If hope is to pass the sobriety test, then it has to walk a pretty straight line to reality. Nothing here is possible unless business is willing to integrate itself into the natural world. It's time for business to take the initiative in a genuinely open process of dialogue, collaboration, reflection, and redesign.
We believe business is on the verge of a transformation, a change brought on by social and biological forces that can no longer be ignored or put aside, a change so thorough and sweeping that in the decades to come, business will be unrecognizable when compared with the commercial institutions of today. We have the capacity and the ability to create a remarkably different economy, one that can restore our ecosystem and protect the environment while bringing forth innovation, prosperity, meaningful work, and true security. While commerce at its worst sometimes appears to be a shambles of defilement when compared with the beauty and majesty of the natural world, it also contains the means to transform society. No other institution in the modern world is powerful enough and creative enough to bring about the changes that must be made. Perhaps we've been asking the wrong question all these years during the many battles between environmentalists and businesspeople. The question as generally proposed is, How do we save the environment? The correct question may be, How do we save business?
W.S. Merwin, the poet and naturalist, cites Robert Graves when he reminds us that we have only one story to tell in our life. We are made to believe over and over by our parents and businesses, by our culture and television, by our politicians and movie stars, that it's the story of money, of finance, of wealth, of the stock portfolio, the partnership, and the country house. These are not stories at all but impoverished, small tales and whispers that have made us restless and craven. As Stanley Crawford puts it in his book A Garlic Testament, "The financial statement must finally give way to the narrative, with all its exceptions, special cases, imponderables. It must finally give way to the story, which is perhaps the way we arm ourselves against the next and always unpredictable turn of the cycle in the quixotic dare that is life; across the rock and cold of lifelessness, it is our seed, our clove, our filament cast toward the future."
Business must yield to the longings of the human spirit. The most important contributions of the members of the socially responsible business movement have little to do with recycling, nuts from the rain forest, or employing the homeless. Their gift to us is that they are leading by trying to do something, to risk, to take a chance, to make a change -- any change. They're not waiting for "the solution" but acting creatively without guarantees of success. That is what all of us must do. Being visionary has always been given a bad rap by commerce. But without a positive vision for humankind, we can have no meaning, no work, and no purpose.
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Paul Hawken is the author of The Next Economy and Growing a Business. The material in this article is substantially from his book The Ecology of Commerce (HarperCollins, 1993). Additional material is from a work in progress titled A Declaration of Interdependence -- Our Future and the Making of Things, cowritten by Hawken and William McDonough, to be published in 1995.
William McDonough is an architect whose firm, William McDonough Architects, wrote The Hannover Principles/Design for Sustainability, the working guidelines for the World's Fair in Hannover, Germany, in the year 2000.
Transform the making of things
Durables, such as cars, computers, TVs, and VCRs, would never be sold. They would always belong to the original manufacturer.
Make prices reflect costs
The World Resources Institute, in Washington, D.C., has estimated that the cost of a gallon of gas, when pollution, waste disposal, health effects, and defense expenditures like the Persian Gulf War are factored in, is approximately $4.50, four times what we pay at the pump. A study by the University of California at San Francisco showed that a pack of cigarettes costs citizens in the state another $3.63 in health care and related costs.
Promote diversity
We don't know how many species live on the planet. We need to find out what's here, who has it, and what we can or can't do with it.
Restore the guardian
The guardian system is conservative and hierarchical, adheres to tradition, values loyalty, and shuns trading and innovation. The commercial system is based on trading and functions well only when it is open, trusting of outsiders, and innovative.
FOUR CRITERIA FOR REINVENTING BUSINESS
Peter Senge of MIT writes about asking business leaders who they think is the leader of a ship crossing the ocean. The answer he receives is usually the captain, the navigator, or the helmsman, but he answers that it's the designer of the ship, because everyone on the ship is influenced by the effect of its design. The world of human activity -- the goods we buy, the cars we drive, the factories we toil within -- is also the effect of design, only in the case of our large-scale commercial and productive systems, there is no designer in the true sense.
