that labor productivity is valued at all costs. It is the summum bonum of commercial enterprise.187 This leads to less demand for workers. Less demand means fewer jobs and less value in wages in the jobs that do exist. In addition, in order to increase labor productivity, people in industrial capitalism must work too hard. Thus, there is not much pleasure in any increased wealth that does filter down.
Natural capitalism changes this scenario by promoting capital productivity, particularly natural capital productivity. In this way, demand for labor will be increased and its remuneration as well. Of course, less increase in labor productivity might be thought to lessen remuneration to labor in the long run. But the authors are thinking not of improvement for the relatively well-paid worker, who is re[*PG265]warded in the current system, but improvement for the millions of unemployed and under-employed. There will be a larger number of moderate wage jobs under natural capitalism.
This potential trade-off between well-paid and less well-paid workers is never discussed or persuasively argued in the book because social equity is only a side benefit of natural capitalism. With the important exception of intergenerational equity,188 equity is not the point of Natural Capitalism. Despite what the authors hope will happen as fallout, it is economic efficiency and environmental protection and restoration that drive the book. Yet, even this is to overstate the promise of natural capitalism. All that is actually promised is true economic efficiency, in which all costs are minimized. It is the effect of such efficiency that is supposed to lead to environmental protection and social equity. Such an efficient economy will “free up resources”189 and a plausible expectation would be that not all of such freed resources would go back to the rich and powerful.
The other way that natural capitalism may promote equity is that it is less toxic overall than is industrial capitalism. A sustainable company would be one that “take[s] nothing from the earth’s crust, and add[s] nothing harmful to the biosphere.”190 This is perhaps an exaggeration, since ore and minerals are renewable also in a very long-term sense and thus could be mined. Nevertheless, the point about less harm is certainly central to the authors’ vision of the future. The harmful byproducts of industrial capitalism, including its climate altering gases,191 all represent waste to be eliminated. Therefore, insofar as equity in environmental matters involves redistribution of the harms of industrial capitalism,192 natural capitalism would be more equitable. Since the wealthy and powerful protect themselves against environmental harms as well as they can already, improvements in the environment may tend to favor the poor and powerless.
[*PG266] All this is to say that equity is not as much in the heart of natural capitalism as it is at the heart of the international sustainable development movement discussed above.193 That movement came out of the milieu of developmental economics in the international arena and has always maintained this commitment. Sustainable capitalism, on the other hand, in any of its manifestations, arises from the context of market opportunities. Its goal is not fundamentally redistribution, but profit. Of course, it may turn out that it is just that difference that will one day allow sustainable capitalism to come about. But again, there is the nagging question, would natural capitalism change the world very much if it did come about?
The authors of Natural Capitalism themselves appear to note the absence of a serious commitment to social equity, despite its lip service treatment in the book. When they discuss the achievement of Curitiba, Brazil, they praise it for showing “a healthy ecosphere, a vibrant and just society, and a society that nurtures humanity.”194 This, the authors call the “social version of the principles of natural capitalism.”195 That vision begins with restructuring economic activity, but its main principle, which appears to be what the authors mean by design in this context, is the synergy of creative solutions that reinforce each other. This is the “social form of whole-system design.”196 But the very fact that the authors must change focus to address the subject of a just society—that is, must move from whole system design, to the “social form” of it—shows the absence of equitable considerations at the core of Natural Capitalism. That very movement also belies the implication that such social change would just happen if the changes in economic activity proposed in the book were to come about.
The authors indeed note the difference between “sustainable economy” on the one hand, and “sustainable society” on the other.197 The one can be achieved through “nature protection, public health and safety, resource productivity,” while the other requires “adding ethics, jobs, the translation of sustainability into other cultures” and citizenship.198
The authors thus acknowledge that sustainable society requires more than natural capitalism. Economics, even the enlightened eco[*PG267]nomics of natural capitalism, makes “a good servant but a bad master and a worse religion.”199 To build a sustainable society, that is, one that “nurtures humanity” we need politics, ethics and religion.200 Only through these modalities will we be able to build sustainable societies.
Industrial capitalism cannot build such societies both because waste of people and things is built into its very core and because its logic forces it to attempt to meet nonmaterial human needs through material means. Although this is not said directly, we may infer that natural capitalism cannot build a sustainable society either, but because it does not waste people and things and because it is more amenable to servicing human needs, it is at least not antithetical to such a society.
The modesty of the authors here is refreshing. They don’t believe that economics answers the basic questions of human life. Nor do they deny that natural economics is still economics. But, much less is delivered by the end of the book than was seemingly promised at the beginning. The goal of a just society depends on matters the authors do not discuss.
At this point we come not only to the social and political limits of Natural Capitalism, but to its ecological limits as well. Natural Capitalism is dedicated to the continuing production of goods and services for human beings. It treats the planet as a resource—hence the use of the term, natural capital—and tries to maximize its long-term value to people. Its notion of waste is just that concept of highest value to people. When coral is destroyed in fishing instead of maintained to nurture fish, for example, the problem is that the coral’s long-term value to people is not enhanced. The current depletion of natural systems is a very large scale “tragedy of the commons.”201
This human orientation is the difference between sustainability and other forms of environmental thinking. The driving forces of natural capitalism are the same as those of capitalism as a whole: the profit motive, technological development, and the enlightened self-interest of the consumer. While the authors do try to hold the human above the merely economic, they do not even begin to suggest holding nature above, or even on a par with, the human. So, if a new orientation really is needed for serious political change, it will not be found in Natural Capitalism.
[*PG268] It may be, of course, that human-oriented thinking is the best sort of thinking to guide us now. After all, we are in the process of endangering the future of humanity. But I wonder if such ways of thinking do not carry industrial capitalism with them despite the authors’ intention. After all, why is it that I should care about the future of the human race? What’s in it for me? The heart of economics, capitalist economics at any rate, may be the destructive isolation and alienation we call individualism. If this is the case, there is something wrong with the strategy of using a form of capitalism to protect natural systems.
Nevertheless, there is no question that natural capitalism promises a great improvement over anything we practice now. The question is, however, are there other forms of sustainable capitalism that carry more hope for the planet than does natural capitalism?
Three individuals have achieved wide public notice as leaders in the sustainability movement: William McDonough, Lester R. Brown and Bill McKibben. In some ways they offer correctives, or perhaps deepening, to the understanding of governance suggested in Natural Capitalism.
In an article co-authored with Michael Braungart, appearing in The Atlantic Monthly, William McDonough challenged the buzzword “‘eco-efficiency’” with the concept of “eco-effectiveness.”203 McDonough, the Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, is a past winner of the Presidential Award for sustainable development. He is currently working with William Ford on the very high profile conversion of the River Rouge Factory into “a monument to sustainability, with a vast, open gallery of a factory and a 454,000-sq.-ft. ‘natural habitat’ for a roof.”204
At first glance, McDonough’s Atlantic Monthly series seems like a criticism of Natural Capitalism. His description of the eco-efficiency [*PG269]movement—calling the idea of “cleaner, faster, quieter engines” and other such business strategies “not a strategy for success over the long term [but only] an illusion of change”—sounds like a dismissal of the “hypercar” so dear to the authors of Natural Capitalism. McDonough points out that the fundamental problem with eco-efficiency is that it just slows down industrialism’s environmental damage; it does not stop it and certainly does not reverse it. So, in the end, eco-efficiency lets “industry finish off everything quietly, persistently, and completely.”205
But, McDonough cannot really be criticizing natural capitalism. For one thing, McDonough singles out Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins, two of the co-authors of Natural Capitalism, as members, along with himself, of “this movement” to “design[] industrial production.”206 Paul Hawken is even credited with the co-invention of the phrase, the Next Industrial Revolution. In addition, the three tenets of this revolution—waste equals food, respect diversity and use solar energy—are not at all inconsistent with natural capitalism. What the book, Natural Capitalism, seems to do is try to deepen eco-efficiency. Natural Capitalism uses the most promising aspects of eco-efficiency, which of course even McDonough acknowledges as good to a certain extent,207 and then adds the hope and expectation that efficiency might become radically complete, thus also endorsing the more fundamental production changes endorsed by McDonough.
What are the differences and similarities in the constitution of Sustainability between McDonough and Natural Capitalism? Both agree that the problem to be solved is a design flaw in industrial capitalism. But they disagree about what design actually can do to resolve the problem. For Natural Capitalism, design is optimized problem solving. Design thus is efficient at its core. For McDonough, the goal is not efficiency, but effectiveness. His example is the blossoms of the cherry tree. It takes thousands of blossoms to germinate the seed of one other cherry tree. Surely this could be done with less material and energy. But Nature does not conserve. In blossoms, nothing is wasted—waste equals food—but not everything is absolutely necessary either. So, the fundamental model for the future for McDonough is different from that of Natural Capitalism. Natural capitalism does [*PG270]more with much less. McDonough want to do more, not only not with less, but eventually without regard for more or less.
In terms of governance, both works share a suspicion of government regulation—of almost any governmental activity. A well designed industrial system would not need “thousands of complex regulations to keep people from being poisoned too quickly.”208 A well-designed system would not need to worry about protecting people, because its products would not be toxic. Its products would be “food” either for the biological or technical metabolism. So the Government is not going to pass laws either protecting people in the Next Industrial Revolution and natural capitalism, or, apparently, mandating the movement toward either one. Nor are the voters going to have any sort of say about the movement toward either system. There is no obvious place for public discussion of any kind in McDonough’s revolution, as there is not in Natural Capitalism.
Then how does this revolution come about? McDonough does not mention altering the price mechanism in order to change behavior, nor is it clear that the practices of the Next Industrial Revolution are necessarily less expensive than are current practices. The practices described by McDonough would not necessarily be less expensive even if prices reflected true costs to a greater extent than they do today. So, it is not obvious that these changes will come about on their own. Nor is there mention of political debate over public policies meant to bring McDonough’s changes about.
It may be that McDonough expects the natural world to force change because of the problems that industrial capitalism is now causing. The image with which he begins the article is the ship the Titanic, which “was headed for a disastrous encounter with the natural world.”209 In the same way, our civilization may be headed for such a disaster and the immanence of that disaster may pave the way for change. If so, this is similar to the thinking of Natural Capitalism.
There is another sense in which McDonough may be thought to be apolitical in a way that is similar to the apolitical viewpoint of Natural Capitalism. Both see economic life as determinant of this society’s future way of life. Industrial production is the important matter that both address. Both wish to continue high levels of consumption. McDonough writes that “commerce is the engine of change.”210 Both [*PG271]expect and describe business as having a leading role in the clarification of values that may lead to sustainable practices.
Fundamentally, both works share the same business centered worldview in two senses. First, business, not political life, is the driving force of all change—the major determinant of all things. Second, ultimately only the material betterment of people matters very much, not any other effect on people, nor any effect on nature itself. This is anthropocentrism with commercial life at the center. That is not an outlook likely to produce political life any healthier than what we know today.
Lester Brown is probably the best known figure in the American sustainability movement. In 1974, Brown founded Worldwatch Institute, a private, nonprofit research center devoted to the analysis of global environmental and related issues. Worldwatch’s annual assessments of the world environment—the State of the World series begun in 1984—has become so much the common standard for public debate about the environment that Natural Capitalism illustrated the way such debate goes on by highlighting the reception of the 1998 State of the World report.211 Brown’s 1991 book about sustainability—Saving the Planet: How to Shape an Environmentally Sustainable Global Economy212—helped pave the way for President Clinton’s sustainability initiatives.
The work of Worldwatch is unabashedly reformist in purpose. Thus, in State of the World 2000213 all of the particular policy proposals that are only hinted at in Natural Capitalism are set forth in great detail214. The general threat to ecosystems is, of course, the same as that noted by Natural Capitalism, by William McDonough and by all voices promoting sustainability—although Brown places much more emphasis than do most others on the spread of the HIV virus that leads to AIDS, especially the magnitude of the epidemic in Africa.215 The two [*PG272]keys to dealing with the environmental threats are stabilizing the climate and stabilizing population.216
Curbing population growth is mostly a matter of “behavioral change.” The goal ultimately is to keep births and deaths essentially in balance, “as they must be in a sustainable society.”217 Government has the major role to play in this field because of the need for information for people planning to have children. They must know the consequences of their actions in terms of the national carrying capacity of each country. Additional funding of quality reproductive health services is needed, especially in developing countries. Brown is scornful of the decision in Congress in 1998 to withdraw all funding for the U.N. Population Fund, the principal source of international family planning assistance. He calls the decision “almost unbelievable.”218 Abortion is not a topic in the index of State of the World 2000 and Brown does not refer to the role of abortion in public policy debate over family planning in the United States.
Stabilizing the climate involves the movement away from a fossil-fuel or carbon-based economy to a solar and hydrogen-based economy.219 This involves a variety of governmental initiatives as well as technological innovation and simple market efficiency. Wind power is growing, for example, mostly because its cost is decreasing rapidly while its effectiveness is increasing.220 Nevertheless, reliance on wind power would be growing much more rapidly if income taxes were reduced and offset by carbon taxes on fossil fuels, which would also have the effect of reflecting the true costs of carbon fuel use.221 Brown endorses such tax restructuring, including a 50� per gallon increase in gasoline taxes.
Most of Brown’s readers know that the United States is not close to enacting such measures. We are not even close to debating them. This is the case not only with regard to carbon taxes, but with other proposals by Brown, such as a change in paradigm from economics, which does not respect the sustainable yield thresholds of natural systems, to an ecological perspective.222 How are these unlikely changes going to happen?
[*PG273] Brown has thought about this problem, which he would readily characterize as a political problem. Brown relies on two ideas when he addresses the potential for political change: threshold and leadership.
The notion of a threshold is that of discontinuous change. Politically, this means that something that has been slowly growing reaches a certain point at which its public support suddenly becomes overwhelming. Suddenly, something that had seemed impossible until then, almost overnight seems inevitable.
Something like this change point occurred with regard to federal action to combat the depression, launching the New Deal. Similarly, the raw racism that stridently and violently opposed Brown v. Board of Education223 is now difficult to imagine.
Brown believes that something like this will occur with regard to the environment in general and sustainability in particular. He calls this the “Sustainability Threshold.”224 He compares this to what occurred in Eastern Europe at the fall of communism and the decline in cigarette smoking in the United States.
The change in political systems in Europe came with no apparent warning. No writers forecast this revolution. “It almost seemed that people woke up one morning and understood that the era of the one-party political system and the centrally planned economy was over.”225
Are we to suppose, then, that one day we’ll wake up and the shift from economics to ecology and the shift to sustainability will be accomplished? This is similar to the feel I get from Natural Capitalism: the small changes we see going on independently of each other, eventually come together to be an overall change in the world.
Brown sees the change coming both because some important corporate voices now acknowledge that the era of oil is over226 and, in limited ways—forest management, for example—government too is evidencing “environmental awakening.”227
Unfortunately, another scenario is implied in Brown’s description of the decline of natural systems. If the first scenario is Eastern Europe, the second might be called Mt. Vesuvius. Brown calls it the Decline Threshold. Natural systems do not tend to decline gradually. Instead, when sustainable yields are exceeded, natural systems eventually crash. Now, with the spread of industrialism over the globe, the [*PG274]declines in natural systems are interconnected. When they crash, all humanity is likely to be affected drastically. Although Brown does not say so, such catastrophes might suddenly create a new political context—one much more cognizant of environmental realities than we are now. So, although Brown does not spell this out, we might be brought to a political threshold through a decline threshold.
That kind of political change, premised on predicted disaster, might not be benign in any sense. The hyper-inflation of Weimar Germany did not lead to a stronger central bank. Instead, it produced Hitler. The Depression led to the New Deal in the United States, but led to fascism elsewhere. And the energy scare in California in the summer of 2001 did not lead to calls for conservation and changed lifestyles, but to pressure to drill for oil in the Arctic Preserve. Once people panic, there is no telling what may happen to our liberal institutions of government.
Perhaps this is why Brown concludes that “leadership and time are scarce resources” and that “[t]he world desperately needs more of both.”228 This language suggests both that time is running out for us to respond in normal ways to the crisis that we face and that the political system must react through reasoned discussion in order for us to respond in a positive way. It is said that times make the man. Perhaps President Bush will be the sort of President in a crisis that FDR became. It does not seem likely. But something like this did happen to President Truman.229
But Brown’s talk of leadership has a deus ex machina quality to it. Lester Brown has many reform proposals to make in many areas—except for the arena of governance. Like the authors of Natural Capitalism, Brown expects corporations to have a role in changing societal consciousness. He is optimistic because they have already begun to do so.230 It does not occur to him that corporate influence may have atrophied the muscles of self-government already.
Brown acknowledges the harm that vested interests do now. He admits that such interests “bribe political leaders either directly or in the form of campaign contributions and . . . mount disinformation [*PG275]campaigns to confuse the public about the need for change.”231 But he does not call for, or even discuss, potential changes in the way we govern. Shouldn’t we do away with private financing of political campaigns? Shouldn’t we reduce or eliminate corporate influence in American life? Shouldn’t we at least raise such questions?
All Brown can do is hope in the future. “Eventually, if enough people in a country are convinced of the need for change, they can override these vested interests, crossing a threshold of social change.”232 Undoubtedly that is so. But it begs the question whether something in the way we structure political life now contributes to our current political lethargy.
Neither Brown, nor McDonough, nor the authors of Natural Capitalism can really call for fundamental changes in the way we live. Neither can challenge production and consumption as the central occupations of human life. Ironically, all may be looking to the source of our problems—business and our way of life—and regarding it as the source of a solution. The changes we need may be more profound than they are willing to say.
Bill McKibben is at the same time, the most pessimistic and the most optimistic of the sustainability voices. He is pessimistic in that he does not believe that engineers can save us—the very engineering that is at the heart of Natural Capitalism. On the other hand, he is optimistic in that his most recent work centers on introducing us to hopeful possibilities and possible success stories.
McKibben is also, in his own sort of gentle way, the most radical of sustainability voices. Unlike most Americans, including environmentalists, McKibben wants to get off the consumption path and move toward “living lightly on the earth.”233
Bill McKibben’s first book, The End of Nature,234 showed that all natural systems are now affected by human activity. Global warming, then a very controversial matter, was merely one particularly dramatic and dangerous example of this human effect. In a follow-up article in [*PG276]the Atlantic Monthly,235 McKibben explained that what we used to call “Acts of God” or simply “natural events” are now acts of man.
The End of Nature was depressing to write and to read, McKibben has written,236 and he wanted to introduce a motive for change other than fear of the future. He wanted to show “a vision of recovery, of renewal, of resurgence.”237 That desire led to the publication of Hope, Human and Wild in 1995,238 which highlighted the recovery of forest and natural systems in the northeastern United States, the now-familiar story of Curitiba Brazil, and the most surprising of all, the inexplicable success of Kerala, India.
The aspect of McKibben’s thinking that most stands out today is his skepticism about technological improvements as ways out of our environmental crises. In a review of Natural Capitalism and Hard Green239 in the New York Review of Books240, McKibben noted two problems with visions like that of Natural Capitalism. For one thing, as Peter Huber points out, “per capita efficiency increases don’t help the planet—what we need are actual reductions in energy use.”241 The other problem is simple inertia, which “stalls technologies short of their full potential.” For example, McKibben asks, when is the last time you cleaned the coils under your refrigerator? The new technologies will not come “as magically as the authors of Natural Capitalism sometimes imply.”242
But, if solutions of the “more and better” sort are not going to save us, what do we do? Here, McKibben points to Kerala India as at least the promise of a possible alternative to the notion that economic growth is needed for human happiness and fulfillment.243 Kerala is poor, even for India. Yet, literacy is close to 100 percent and the male life expectancy is approximately the same as that of the United States.
It’s not clear precisely what the secret of Kerala’s success is. Education is a factor, as is tolerance. Also, communist political rule worked in Kerala. Relative income redistribution has been achieved. Despite deep problems, Kerala is a livable place.
[*PG277] McKibben is not so much interested in how Kerala became the way that it is as he is that it is as it is. Kerala contradicts maxims we believe are necessary truths—that rich people are healthier, live longer, have fewer children and better lives. Once we see that a future with less material benefits might not be an oppressive threat, we might consider the possibility of living with less. Unlike others in the sustainability movement, McKibben confronts the reality that if our current way of living is not sustainable, we had better confront our fears of living in any other way.244
The political aspect of McKibben’s vision that is distinctive is his interest in public action and political life. McKibben quotes Al Gore to the effect that what today—actually 1992—is political imaginable st