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Issue 1 - Summer 1994

Book Review: (page 2 of 5)

The Ecology of Commerce
By Paul Hawken
Harper Business, New York City 1993
250 pages, $23.00 US.

By Ivan Handler
Networking for Democracy

Hawken starts by making it clear that not only is business the problem, it must also become the solution. He reformulates the question of "How do we save the environment?" into "How do we save business?" After laying out the depth of the environmental crisis, he contrasts the ideas of immature and mature ecological systems, stating that our world economy is best thought of as an immature ecological system -- one that grows fast and does not do a good job of recycling its wastes. The chapter titled "The Death of Birth" refers to the enormous extinction rate now occurring and explains the fearful consequences of exceeding the carrying capacity of the biosphere. Here as with the rest of the book, Hawken attempts to bridge the gap between environmentalists and business people by pointing out that finding a solution to this crisis is in everyone's interest. Good environmental policy, in other words, is also optimal business policy.

However, Hawken also insists that structure of the world's industrial economy is what pits business against the environment.
Changing this structure is really what this book is about.

In Chapter 3, Hawken exposes the legacy of industrial waste, especially non- degradable toxic waste. He takes on the fallacy that the solution to today’s problems is better clean up programs:

"Industry's only answer is to clean it all up -- or to try to. But what does that mean? How do you throw away a toxic molecule? To celebrate the environmental clean-up sector of the economy as a 'growth industry,' is worse than ignorant. We might as well celebrate cancer treatment as a growth industry, rather than take cancer epidemics as a warning about the hundreds of toxic chemicals loosed in the environment. Business must add value to the economy and the society in order to make a positive contribution. 'Environmental' companies that limit the damage done to the environment and to human beings by other companies, strictly speaking, do not add value. Reducing the harm caused by 'growth' is a self-cancelling contribution at best, no more a factor in real economic growth than the rescue of a man who has been thrown overboard is an act of mercy."

Hawken puts human economics in context. He goes back to the concept of ecological succession--where an immature ecology becomes a mature ecology--and calls for "commercial succession" whereby our world industrial economy can become a mature ecosystem. The use of ecological concepts here is both welcome and innovative. All too often scientists attempt to reduce ecology to analogies in physics (even E.O. Wison of Harvard is guilty of this and he is nothing if not an environmentalist). Hawken turns this around and uses ecology as the base model and measures our world economy against other ecosystems. This has the effect of subsuming economics as a specialized subset of ecology. This allows him to demonstrate over and over again how narrow and inefficient current business practices really are. More >>

 
 
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