[For photo album and slideshow for this entry, go here]

Sunday 2:35 P.M. United flight 0871 Dulles to SFO

The sun is shining when A. and E. arrive Saturday morning. Their Honda van is covered with a mural depicting kids in the city and fish, birds, and plants of the Chesapeake watershed along with a logo of a sailboat surrounded by the words “Living Classrooms Foundation¦Learning by Doing.”

While E. chats with S. about work, A. tells me about her program taking inner city kids on hikes and boat excursions to study their bioregion and get involved in restoration projects. I tell her that my University, Cal Poly’s motto, is “Learn by Doing,” and that I teach courses in Bioregional Place Study.

We park near Teism and hear a roar coming from a crowd with pink banners in front of the National archives across Pennsylvania Ave. On the sidewalk outside the teahouse, a circle of Grannies for Peace stand singing. The people I’m with seem to know everybody outside and in. Two young men at our table say they work for Campus Climate Challenge. I say I’m working on Focus the Nation at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. They say do you know Tyler Middlestadt, our charismatic student sustainability activist. I say let me take your picture for him. A. says that Washington is filled with young activists working for NGO’s. They last about five years before burn out.

When I mention the man on the cell phone yesterday, S. says yes there are a lot of those too. They stay longer. She went to a party recently where she talked to four girls working in the State Department. Their assignment was to figure out ways to influence the elections in Nicaragua. When S. asked how can you do that in good conscience, they replied that it was a benefit to the region to promote stability. (more…)

United flight 0936 San Francisco to Dulles
8:00 AM, Friday January 26

The sun shines from the direction we’re heading. The coast range pokes through cloud cover thickly wrinkled like the top of a souffle blanketing the valleys below.

The 5:30 AM flight from SLO to SFO: Venus cast her pristine beams above an eastern horizon striped pink and orange as we descended in the dark, only mountain peaks and a couple of beacons protruding through the marine layer. A few thin spots glowed pale, traces of the sea of lights hidden below. This is what the Bay Area might look like after the deluge. Morning coffee served by a pretty stewardess.

I love flying. Planes and airports let me admire rather than scorn our human achievement: thought, organization, community. Even the corporations.

Flying also sends my mind inward, propels me to the edge. At any moment the plane could start falling. I’d grab my cell phone, call Jan, say it’s been great”buddhatrip, eclipse, wabikon, barrel stove, venice, thank you, have fun, travel. What do I leave behind? The initials of my password: wife, children, grandchildren. Three books. Three places: New York, Lund B.C., San Luis Obispo.

Over the Sierras now. Low light on snow and rock, sharp line between brightness and shadow on the ridge crests. The mountains wont suffer from global warming or nuclear winter.

9:00 AM

Still over mountains, snow covers the country, normal for January. Not the weather weirdness of two weeks ago, with sunbathing in New York and wild blizzards in Denver. For the last week I’ve been immersed in the apocalyptic prophecies of An Inconvenient Truth to prepare for my new English course: “The Rhetoric of Sustainability,” and working on plans for “Focus the Nation: Global Warming Solutions for America” coming up in 2008. But this trip is about the War. The ads for 2 million dollar vacation condos in the airline magazine deny both threats. What has my generation bequeathed to our grandchildren?

9:40 AM

I delight in reading Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George. The language gives pleasure one sentence at a time. The author’s sly slow release of information about the characters makes you engage with them before learning their identities. After 80 pages it turns out that this is a real-life Sherlock Holmes mystery about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It takes place in the world of Bleak House that Jan and I were immersed in last night in the final episodes of the BBC serial. Anglophilia is my guilty pleasure, even as an English professor.

11:00 AM Pacific Time above North Dakota

Graph paper road grid, a right angled overlay on squirming fractal landforms.

7:00 PM”Il Rumbero

I wanted the airplane to be filled with people converging on Washington to protest. My old college friend, P., who was supposed to be sitting next to me never showed up. I felt a duty to tell the stranger in his seat that I was going to march against the war, but I kept chickening out. On the shuttle bus from Dulles to the Metro I looked for allies and spotted a man with a gray beard carrying a sign. He was from Mountain View California, a retired Cambridge eye research scientist.

I’ve arranged to arrive around 8:30 to crash at the apartment of young people I was introduced to last summer. A. is the son of friends who lived in the barn loft on the farm in Lund for two years in the seventies. We visited his mom on Saltspring Island and met him for the first time since he was one year old, shortly after his marriage to S, whose picture I saw in their wedding collection on Flickr. (more…)

Yesterday I went to the Mission Plaza at noon to attend an anti-war demonstration organized by Code Pink, the national organization, largely of women, who have been mounting protests since the war started in 2003. I was reminded of Women Stike for Peace, to which my mother belonged in the 1950’s.

It was one of those beautiful west coast January days.Low light and long shadows. The creek was flowing, the bells were tolling, music wafted through the plaza from one of the restaurant patios. Pairs of shoes of all sizes labelled with the names of Iraqi casualties were laid out on the pavement, an effort to put passersby “in their shoes.”

Prayer flags fluttered from the bandstand, each inscribed with the names and ages of U.S. soldiers killed in the last year and the dates they died. An art teacher unveiled a group canvas produced by her students showing the lofty ideal of the dove of peace and its ragged reality, trapped in barbed wire.

Starting with a woman in her nineties, people read the names of the 110 US troops who died in December written on flags that had not yet been mounted and placed them slowly in a box. After each name, one of the organizers beat a gong. Some wept as they read.

The day before, I had cashed in my United Miles and got a ticket to go to Washington for the January 27 national mobilization. Last night I listened to the CD just sent to me by college friend Jeff Parson: The Baby and the Bathwater–seventeen songs about the horrors of this war he felt called to write and perform with one of his daughters and friends.

Passions are rising. What comes next after elections?

Friday November 17 enroute Salt Lake City to L.A.

Last night Terry Tempest Williams spoke and read at the Wood River Presbyterian Church. The day I arrived in Ketchum, when I saw this event announced in the paper I’d bought tickets for me Joe and Amy to attend on our last night. The large parking lot was full, the sanctuary of the church, which houses Ethan’s preschool, is a large wood panelled cavern with side windows giving on a view of the dashing river just outside. I’d read Williams’ canonical ecoliterary text, Refuge, years ago and essays in Orion along with her collection, On the Open Space of Democracy. Eloquent and informative, her writing is driven by urgent personal grievings and celebrations, by the need to formulate dilemmas without resolving them, and by an activist’s unrelenting drive to battle for what she believes in. I would have gone out of my way to hear her speak in California, and yet here she was at the doorstep of our home away from home.

On the way into the hall, Joe and Amy introduced me to people of many ages they knew. I was glad to have nudged them in the direction of folks interested in writing and ecology among their own extended circle of neighbors, especially after talks about Amy’s community involvement on the board of directors of Ethan’s school and her strong opinions about the error of demanding twenty percent rather than fifteen percent from developers to create affordable housing.

Terry was introduced by a young woman who sat on the Ketchum Arts Center board that sponsored her talk in connection with a display of photographs on the theme of nature and place that I wished I had known about. The bad setup of the p.a. system made her hard to understand, and for the first part of the program I was irritated to the point of distraction that in such lavish surroundings and at such a pricey occasion, nobody was taking responsbility for the sound. Terry took the stage, and with an apology for shakiness due to diarrhea from food poisoning, sat down to deliver her presentation. I was surprised by her appearance, for some reason expecting a dowdyish presence from the Mormon wife of a contractor, but instead finding a svelte, blackbooted, silverhaired beauty.

(more…)

I got an email this morning from a colleague who’d organized a panel at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America on uses of Shakespeare by the military. He’d asked me to present because I’ve published and lectured on the subject of Shakespeare’s anti-militarism. Also on the panel was Mr. Kenneth Adelman, who teaches Shakespeare at Georgetown University in his spare time, but who is widely known as one of the architects of our Iraq war policy.

My colleague’s email referred me to a new article in Vanity Fair, circulated on the web, which contains an interview with Adelman repudiating Bush and the war.

This was my reply:

I thought of us in Philadelphia when I read this on the web last night. These days, I’ve been heavily addicted to Truthout, Slate and that junkfood for liberals, Huffpost.

Notice Adelman’s signature self-congratulation for being invited to Rumsfeld’s house even as he betrays his host:

“I’ve worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I’ve been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I’m very, very fond of him, but I’m crushed by his performance.”

Part of my addiction are repeated Dantean fantasies of how these people will fare in hell.

###

This is some of what I said on the panel with Mr. Adelman last April:

In his book, Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard’s Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage, Kenneth Adelman reads Shakespeare’s account of the war against France as follows:

The family business has not been going well. Henry’s father, Henry IV had a woeful reign notable for rebellion ¦. His advice to his son was succinct: Go for an acquisition, even if it entails a hostile takeover. In fifteenth century England that meant finding someplace to attack”it didn’t much matter where”in order to ˜busy giddy minds’ at home ˜with foreign quarrels.’ Like any new and especially young executive, Henry longs to make his mark. War offers a great opportunity to do so”but only if he wins. (p.4)

The sinister strategy Shakespeare brings to light here is presented by Mr. Adelman as exemplary to those who benefit from war”the leaders and succeeders in charge today who regard the nation born in this city of brotherly love as their family business. The book’s co-author, Norman Augustine, is CEO of Lockheed Martin, one of the largest arms manufacturers and defense contractors in the world. And Mr. Adelman, among his many other leadership roles, sits on the Defense Policy Board, which traditionally served to strengthen ties between the private sector and the Pentagon, and which contributed significantly to our present administration’s disastrous middle-east foreign policy. Indeed, war provides “great opportunity” for these people–win or lose, and “it [doesn’t]¦ much matter where.”

Erasmus was recognized as the greatest scholar and thinker of early Renaissance Europe. He was given a seat at the tables of the Great, who were tutored by humanists and loved their culture. Erasmus tried to persuade the Movers and Shakers to give up their bellicose power games and to devote themselves to the protection and welfare of all their subjects. The policies that he championed”outlawing war, arbitrating international disputes, disbanding standing armies–never took hold. But his voice still speaks, along with Shakespeare’s, to guide and inspire those engaged in a battle of true worth.

An editorial set to appear on Monday — election eve — in four leading newspapers for the military calls for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

from Macbeth, Act 5 scene 2:

Now does he feel
His secret murders sticking on his hands;
Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love: now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.

from the editorial:

“These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many privately feared would fail. They have kept their counsel private, adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of subordination of the military to civilian authority. And although that tradition, and the officers’ deep sense of honor, prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe it.”

To All Things Considered
Your story on the controversy about the ballot intiative on the shopping center in San Luis Obispo California (All Things Considered October 27) was sadly underresearched. The angle on the story came straight out of a feature in the L.A. Times a few weeks ago that emphasized butterfly viewing”one of the trivial trinkets promised by the developer’s public relations firm. It ignored the serious negative consequences of the proposed development that have been clearly delineated in the ballot arguments, the impartial analysis and public opposition by the Council of Local Governments, the Arroyo Grande City Council, and dozens of public officials. Shame on your reporter for not even reading the opposition website (http://nomeasurej.org) that would have made the important issues of traffic impacts and infrastructure financing obvious, and instead producing a puff piece for the developer.

[This report was published in the October 2005 Issue of The Santa Lucian]

I just returned from the Sierra Summit that took place in San Francisco September 8 to 11. My wife Jan and I had decided to attend privately to strengthen our connection to the national organization in this dark time and to learn from a luminary lineup of scheduled speakers. When some of our chapter representatives couldn’t go, I became a delegate in return for half price on the registration fee. The delegates’ job was to bridge a gap between leadership and grassroots and to democratically select goals guiding action and budget decisions over the next five years.

We drove up on Thursday morning with Chris, who’d agreed to become a much in-demand under-30 delegate, checked into a cheap hotel in Chinatown, walked to the Moscone Convention center, and fell in with thousands of well-dressed members of the California Dental Association. Finally we found our way to “Moscone North” and what was billed as “Sierra Club’s First Ever National Environmental Convention and Expo.” http://www.sierraclub.org/sierrasummit

The prospect of a four hour priority setting session after a long drive and no lunch in a cavernous banquet hall was not enhanced by lengthy “motivational” harangues by two professional facilitators with deep southern accents. Though the leader admitted that he had no environmental involvement of his own, he assured me that he did not normally work for energy companies like Exxon, but only churches and financial institutions. Sitting at tables in groups of ten, the seven hundred delegates were put through a series of ill conceived icebreaking exercises and endless questionnaires, and asked to prioritize vague, confusing and overlappingly phrased goals.

Midway through the session, delegates started speaking up, expressing bewilderment and resentment. Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director, convinced the audience not to give up and the facilitators to talk less and listen more. By the end of the session a general consensus among delegates was reached: the first two priorities for future national action and budgeting were 1)build a clean and safe energy future with improved efficiency and renewable resources and 2)build vibrant communities assuring environmental justice and reducing sprawl.

This selection makes significant changes in sequence and wording to conclusions drawn from pre-summit surveys. It signals a shift from primary emphasis on recreation and wilderness preservation and clearly reflects the impact of Hurricane Katrina. That impact was reinforced by the surprise announcement that the Convention would be addressed at 8:30 next morning by Al Gore. He had turned down our invitation because of a previous commitment on the same day to talk about global warming to an insurance industry convention in New Orleans.

The onslaught of Katrina is an apt metaphor for the Bush administration’s onslaught on the world environment. The speeches I heard at Sierra Summit on Friday and Saturday gave evidence of an energy that might be able to resist and protect from these storms.

Gavin Newsome, the radiant mayor of SF, welcomed the Sierra Club to his “49 square miles surrounded by reality” by asserting that cities can act when federal and state governments fail to address environmental issues. San Francisco has required all retired city vehicles to be replaced by hybrids, has embarked upon an aggressive green building program, and has been the first city to adopt the Precautionary Principle as a guiding policy. http://www.sfenvironment.com/aboutus/innovative/pp/

In his introduction of Al Gore to a packed hall of about 2500 people, Carl Pope told us he had just returned from India where a hardly reported storm dropped 37 inches of rain on Bombay the day that Katrina hit New Orleans. Carl witnessed that within seven hours 15,000 Indian troops were on the streets helping survivors, within 15 hours all buses in the neighboring states were mobilizeed for rescue and evacuation, within 8 hours, everyone in Bombay had food and water, and within two days plastic packaging was banned because it was discovered that plastic waste had blocked sewers and storm drains. The contrasting fate of the Gulf Coast, said Pope, was sealed on a November day in 2000, when the Supreme Court decided the case of Bush vs. Gore.

The gravity and eloquence of Gore’s speech are impossible to convey. I urge you to read or listen to it at http://www.sierraclub.org/pressroom/gorespeech/. He put Katrina into the context of the gathering storm preceding World War II prophecied by Winston Churchill. We have tasted the first sip of the bitter cup that awaits us, he prophesied. Four years ago it was vacation time when dire warnings about the prospect of an attack by Al quaeda and identification of students at flight schools with no interest in learning to land were provided to the President. This summer there were warnings about what could happen if a large hurricane hit New Orleans. Three years ago, there were dire warnings that FEMA was being rendered helpless. He asked us to draw the line connecting the emotions we felt when we saw the images of Abu Graib and the emotionswe felt when seeing the people in the Superdome and then to draw the line connecting those responsible for both tragedies.

Gore compared the warnings about Hitler wilfully ignored by the British government and the West and the warnings about global warning wilfully denied by the American government, quoting Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” He insisted that we have the vision and know-how and technology we need to address global warming, but we lack the political will. “But political will is a renewable resource,” he concluded, and the audience came to its feet and roared.

The glimmer of hope kindled by Gore’s conclusion exploded into sunshine during the next presentation I attended, a talk by Bill McDonough, the author of Cradle to Cradle and prophet of the Second Industrial Revolution. His maxim is “how do we love all the children of all species for all time?” McDonough often works with people the Sierra Club is aligned against, such as the Ford Motor Company, for which he designed a green assembly plant in Dearborn Michigan. McDonough and his company devise products, buildings, industrial processes and cities according to standards that require zero waste and zero pollution. He showed us some of his ecotopian plans for the construction of seven new cities commissioned by the government of China which he said has adopted Cradle to Cradle as their industrial policy. Less optimistically, he alerted us to the fact that the world’s oceans are rapidly lowering in Ph, and that if the present trend continues, by the year 2100, calcium carbonate will dissolve, destroying all coral and molluscs”the bottom of the food chain. If you want to know more about McDonough, a seminal thinker on Sustainability, try http://www.mcdonough.com

While McDonough spoke to an audience of 800, six other presentations were taking place simultaneously. For the late afternoon session, I attended a small one on “engaging youth” mounted by the Sierra Student Coalition. These young people organize projects like “Victoria’s Dirty Secret” exposing the practises of the catalog industry which is destroying boreal and appalachian forests to produce the junk mail. SSC may be able to help us start a local group bringing together high school, college and university student allies.

Delegates convened again Saturday morning from 7:30 to 11:30 to prioritize means to achieve goals prioritized the day before. First place went to organizing people locally to take action. Second was creating new allies and coalitions. Others included supplying environmental expertise, getting people outdoors, public education, bringing legal action and creating media visibility. Delegates were then treated to a lengthy study by Harvard Professor Marshall Ganz on how the club could increase general effectiveness (NPLA). He concluded we need motivated well trained leaders and lots of attention to engaging new members in club activities. If interested, see http://www.clubhouse.sierraclub.org/committees/oegc/workplan/index.html

Saturday’s highlight for me was the plenary session featuring Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Security was extensive and the great hall was even more packed than for Gore. Hoarse with laryngitis, at times desperate with anger at others ecstatic with ardor, Kennedy repeatedly brought me to tears. This is a person you could follow to the barricades. Presented with the Sierra Club’s William O. Douglas award, he spoke at length about his childhood relation with Douglas and then went on to indict the present administration”headed by the worst environmental president in history who has corrupted all agencies by heading them with the bought dogs of the corporations who finance his campaigns. A former NY state assistant attorney general who spearheaded the salvation of New York’s Hudson River, Bobby’s son spoke about his three sons who suffer from asthma brought on by the unprosecuted criminal activities of corporate polluters. He talked about the subversion of the free market by the corporations that now control government. He talked about the ignorance of what’s going on caused by the corporate media’s refusal to report it. He talked about his own success at awakening and converting Red-state audiences. And finally he rhapsodized at length about Saint Francis, the Bible, religion and nature. You can find an early version of this speech at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1120-01.htm

A quiet and lyrical coda to this Riverkeeper’s jeremiad came in a presentation by Robert Hass entitled “River of Words.” Another local as well as national hero, Hass used his position as former US poet laureate to create an organization promoting environmental education for children. As he does with his students at UC Berkeley he encourages teachers to take their students outdoors, to cultivate their senses and encourage their observations of nature, to get them to follow Aldo Leopold’s advice to “think like a mountain,” and then to have them write poems and draw pictures about their experiences. This traditional but nowadays rare approach has generated thousands of submissions from around the world which his organization makes available online and in published collections, and which in turn generate more rivers of words. Rather than reading his own lovely nature poems, Hass spent the hour showing and commenting upon exquisite examples of the childrens’ work. For more information on this project see, http://www.riverofwords.org/index.html

There was much more at this amazing conference than can fit here. The impact of what I heard and saw is still not absorbed. And though I have doubts about the effectiveness of a very abstract exercise in deliberative process, the sensation of simply being together with so many people of like mind, common loss and shared aspiration–people for whom I immediately felt affection and respect–will nourish me for a long time.

Reviewed for “Books at High Noon,” Cal Poly University, San Luis Obispo, March 20, 2001, by Steven Marx, Professor of English.During the discussion following, the two proposals offered at the end of this review were supported by representatives of the faculty union(CFA), the staff union(CSEA), students(ASI), and the Cal Poly Land Faculty Seminar. At a meeting on March 29, these proposals were supported by a representative of the Cal Poly Administration’s Centennial Celebration organizing committee.

Introduction

Thanks for coming. Not only are you taking time during finals week crunch, but attending a talk by a speaker named Marx on the topic of Capitalism sounds like risky business.

The book is Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins. I read this book the first time last summer, after tuning into a talk on National Public Radio by Paul Hawken one night while washing the dishes. I put down the sponge, turned off the water and just stood there, not wanting it to end, feeling that this was the kind of speech that could change the world. I had a flashback to 1965, standing in the kitchen of my graduate student house in East Palo Alto listening to voice of Mario Savio coming through the radio from the Sproul Hall steps in Berkeley.

Then I remembered that Rob Rutherford, professor of animal science, kept talking about Paul Hawken–how his ideas are important, how great it would be if he could come speak at Cal Poly. So I went down to The Novel Experience and bought the book.

Before I read it I checked its website–http://www.naturalcapitalism.org–for information on the authors:

“Paul Hawken began his career as an entrepreneur in the 1960s, when he founded Erewhon Trading Company, a natural foods wholesaling business. He went on to co-found Smith & Hawken, the retail and catalog company, in 1979, and Datafusion, a knowledge synthesis software company, in 1995. His next book, The Ecology of Commerce (1993), has become a classic text on business and environment, and continues to have a large impact on government and business.”

“Amory and Hunter Lovins are visionaries who have been around long enough to see many of their ideas become reality“and as consultants and advisers to many of the world’s largest corporations, they have helped shape the futures of the electricity, oil, real-estate, automobile and semiconductor sectors. Co-CEOs of Rocky Mountain Institute a nonprofit natural-resource thinktank, they have written dozens of books on resource policy and business, including Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use (1998).”

All three of these authors can be classified as environmentalists, but what distinguishes them and their method of proceeding is that they are equally business people and economists. Much of the book is an argument about accounting, supported by numbers– like the opening section of Thoreau’s Walden, which he titled “Economy.”

Though it’s long, dense and heavily documented, the book is clearly organized, well written and crammed with lively anecdotes that made it hard to put down. I also found it profoundly unsettling–not so much because it documents familiar bad news about the dangers of our present course, but more because of its good news of promise and possibility. Reading it makes you ardent to do anything within your power to spread the word and to help bring about the changes it advocates.

Like Rob, I found that this book is particularly suited for where we are right now–at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Its message that “there is no true separation between how we support life economically and ecologically” and its revelation of the environmental, political, and moral significance of good engineering, design, resource management and business practices could lead our university to a new and higher mission statement for its second century of growth.

Each of its fifteen chapters can stand on its own, but cumulatively they build to a climax. The first chapter lays out the overall thesis with a historical perspective and an outline of general principles. Later chapters divide the subject into categories like Transportation, Real Estate and Construction, Agriculture, and Climate. The two penultimate chapters return to more general observations, and the final chapter ends with a discussion of the importance of disseminating the book’s ideas on university campuses.

Incidentally, the book can be downloaded chapter by chapter from the website.

Summary

Chapter 1, entitled, “The Next Industrial Revolution,” outlines the thesis developed in the rest of the book. The authors envision an industrial transformation occurring now as comprehensive and revolutionary as the First Industrial Revolution which began in the middle 18th century–the revolution which gave rise to modern industrial capitalism and vastly expanded the possibilities for material development.

The gains of this First Industrial Revolution have been achieved at immense cost to the earth.

• Since the mid 18th century, more of nature has been destroyed than in all prior history.(2)
• In the past 50 years, the world lost one fourth of its topsoil and one third of its forest cover.(4)
• In the past three decades, one third of planet’s natural wealth has been consumed.
• Every living system on the planet is losing ability to sustain the continuity of the life process.

The fact that stronger resource extraction technology still makes prices fall on natural commodities creates an illusion of prosperity because we are drawing our income not from earnings but from principal, from inherited wealth, or what the authors call Natural Capital.

What is Natural Capital? It’s the store of commodities produced by nature in its 3.8 billion year development process–commodities that we consume, like water, minerals, oil, trees, fish, soil, and air. It’s also all living systems–grasslands, savannas, wetlands, estuaries, oceans, coral reefs, riparian corridors, tundras and rainforests. These living systems supply not only nonrenewable resources but indispensible services, such as

• regeneration of atmosphere
• flood management, water storage and purification
• soil fertilization
• waste processing
• buffering against extremes of weather

Awareness of Natural Capital–the economic value of Nature as a system–extends the traditional economists’ definition of Capital as stored value. Added to their two forms of 1)financial capital–cash, investments, monetary instruments–and 2)manufactured capital–infrastructure, machines, tools, factories–are 3) natural capital–resources, living systems, ecosystem services and 4) human capital–labor, intelligence, culture and organization. Though it’s hard to assign monetary value to ecosystem services such as oxygen production by green plants, for which there are no substitutes at any price, the authors observe that the recent $200 million Biosphere experiment in Arizona was unable to maintain oxygen levels for 8 people. They estimate that these services worldwide are worth $36 trillion annually–about the same as the gross world product(5). They also report a recent World Bank study which found the sum value of human capital to be three times greater than all financial and manufactured capital.

Industrial Capitalism only includes financial and manufactured capital in its accounting and neglects to assign any value to our largest stocks of capital–natural and human. It portrays the creation of value as a linear sequence of extraction, production and distribution. Raw materials are introduced from “somewhere,” labor uses technology to transform resources into products, which are sold to create profits. Wastes are excreted “somewhere.”(7) This method of accounting leaves out the costs of extraction and of waste production to the environment. And the environment is not a minor factor but “an envelop containing, provisioning and sustaining the entire economy.”(9)

The new industrial system of Natural Capitalism employs an expanded set of values that include accounting for natural and human capital. It proposes four strategies to address its broader picture of economic activity.

1. Radical resource productivity–that is industrial efficiency. This slows depletion at one end, lowers pollution at the other end and creates more jobs in between. Through the use of industrial technology labor productivity increased 200 fold between 1750 and 1820. Today, the “Factor 10 club” of governments and business foresees a tenfold increase of productivity from resource use promoted by improvements in technology and design.
2. Biomimicry, which eliminates the very idea of waste by redesigning industrial systems on biological lines. “Spiders make silk strong as Kevlar but much rougher, from digested crickets and flies, without needing boiling sulfuric acid and higher temperature extruders. The abalone generates an inner shell twice as tough as our best ceramics, and diatoms make glass, both processes employing seawater with no furnaces. Trees turn sunlight and water into cellulose, a sugar stiffer and stronger than nylon and bind it into wood, a natural composite with higher bending strength and stiffness than concrete or steel. We may never grow as skillful as spiders, abalone, diatoms, or trees, but smart designers are apprenticing themselves to nature to learn the benign chemistry of its processes.”(16)
3. A service and flow economy. This involves shifting from a perception of wealth as goods and purchases to a perception of value as desired services and satisfaction of human needs. “Manufacturers cease thinking of themselves as sellers of products and become, instead, deliverers of service, provided by long-lasting upgradeable durables.”(16) For example, the Carrier Corporation now sells “coolth” rather than air conditioners–they own and service and upgrade equipment(17), and “Interface Corporation¦leases warmth, beauty and comfort of floor covering services rather than selling carpets.” In Europe, the principle of Intelligent Product Systems makes manufacturers responsible for waste if their product cant be recycled, so products are designed to be reincorporated into “technical nutrient cycles” in which nothing can be thrown away. Such systems use less energy than extraction of new materials and provide more jobs.
4. Investing in Natural Capital. This involves developing markets for activities which enhance and restore the environment, and it needs to be done internationally since degradation of environment“global warming and attendant storms, for example–is an international consequence.

The rest of the book describes “an array of opportunities¦that are real, practical, measured and documented” by which the second industrial revolution is going forward and the principles of natural capitalism are taking hold.

Chapter 2, called “Reinventing the Wheels,” prophesies an impending transformation of the automobile industry, the largest component of the modern economy worldwide. The technical and policy issues addressed by this chapter have direct bearing on the teaching and research carried out in Cal Poly’s Mechanical Engineering and Urban Planning Departments.

The authors claim that this industry is “well along the way to a Factor Four or greater breakthrough in resource productivity and is beginning to close its materials loops…”(22)

Modern cars are extremely inefficient, using only 20% of their fuel to turn the wheels and of that 95% moves the car, and only 5% moves the driver.(24) Lovins’ Rocky Mountain Institute designed a Hypercar (and put it into the public domain making it unpatentable), which reverses those efficiency ratios by being ultralight, low drag, and hybrid in propulsion. Once these cars, now in production, are successfully marketed, “oil will become uncompetitive even at low prices.” Even more radical resource productivity will be created by hydrogen fuel cell technology, which literally can take fuel out of the air and leave only water and oxygen as waste.

To realize this productivity and promote the sale of environmentally clean automobiles, the authors propose a system of “feebates” administered at no public cost by governments. Fees imposed on energy inefficient cars pay for rebates on those which which do less harm.

Other solutions to the “excessive automobility” which costs everyone involve reconfiguring transportation systems to make parking and driving bear their true costs–in road construction and maintenance, resource depletion, traffic jams, pollution, and accidents, fostering genuine competition between different modes of transportation. In addition to improving public transportation, sensible land use can be promoted over actual physical mobility.(41) “Most American building regulations require developers to provide as much parking for each shop office or apartment as people would demand if parking were free….diverts investment from buildings into parking spaces, making affordable housing scarcer.” Instead builders should be required to provide perpetual transit passes.

Chapter 3, entitled “Waste Not,” exposes the scale and consequences of Industrial Capitalism’s failure to follow the natural principle of recycling. This chapter’s topics represent the concerns of our Environmental Engineering, Facilities Planning and Operations departments.

“The critical difference between industrial and biological processes is that living systems are regulated by …feedback loops.”(49) In nature there is no such thing as waste. But our present economy consumes and disposes of unthinkable quantities of unrecoverable natural capital:

• “The US still gets 3/5 of its aluminum from virgin ore, at twenty times the energy intensity of recycled aluminum, and throws away enough aluminum to replace its entire commercial aircraft fleet every three months.”
• “The amount of waste generated to make a semiconductor chip is over 100 000 times its weight. Two quarts of gasoline and a thousand quarts of water are required to produce a quart of Florida orange juice 50
• “America wastes or causes to be wasted nearly 1 million pounds of materials per person per year. This figure includes 3.5 billion pounds of carpet landfilled…28 billion pounds of food discarded at home…3.7 trillion pounds of construction debris.”(52)
• Highway accidents cost us 150 billion a year
• Highway congestion 100 billion a year
• We spend 200 billion a year in wasted energy–just because we don’t employ same efficiency practices as in Japan
• We waste 250 billion on inflated and unnecessary medical overhead
• Our recordkeeping procedures for a ridiculous tax code cost us 250 billion a year.
• We also waste human capital: a billion workers in the world cant find jobs while “the U.S. has quietly become the world’s largest penal colony”–nearly five million men are in jail, awaiting trial or on parole.

Chapter 4, entitled “Making the World,” presents antidotes to this grim picture with principles and examples of industrial design that provide a better stream of services from smaller flows of stuff.(62) The kind of innovation described by this chapter is the concern of Cal Poly’s Department of Industrial technology.

The principle is fully developed in the German concept of extended product responsibility–the manufacturer has to take product back at end of its life. “In short, the whole concept of industry’s dependence on ever faster once-through flow of materials from depletion to pollution is turning from a hallmark of progress into a nagging signal of uncompetitiveness.”(81)

• Chemical engineers have cut US chemical firms’ energy intensity in half since 1970.
• The mass of an average European yogurt container dropped by 67 percent during years 1960-1990.
• Refrigerators now save 87 percent of their 1972 energy cost.
• High-temperature processes are replaced with gentler, cheaper ones based on biological models that often involve using actual micro-organizations–like those that Professor Cano at Cal Poly is developing for Bioremediation with Unocal.
• “Distributed intelligence” controls industrial processes with decentralized and sensitive instruments.
• Materials are saved with net shape manufacturing–rather than assembly
• “Disposable” cameras are actually recycled.
• IBM remanufactures computers.
• Xerox makes every part of its machines reusable or recyclable.

Chapter 5, “Building Blocks,” applies the principles of Natural Capitalism to construction and real estate development industries. This is a chapter for our Architecture, Construction Management, and Regional and City Planning departments.

Green buildings, like the high-rise Amsterdam bank described by the authors, use 92% less energy and create greater worker productivity and satisfaction by use of proper placement and orientation, passive heating and cooling principles, and full insulation. Such buildings are designed by a “charette” process of collaboration that crosses traditional professional boundaries.(87)

A major obstacle to true economy is created by the fact that architects and engineers are now paid on a percentage of the cost of buildings rather than on the basis of what they save in cost. The way to overcome such obstacles is to replace disincentives with financial incentives for conservation, for instance,

• overcoming the “split incentive problem in which one party selects the technology while another pays its energy costs,” for example with lease riders for fair sharing of savings between landlords and tenants
• changing the home appraisal process to evaluate a house’s energy efficiency
• requiring “feebates” for new energy hookups–energy efficient buildings get rebates paid by higher fees on energy inefficient ones.

The same kind of incentives–crediting developers for reducing automotive trips and numbers of cars per family–can promote real estate developments that “challenge the American habit of ceding community design to traffic engineering.” Such challenges are have been dubbed the “new urbanism,” and include neo-traditional village-style layouts, with neighborhood grocery stores, mixed-use occupancy, and narrower, tree shaded streets.

Chapter 6, “Tunneling Through the Cost Barrier,” and Chapter 7, “Muda, Service and Flow,” explore more abstract issues of economics that have to do with positive feedback loops in long term planning and financing of resource productivity. Both refute the generally accepted notion that increased efficiency is purchased at a rate of diminishing returns, and show rather that the tendency is toward incremental snowballing.

Chapter 8, “Capital Gains,” returns to the accounting principles of Natural Capitalism and proposes ways to overcome the obstacles to their implementation. Issues of accounting, subsidy and tax policy here are within the purview of Cal Poly’s faculty in Business, Economics, Political Science, and Natural Resource Management.

Economic benefits and services provided by natural systems include:

• oxygen production(183)
• biological and genetic diversity maintenance
• purification of water and air
• storage cycling and distribution of freshwater
• regulation of chemical composition of the atmosphere
• maintenance of migration and nursery habitats for wildlife
• decomposition of organic wastes
• sequestration and detoxification of human and industrial waste
• natural pest and disease control by insects, birds, bats etc
• maintenance of genetic library
• fixation of solar energy and conversion into raw materials
• management of soil erosion and sediment control
• flood prevention and regulation of runoff
• protection against cosmic radiation
• regulation of chemical composition of oceans
• regulation of local and global climate
• formation of topsoil and maintenance of soil fertility
• production of grasslands, fertilizers and food
• storage and recycling of nutrients

Yearly monetary values for such services can be calculated at

• $1.3 trillion for atmospheric regulation of gases
• $2.3 trillion for waste processing
• $17 trillion for nutrient flows
• $20.9 trillion from marine systems especially coastal environments

No matter how uncertain these specific amounts, establishing values for natural stocks and flows is the first step of incorporating them into planning, policy and public behavior–of getting people to recognize that these services require investment for preservation and replacement.

Obstacles to such investment in natural capital are perverse and often hidden subsidies by governments that promote abuse and waste–to the tune of $1.5 trillion per year.(161) For example:

• $6.7 billion paid by the German government to subsidize Ruhr Valley coal for jobs. It would be cheaper to pay off workers and close mines.
• $464 billion per year provided by the U.S. government for automobile industry subsidy–including road construction and the cost of the Persian Gulf war
• Subsidies to restrain surplus Agricultural production of $330 Billion year, including $800 million per year to tobacco farmers
• Huge grants to mining, logging and waste disposal industries, which encourage waste and discourage resource efficiency, including the U.S. Forest Service, “the worlds largest socialist road builder.”

At the same time government provides minimal support for clean technologies that can benefit the environment. One way of overcoming barriers to investment in natural capital is by tax shifting–a scheme that can appeal to conservatives and liberals alike. The authors propose to eliminate personal and employer taxes on labor–all income and payroll taxes–and to shift those taxes to sources of resource depletion, waste and pollution, like

• Emission of gases causing climatic change
• Nuclear power
• Toxic fuels
• Pesticides, synthetic fertilizers tobacco and alcohol, piped in water, old-growth timber, free-run salmon, irrigation water from public lands, all minerals from the ground, and waste sent to landfill or incinerator

Eliminating income tax would promote employment, since employees will not be as expensive to hire. Lower labor costs will reduce the rate of return required from investments and thereby benefit the environment, since the higher rate of return required on investment, the greater the likelihood of liquidation of natural capital.(166)

Chapter 9, called “Natures Filaments,” is of special interest to people in Cal Poly’s Natural Resource Management and Forestry programs, as well as to paper consumers in all departments and to building maintenance staff. It discusses the natural capital of forests, which is now being depleted for building materials and paper.

“The world consumes five times more paper now than in 1950”; we live in “a culture in which paper is universally available, priced at perhaps a penny a sheet and rarely paid for or thought about by its users.”(173) Sustainable forestry methods are known but not widely practiced.

Three ways for New Industrialism to deal with this waste of natural capital are to reduce demand, make production more efficient and increase recycling.

Chapter 10, “Food for Life,” raises issues that affect several departments in Cal Poly’s College of Agriculture, including Soil Science, Crop Science, Animal Science, and Agribusiness.

Judged by raw output, the industrialization of farming–or the Green Revolution–has been a triumph of technology, producing larger and faster maturing crops with high yield seeds, biocides, irrigation and nitrogen fertilizers.

But, according to the authors, this triumph has created deepening problems. Actual returns are diminishing and harvests are volatile. Two fifths of food production energy goes to processing and distribution and another two fifths to cooking and refrigeration by final users. Only one fifth is used on the farm, half in chemicals. We use ten times as much fossil fuel energy to produce it as food returns. The costs and liabilities of this system to our Ecosystem are unaccounted for.

• Soil, “the ultimate natural capital,” which the Chinese call the mother of all things, is being lost to erosion faster than it’s being produced, and is suffering overall reduction of organic fertility.
• Genetic diversity of all food crops is being reduced. For instance, India is replacing 30,000 native varieties of rice with one super variety; seed banks are being neglected(195); agrochemical companies are seeking to makes themselves the sole lawful proprietors of the world’s legacy of plant diversity
• There has been a twenty-fold increase in insecticide use since 1948“up to a billion pounds per year– but today insects get 13 percent of yield compared to 7 percent then.
• “Organic farmers recognize that healthy systems needs enough pests to provide enough food to support predators to so they can hang around and keep the pests in balance.” (197) Genetic engineers now put the Bt toxins that are natural pesticides into plants, but pests quickly evolve resistance, thereby eliminating the original natural benefits.
• Widespread monoculture reduces resistance to disease and adaptation to climate change. “Monoculture’s chemical dependence requires enormous amounts of fertilizers to make up for the free ecological services that the soil biota, other plants and manure provide in natural systems.”(197)

Solutions to these growing problems are provided by alternative agricultural practices employing principles of natural capitalism. As opposed to the Green revolution, “Ecoagriculture” substitutes good husbandry and local seed for otherwise purchased inputs. Resource productivity can be increased in biomimetic, closed-loop, nontoxic innovations such as

• crop drying using a no energy windmill vacuum in silos to create dry air flow
• sustainable barn architecture
• community supported agriculture
• substituting information for resources with close monitoring of soil moisture and biota(203)
• attracting wildlife to harvest non-food crop residues instead of burning them
• reconfiguring livestock raising with biomimicry
• “Pioneers of ecologically based grazing are showing it is far better to restore and maintain grazing by cattle and other animals on grasslands that typically coevolved with grazing animals and cannot remain healthy without them.”(207)
• restorative and biological farming organized on traditional family or village scale

Chapter 11, “Aqueous Solutions,” deals with issues of fresh water use and conservation of special interest to Cal Poly’s Agricultural Engineering and Environmental Engineering departments.

Chapter 12 outlines the problems of global climate change, to which some people respond with denial and others with hopelessness.

The authors present a plan not only for solving the problems but turning them into a business opportunity. They claim that the growing urgency and cost of global warming will push us in the right direction. The primary cause, the release of carbon into the atmosphere from burning of fossil fuels, can be reversed. U.S. growth in efficiency has actually lowered energy use, in contrast to projections in the 1970’s. But there’s a long way to go: America’s power stations turn fuel, still mostly coal, into an average of 34 percent electricity and 66 percent waste heat. In contrast, Denmark converts 61 percent of its power-plant fuel into useful work.(247)

According to the authors, increased efficiency and reduction of emissions can be achieved largely through the creation of business credits and incentives such as those developed in the 1997 Kyoto agreement. The sulfur emissions credit program has reduced them 37 percent in a decade, and the same policy can work with carbon trading, especially with the use of higher rewards for “early adopters.”

Chapter 13, “Making Markets Work,” outlines other business strategies to make environmental sustainability compatible with profitability. This chapter again is directed specifically to concerns of Cal Poly’s College of Business. “The goal of natural capitalism is to extend sound principles of the market to all sources of material value…[and] to guarantee that all forms of capital are as prudently stewarded as money is by trustees of financial capital.”

The authors proclaim that the remedy for unsustainable market activities is adoption of sustainable market activities. Such activities include creating markets in avoided resource depletion and abated pollution credits which will maximize competition in saving resources.(261)

One example demonstrating the feasibility and success of this kind of market is the toilet retrofit program developed in San Luis Obispo county. [This program is attributed to the City of Morro Bay, but it was also carried out in the City of San Luis Obispo.] When the city ran short of water, it required developers to save twice as much water at another place in town to get building permits. Two fifths of the houses got retrofitted within four years.

Another method is for Utilities to make markets in negawatts, allowing energy saving to compete against against energy production. “Every form of avoided resource depletion and prevented pollution is a potential candidate for an entrepeneur to find and exploit inefficiencies…the bigger the problem, the bigger the potential gain.”(280)

Yet another example of making markets work to promote sustainability is provided by the collaboration of climate scientists, who “Greenpeace introduced…to leaders of the European insurance and reinsurance industry. They are now investing in climate protection.”

In “Human Capitalism,” the book’s next-to-last chapter 14, the authors dramatically shift emphasis from natural capital to human capital, applying the “…same design philosophy, to achieve the same elegant frugality, with which whole-system engineering meets technical demands by delivering multiple benefits from single expenditures.” This chapter in itself has the impact of a whole book. It’s a vivid and plausible description of a Utopia, one whose actual existence is confirmed by numerous city websites, another book by Bill McKibbon, and a video available locally at Insomniac Video.

Known as “the ecological city,” Curitiba is located in the Southeastern Brazilian state of Parana and has a population of about 4 million people–the size of Houston or Philadelphia. There, “responsible government in partnership with vital entrepenurship has succeeded better than most cities in the U.S.” They have implemented “hundreds of multipurpose, cheap, fast, simple homegrown, people-centered intiiatives…treating all its citizens–most of all its children–not as burden but as most precious resource.”

“Teasing apart the strands of the intricate web of Curitiban innovation reveals the basic principles of Natural Capitalism at work in a particularly inspiring way.”(307) Resources are used frugally. New technologies are adopted. Broken loops are reclosed. Toxicity is designed out, health in. Design works with nature, not against it. The scale of solutions matches the scale of problems. “The existence of Curitba holds out the promise that it will be first of a string of cities that redefine the nature of urban life.”(308)

Chapter 15, the final chapter of the book, entitled, “Once Upon a Planet,” leads right to where we sit today.

The change in accounting procedures which Natural Capitalism demands requires a change of mental models. The largest institution addressing mental models is our schools.(315) Colleges, universities and public schools can change their impact on the environment in two fundamental ways. “They create the citizens, MBAs, engineers and architects that create our world. At the same time they spend $564 billion a year to do so, including 17 billion annually in new construction on colleges and universities.” According to David Orr of Oberlin, a leader of the campus ecology movement, “…changing the procurement, design and investments made by our educational systems represents a hidden curriculum that can teach as powerfully as any overt curriculum.”

Conclusion

Many our University’s departments exist to address the subjects of this book. We are located where crucial intersections and practical applications can take place. We’re blessed with resources that are often treated with the outmoded attitudes of the old industrialism. If Cal Poly can turn around to become an “early adopter” of Natural Capitalism, we can help bring along the rest of the world.

I’d like to offer two proposals: First, that we follow Rob Rutherford’s suggestion and get one of the authors to speak here and start the ball rolling toward a campus conference on Natural Capitalism. Second, that we get Hunter and Amory Lovins’ Rocky Mountain Institute to be consultants on our recently adopted $500 million twenty-year campus capital expansion program known as the Master Plan.

Natural Capitalism is book thick with ideas, facts and figures presented by entrepeneurs and engineers. It’s a set of concrete suggestions for improving the way business gets done proposed by economists. It’s a diagnosis of what’s wrong with the planet and the way we’ve been treating it delivered by ecologists. It’s an exploration of the relation between nature and technology written by philosophers. Finally it’s a testament of faith that can awaken us to reality uttered by prophets.

That’s emphasized by the logo on its cover. What appears at first like a coiled steel spring, on closer examination turns out to be the springtime symbol of a fiddlehead fern. The book’s mission is confirmed by its epigraph, a short poem called “Loaves and Fishes,” which concludes: “People are hungry/and one good word is bread/ for a thousand.”

 

 

“Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year….We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies and odes,…for parliaments of love and poesy…nor for the advancement of science…Our occasion is simply a “friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. [In the hope that this love will thrive and persist,] I accept the topic which not only custom but the nature of our association seem to prescribe to this day–the American Scholar. Year by year we come together to read one more chapter in his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on her character and her hopes.”

Those, roughly, are the opening words of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard on August 31, 1837,” thereafter published under the title of “The American Scholar,” and venerated ever since as a classic document in both the realms of literature and of education. What am I doing getting up here in an academic robe and mouthing them as if they were my own?

Well, just as it was to Emerson, the title of this talk was given to me as one appropriate for the occasion. Thomas Patchell, your new president, invited me to speak on this topic at two oclock in the morning at McCarthy’s bar last June 4, after the cleanup of the English Department’s Year End Bash. I was too exhilirated or too tired or too drunk to say no. But from a more sober perspective there is a certain appropriateness. Though this is not Harvard, but Cal Poly, and though our meeting is sponsored not by Phi Beta Kappa but by Sigma Tau Delta, the Cal Poly English Honor Society, we too are celebrating the recommencement of the literary year and the survival of the love of letters in a less than congenial environment. And though the audience facing me tonight may not include the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and William Henry Dana, just back to Cambridge after his famous sea voyage to the Central Coast of California, it couldn’t be any more challenging to me than the one Emerson faced 156 years ago. He tells us that the custom of his audience prescribed that the speaker read a chapter in the biography of THE American Scholar. But since I’m a little short of Ralph Waldo’s measureless confidence, I’ll scale back the assignment and limit my scope to a chapter in the biography of the one American Scholar I feel qualified to talk about, myself. That will require about as much transcendental ego as I can summon up.

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