Book Review: (page 4 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 next defines what he means by a sustainable business. His guidelines mainly mean that the waste from one process needs to be the input for another process--and that all of these inputs and outputs should form closed loops. To require sustainability, he returns to "green taxes" to get the public and private interests back in line. As an example, he applies green taxes to energy and demonstrates how different tax structures can lead to completely different results:

"The EPA commissioned a study to examine the effects of a $15/ton carbon tax rising 5 percent per year until the year 2010, and found that if the money were used to cut income taxes, it would reduce economic growth $870 billion during that period, whereas if the money were used for investment tax credits, it would result in additional GNP growth of $2.6 trillion."
Hawken summarizes with three principles:

I have two major criticisms to offer Hawken. One is that his analysis needs to be extended into the realm of social justice. The second is that he lacks a political analysis about how to accomplish his objectives. In the end he is left with moral persuasion as the major vehicle to effect change.

Human beings are clearly part of the human and world ecology. Among the hidden costs of industrial economies are their affects on the lives of working people. One of the enduring criticisms Karl Marx made of capitalism was its inability to provide full employment. Updating that point with Hawken's terminology would label capitalism today as an immature ecosystem and would require an ecologically mature (sustainable or restorative) economy to provide a secure living for all who work in it. Along the same line, institutional racism has created the social equivalent of a "labor toxic waste dump" with a large pool of permanently unemployable people whose lives are consigned to increasingly horrific levels of violence and depravity.

Hawken only narrowly focuses on what has been traditionally delineated as the environment; he would be more consistent if social justice issues were treated more thoroughly with the same analysis.

Hawken's narrowness may reflect the traditional intellectual's alienation from industry. Going back at least as far as Emerson, this tradition partitions the world into "Nature" and "Man" and offers up the Earth as an object for Man to subdue. This framework clearly plays into the hands of the industrialists, as this book so ably shows. By subsuming all human enterprise under the ecology of the Earth, the alienation is overcome and new creative solutions become immediately available. It is ironic that Hawken, who really opens up this possibility, does not seem to fully understand its implications. More >>