Pertinent excerpt from Paul Hawken's "The Ecology of Commerce"

[marmar]

"The dirty secret in environmentalism is that there is no such thing as sustainability. Habitats can endure over millennia, but it's practically impossible to calculate the sustainability of specific fisheries, tracts of land, and actual forests. We have also probably already passed the point where present planetary resources can be relied on to support the population of the next forty years. Any viable economic program must turn back the resource clock and devote itself actively to restoring damaged and deteriorating systems--restoration is far more compelling than the algebra of sustainability."

"Why, then, do we accept the excuses? Why do we hand business a blank check and exempt enterprise from the responsibility for maintaining social values? One reason might be that . . . we have only a piecemeal view of events. We have no accumulate the overall image of cumulative destruction. Furthermore, their actions are defended--I daresay have to be defended--because most of us are dependent upon them for our livelihood. Even a declining General Motors still employs nearly 600,000 people. A supermarket chain such as American Stores employs 200,000 or more. The 400 companies profiled in Everybody's Business Almanac employ or support one-fourth of the U.S. population. . . . The average large business is 16,500 times larger than the average small business. And since much of the population is now employed by these large corporations, they naturally see their interest as being linked to the success and growth of their employers. Such fealty resembles the allegiance that sustained feudal baronies; the vassal serfs believed that the lord who exploited them was better than the uncertainty of no lord at all. But in the competitive world of modern commerce, loyalty to the system prevents an objective examination of how market capitalism can also work against those who serve it."

"We should not be surprised then, that there is deep-seated unwillingness to face the necessary reconstruction of our commercial institutions so that they function on behalf of our lives. Business believes that if it does not continue to grow and instead cuts back and retreats, it will destroy itself. Ecologists believe that if business continues its unabated expansion it will destroy the world around it. This book will discuss a third way, a path that restores the natural communities on earth but uses many of the historically effective organizational and market techniques of free enterprise."

"The cumulative impact of corporate crime is a deep-seated, 'free-floating' cynicism and distrust regarding big business. If we are to create a commercial culture that does no harm to natural and human communities, society will have to define commercial crime more effectively, and begin to see it as something less than inevitable, and more than excusable."

"What misleads citizen in the richer nations is that we in the industrialized North are very well provided for indeed: with some notable exceptions, we either don't see, don't experience, or choose to ignore the impact our lives have. It is difficult for us to imagine that the ecological principle of carrying capacity can significantly affect us. Between the advertisements for Eddie Bauer, Jeeps, the suburbs, and the mall, we assume that we're not taking too much from our environment, or we would see more signs of stress and deterioration around us. Our comfort and abundance is the foundation for the great differences we see in public debate and private discussions about the environment. . . . We confuse our rate and ability to consume with the capacity of living systems to provide for those wants."

[kestrel91316]

1. We cannot and must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Improving our society's RELATIVE sustainability is an emergency imperative. That we cannot achieve complete sustainability is irrelevant.

[The2ndWheel]

2. There isn't really a good either

It doesn't matter what we do, because those actions will cause complex interactions with the environment, which we'll have to take into account, which will then change our actions, changing the interactions, which we'll have to take into account...

We're chasing something that isn't there.

[kestrel91316]

3. Well, then, I suggest you commit suicide. It's the only solution.

I will do my part to reduce my environmental impact to the best of my ability. And I never had kids, and don't currently have a car, so I have already done way more than my fair share.