The Ecology of Commerce

Essay on the responsibility of business to society and the environment. (Letters to the Editor in the July '92 issue.)

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Paul Hawken started Smith & Hawken, the garden and horticulture cataloguecompany, in 1979. Paul was also the founder, in 1966, of Erewhon, one of thefirst natural-food companies in the country. He is the author of The Magic ofFindhorn, The Next Economy, and Growing a Business. This article is adapted from a recent speech of Hawken's to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.

It strikes me that we in America understand little about what business is. Given that business and the free market have become the most dominant social force in this century and, presumably, of the one to come, I realize that this is an odd observation. Yet most of us still do not understand how business works. I think our understanding of business -- what it does, its effect on society, what makes for healthy commerce -- is at about the level that medicine was before Louis Pasteur.

Now, 100 years ago it may not have mattered how much we understood about business -- what makes for healthy commerce -- but today it does because I think we can say in no uncertain terms that business is destroying the world. And while consumers and producers are becoming aware of their interrelated impact upon the earth, what also needs to be said is that business can restore the planet upon which we live.

I don't believe there's any choice about this. Either we see business as a restorative undertaking, or we, businesspeople, will march the entire race to the undertaker. Business is the only mechanism on the planet today powerful enough to produce the changes necessary to reverse global environmental and social degradation.

Doing that will depend in large part on the willingness of customers to change what they buy, how they buy, and from whom they buy their products and services. I know it sounds a little venal, if not smarmy, to say this, that you can make money restoring the world, but it is true, and it may be the only way it happens. There is an economy of degradation, which is one objective way to describe industrialization, and there is a restorative economy that is nascent but real, whose potential size is as great as the entire world economy is today.

How bad is the degradation? As I speak to you today, there are 5,000 fires burning in the Amazon Basin. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a dead beluga whale has to be handled with gloves and face masks and is classified as a toxic waste because of the amount of toxins it contains. It is estimated that we lose 100,000 species on the planet every year, mostly invertebrates, and mostly species we've never seen or classified. When cattle ranchers clear rain forests to raise beef to sell to fast-food chains that make hamburgers to sell to Americans, who have the highest rate of heart disease in the world (and spend the most money per GNP on health care), we can say easily that business is no longer developing the world. We have become its predator. And this predation is invariably, directly or indirectly, in the form of the corporation, a corporation that's satisfied, sometimes smug, convinced that its goals are justifiable and worthy, so long as they lead to profitability.

Because business is so well organized, capitalized, and managed, we fail to see that business has run amok. It is simply out of control. And despite our efforts and the efforts of many people worldwide, we face on the planet today what mountaineer and naturalist Jack Turner has called the "final loss" -- a point in the not-too-distant future when environmental degradation will no longer require our active participation. It will just happen. Biological diversity is messy. It walks, it crawls, it swims, it swoops, it buzzes. But extinction is silent, and it has no voice other than our own.

In order to do anything about the planet where we live, we have to know where we are. I doubt very much that the chief executives of any of the Fortune 500 corporations can name five edible plants, five native grasses, or five migratory birds within walking distance of their homes, or name the soil series upon which their house sits. And I would contend that if you don't know where you are, you are in fact nowhere at all. And yet it is with the hands and minds of these CEOs that the environmental battle is being waged and lost.

The great writer-naturalist Aldo Leopold had it right when he said, simply and bluntly, "Things are wrong, morally wrong, whenever our biotic community is degraded." The question we must ask is: Can business change in time to arrest global environmental degradation? And on the face of it, the answer would have to be no. The force of human greed expressed through commerce is powerful and increasing worldwide.

All of us have been touched, if not sent reeling, by the last 10 years, a decade-long excursion into mindless speculation and debilitating indebtedness that has left one-third of our corporations staggering under that load, a time when a handful of men absconded with a half trillion dollars of our money to build real estate projects we don't need, homes they don't deserve, and a lifestyle that was corrupt. As H. Ross Perot put it, "It is a sad day when the lives and jobs of millions of Americans are in the hands of men who fly around in corporate jets with personal trainers, hair implants, and trophy wives." In that sense, we can look at the 1980s and say, economically speaking, they were utterly neurotic.

I think we have to ask ourselves again, What kind of businesses have we created where the Karen Silkwoods of the world are run off the road and killed simply for calling plutonium what it is: contamination? We have to ask ourselves, What kind of world is it where a baby-food executive substitutes artificial flavoring and sugar for apple juice? What kind of businesses have we created when we even lie to infants? When timber-company executives propose to start a hate-them campaign against environmentalism to "kick them in the crotch," and to disguise the fact that the funding came from the timber industry? What do companies think of us when they advertise biodegradable Hefty trash bags that are not biodegradable, and in the process of advertising quote the Native American chief Seattle?

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