By now it should be obvious to most that our current way of life is deeply and fundamentally flawed and unsustainable. We desperately need to change our policies and guiding principles if we as a species are to have a future on this planet. I believe a big part of the problem lies in the way we view the world and our place in it - rather than considering it a collection of discrete objects to be claimed in the name of private ownership, we ought to consider the world as the interconnected web of life that it is.
"Ecological Debt Day" or "Overshoot Day", the day when we have consumed more resources than the Earth can produce in a year, comes earlier for each year. Man-made environmental disasters such as the oil spill in the Mexican Gulf earlier this year or the on-going oil spill in the Niger Delta now on its 50th year, are getting more common. The same is true for "natural" environmental disasters exacerbated by human exploitation such as the flooding of New Orleans or Bangladesh. While many large corporations are making ever increasing profits, a growing amount of people are getting ever poorer. In their strive for maximized profits, companies like Monsanto backed up by national governments, are turning more and more of our common resources into commodities to be sold and traded even going so far as to patent life itself.
At the heart of these issues lies the notion mentioned above, of the world and everything in it as something to be claimed and owned. This is closely related to the prevailing paradigm of domination, exploitation and manipulation. Also, the idea of the world as consisting of discrete objects with no regard for how everything fits together and is part of a greater whole, which makes us insensitve to the delicate balance of the Earth's ecosystems and the essential role they play in bringing forth and sustaining all life.
One of the major problems can be found in the way most companies focus blindly on maximizing share-holder stock value, regarding any other values as secondary or instrumental to that. I would like to point out that the main issue isn't companies themselves, or even that they are profit driven in the sense that they make money for their share-holders. It is that their sole purpose is maximizing profits rather than simply making money. This comes as a result of considering both natural resources and companies themselves as isolated units, to be price-tagged, sold and traded. It is the idea that if every single actor (being an isolated unit) maximize his or her profit, everyone will gain from it. This idea is flawed in that it presupposes the possibility of ever increasing, unlimited growth in a world of limited resources, and also in that it plainly disregards the complex and interconnected fabric of the ecosystems.
Instead of attempting to maximize production at every single node of the various ecosystems that constitute the world, we ought to optimize the productive capacities of those ecosystems. Doing so entails learning from nature, shifting from a paradigm of domination, exploitation and manipulation to one of partnership, cooperation and emulation. For instance, rather than thinking of eco-design as "manipulating" nature we ought to think of it as "emulating" nature. It doesn't mean that we cannot make profits, but it does mean that we need to stop thinking of the world as consisting of isolated units and start thinking of it as an interconnected whole, as a web of life.
I would like to point anyone interested in this issues to two highly interesting organizations. ZERI, or the Zero Emissions Research & Initiatives, is a global network trying to find novel ways of organizing "production clusters" which work along eco-design principles in an attempt to eliminate waste products, instead using waste as a resource in itself. The Center for Ecoliteracy is a public foundation aimed at promoting "schooling for sustainability" and "incorporating ecological principles and sustainability into school curricula".
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