Paul Hawken was the keynote speaker at the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum in San Francisco on Thursday. He had some inspiring talking points (the forum’s goal was to ‘reinspire the inspired’), but one of the key takeaways was in how we should be viewing sustainability. He started by saying that sustainability should be viewed as a easily defineable. Sustainability means we survive. Living unsustainably means we don’t. But it was how he suggested we view this that was really interesting.
He wanted to suggest that sustainability is about seeing the world as a system. Once you see it that way, it’s hard to un-see it. If you see the world that way, there’s no such thing as bad news. You can see the loss, feel the grief…the loss of a child, the loss of a species, the loss of a culture…it’s connected to a whole system. Instead, it turns into just news…information.
In this way, we can view the whole world as one system of energy. A watershed, for example, builds over millennia using a lot of energy in terms of rainfall, geologic uplift, etc. We are tapping into that energy, unsustainably, and have been since the industrial revolution. We’re using our reserves. Quickly. Seeing this as a system, where the river may look ok today, but when viewed as part of a system, clearly is not, is a path toward an enlightened view of the world that many more people can share.
All the oil in Canada can run the world for 6 months. China…7 months. The U.S.: 9 months. Nigeria: 12 months. Russia: 28 months. Iraq: 4 years. Saudi Arabia has 8 years. Biggest recent discovery offshore of Brazil: 15 months…after it takes 20-25 years to extract. When viewed as a system, with all the energy that went into the creation of that oil, it becomes so clear that extraction and burning is not the answer. Drill, Baby, Drill is just plain dumb.
Scott Cooney is the author of Build a Green Small Business: Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur (McGraw-Hill)
