From: matus [matus@snet.net]
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2002 9:19 PM
To: matus@snet.net
Subject: MFD List - Original Critique of Paul Hawken's work

(All, this is from an email I sent to a coworker.  She expressed dire
concern about the future of humanity after reading Paul Hawken's book 'The
Ecology of commerce'  While some of it I agreed with (making producers
reflect external costs internally) the general theme of the book I wholly
disagreed with.  These are some of my comments about the book.  It gets
interesting around the 3rd or 4th paragraph - Mike)

These are some of the issues I have with Hawken from what I have read of
him.   Many of the business suggestions he has I whole heartily agree with,
and so do most libertarians (the third largest political party in the US)
Such as internalizing external costs.  Currently Coal burning power plants
dump millions of coal ash and other pollutants into the air, a consequence
of the energy they produce.  Yet nuclear plants must build large nuclear
storage facilities, they (rightfully so) are not allowed to just dump it
into the air like coal plants.  They coal power is cheaper then nuclear
power.  Most libertarians support the 'capping' of smoke stacks, that is,
the coal plant must incorporate the cost of dealing with its waste into its
product, just like the nuclear industry.  If this were the case coal power
would be much more expensive than nuclear.

I disagree with curbing energy usage though, as energy consumption is
directly correlated to standards of living.  Curbing wasteful and polluting
energy production mechanisms (like coal burning plants) is a good idea
though.

The more I read about some of his sustainability ideas the more interested I
get in reading the book.

Here are some of my disagreements in detail...

"Every natural system in the world today is in decline."

In all post industrialized nations, such as the US, Australia, and most of
Europe, every measurable pollutant and 'toxic' compound is and has been in a
steep decline in the past 20 - 40 years, as these nations move away from
industrial based economies and toward information based economies.
Technological progress in the manufacturing and use of materials also
significantly reduces the levels of these materials in the environments of
post industrialized nations.  These capitalistic post industrialized nations
utilize technological advancement to make products better and cheaper.  The
same advancements will be used in new industrialized nations and nations
moving toward industriliazation, the world will never see the likes of the
soot coated forests in Europe as it went through industrialization, as
nobody burns coal in there factories to generate power.  In fact, in all
likelihood, clean safe fission nuclear plants (the US armed forces have
successfully operated up to 50 nuclear reactors without ANY incidents for
the past 50 years) or even cleaner and safer fusion power plants will
provide the power to these industrializing nations.  So the world will not
see the environmental ravages that the first generation of industrialized
nations imposed on the world because they will be using 3rd generation
technologies.

"A large array of toxic waste products are being released into the
environment where they will never be broken down"

"never" be broken down is a very harsh statement.  Who is Hawken to say that
something will never be done?  I am reminded of the head of the patent
office who in 1890 resigned, stating that everything that could be invented
has been.  Every time a man claims that something 'can not' be done he has
eventually been shown to be wrong.  Top phycisists in the late 1800's and
early 1900s stated that heavier than air machines would never fly.  Are
there processes in place to naturally break these 'toxic' compounds down
now?  Maybe for many of them there is not, but as new compounds are
introduced into the environment, new niches are created for organisms to
evolve to take use of.  There are already microscopic bacteria that have
evolved to eat plastics, breathe methane, and survive in highly toxic
environments near deep sea hydrothermal vents.  Nature and natural selection
is much clever than man, let alone Hawken.  Assuming the effect of these new
niches is minimal, or will take a long time to occur (which is likely)
stating that these compounds will never be broken down depends on man never
involving themselves in the breaking down of these compounds.  Who is to
know what man will be doing in 20, 50, or 100 years?  All compounds, even
toxic ones, are merely arrangements of atoms.  Arranging and moving atoms
takes energy, no molecular compound can not be altered, separated, or broken
down with the application of energy.  And mankind continually has more and
more energy at his disposal at cheaper and cheaper costs.  Applying energy
to any system can alter it, and no system is ever permanent.

"chemical compounds such as chlorinated hydrocarbons have no counterparts in
nature, and therefore there are no natural processes to assimilate them."

As stated above, because no natural process exists NOW certainly does not
prove that no natural process will EVER exist.  Natural selection has
overcome many tremendous and daunting obstacles, these will be no different.

"millions of gallons of herbicides that are applied annually to North
American lawns."

Something that genetic engineering, i.e. technological progress will render
needless.  Why spray herbicide on your lawn when the grass of your lawn is
genetically engineered to attack weeds next to it?  Or releases 'natural'
herbicides of its own to combat these weeds (ever noticed that nothing grown
under pine trees?  Because their needles have a 'natural' toxin that is
harmful to most other plants, insert pine toxin gene here please...)  How
about genetically engineering grass to stop growing at a certain height?  No
more polluting lawn mowers.  How about genetically engineering grass to emit
a pheromone that repels mosquitoes (catnip has a secretion that is one of
the most mosquito repellent materials known) The possibilities are wondrous,
yet all of these advancements are routinely objected and protested against
by people who are trying to 'protect' the very environment that these
advancements will help.  Irony at its best.

"In California, PacBell has told its telephone operators that they can no
longer use the word "please". This will save enough time to allow them to
lay off enough operators to save 5 million dollars per year"

I take serious issues with statements like these.  They would be true in an
imaginary world of no competitors (say a communist society)  "save" 5
million per year can also be said as 'produce a service at less cost' which
benefits everyone.  Would you be willing to pay a phone operator to have
limo service to and from work, catered meals, and free medical care?  Phone
bills would sky rocket, no one would use them, and some competing technology
would arise and replace the ridiculously expensive phone service.  This cash
savings, of course, would have to be weighed against the customers who
receive the service.  Corporations only exist if they can make a profit
through selling some service or good.  If two corporations are in
competition, and one cuts cost but charges the same price for their product
(in essence only increasing profits), then no savings are passed to the
consumer.  If the competing corporation cuts costs and uses those savings to
reduce the cost of their product (or, similiarly, make it better, add
features, or last longer) then their product will have a higher demand then
the competing one which all the saved money goes to corporate profits.  Yet
corporations need to have profits or else they wouldn't exist, these effects
serve to push corporate profits toward a mean, and limit then from going
extreme in one way or the other.  If it does, the company goes out of
business.

""The problems to be faced are vast and complex, but come down to this: 5.5
billion people are breeding exponentially. The process of fulfilling their
wants and needs is stripping the earth of its biotic capacity to produce
life;"

Exponential projections and predictions based there in only hold true as
long as all other variables remaining constant.  Bacteria reproduce
exponentially, and 1 single bacteria within a year can easily produce enough
bacteria to cover the world a mile deep.  Why has this not happened?
Because other factors limit this exponential growth curve, in the case of
bacteria, it's the presence of waste and the lack of a food supply.  Food
supply?  In the late 1960's author Paul Elhrich wrote 'The Population Bomb'
which predicted, by the 1980's widespread famines across the globe and
millions of deaths.  What happened?  What happened was that Elhrich assumed
that the population growth curve would continue to exponentially increase,
and the ability to produce food would stay at the level it was always been.
Thus we would not be able to feed everyone. In reality agricultural
technologies continue to advance, making more and more food available with
less and less land use (post industrialized nations now have more forest
cover then they have in centuries because old farms are abandoned.  For
example, the rock walls that criss cross all of New England designated
farmland boundaries) In the 1800's, in the US, more than 80% of people
farmed, they lived hard, painful, short lives.  There was no time for art,
culture, music, or entertainment.  You got up at sunrise and worked till
sunset, making just enough food for yourself and a few others.  You died by
the time you were forty.  In 1850, the number of farmers was smaller, more
like 60%, by 1900 the number was down even more, to 30%.  The same amount of
people were producing three times as much food (even more than that, when
taking the population growth into account)  Yet they were using less and
less land to do it in.  By 1950 the number was down to around 15%, and
today, in 2002, less than 2% of the worlds population farms.  And they make
too much food.  Food today is cheaper and more plentiful then it has ever
been before.  So why do 30,000 children starve to death every day?  Because
the countries that they live in are ruled by corrupt despotic governments
(governments that do not abide by the laws they enforce) and they use food
as a political tool and weapon.  But even in the poorest of the poor
countries, calorie consumption has increased by 30% since 1960, and this is
precisely because agriculture technologies have made food cheaper then it
has ever been, and the cheaper something is the more expensive it is to
control it.

Dire and scary predictions like Elhric's "The population bomb" never took
into account technological progress and always, for some reason, assumed a
technological stasis.  Modern day scares amount to much the same, these 'sky
is falling' cries never give full credit to human ingenuity and creativity.
We are all mindless automones who will destroy ourselves, right?  Yet we
have managed to go 100,000 years without doing it, and we continue to live
longer, better, healthier, happier lives.

One of the biggest factors that effects the population growth of humans is
there socio-economic status.  Basically, the poorer a society is, the more
it reproduces, as children become valuable sources of income.  Yet in post
industrialized nations, children are an expense, and are often put of more
and more years.  The population growth in most post industrialized nations
is at or below zero, that is, more people are dying then being born.  The
world as a whole is increasing in socioeconomic status, even some of the
poorest in the world live longer, healthier lives than the richest 1% of a
century ago.  The 'poor' in post industrialized nations have guaranteed
stabilizing health care, and often have apartments, multiple color TVs,
power, phones, cable, heat, hot water, and centralized sanitation.  They
have at their disposal things that the richest roman emperor would envy.  As
the rest of the world is dragged from poor corrupt despotic 3rd world
countries into industrialization and post industrialization, the welfare of
people will increase as well, and population growth will decrease.  As these
countries industrialize with 3rd generation technologies, less havoc is
wreaked on the environment.  As these citizens and countries wealth
increase, they concern themselves more with things poorer people, who
struggle just to feed their family, do not, like the environment and
ecosystems and state parks.

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