Moral imagination is not just preventive medicine for inventors and scientists, to be exercised once in a while to see if you are about to create a new Frankenstein. Moral imagination can be used to identify areas in which new discoveries are needed, and to provide a framework for developing new technologies.
The organizing metaphor for these cases is once again Campbell's hero, who is called to a quest, receives help from a mentor and returns with new knowledge or power, but can only use it beneficially after an inner, personal transformation. Frankenstein obtained power, but did not undergo the kind of transformation that would have given him the moral imagination to decide whether and how to use it.
Unlike Frankenstein, the heroes in these cases are motivated by the desire to do well by doing good--to create new technologies that will benefit other people as well as themselves. To be successful, such a quest will also involve a personal and organizational transformation.
Here the individualistic Campbellian metaphor breaks down. In these cases, heroes and heroines must become system builders--they must find allies who can share their values and move towards their goals, allies with complementary skills who can form a network.
John Law (Law, 1987) has written about "the fundamental problem faced by system builders: how to juxtapose and relate heterogeneous elements together such that they stay in place and are not dissociated by other actors in the environment in the course of the inevitable struggles--whether these are social or physical or some mix of the two" (p. 117). He uses the example of Portuguese navigators, who sent frail craft out on a journey of discovery. They had to develop technologies and heuristics for dealing with physical forces; they also had to coordinate financial backers, crews, and compete with traders from other cultures.
Like Law's navigators, the designer-heroes in these cases will be assembling frail networks that are continually threatened. To survive, they will have to recruit others, and convince them to adopt a shared mental model.
According to Paul Ehrlich, "Resource depletion and environmental degradation are the products of three factors: population size; per capita affluence (or consumption); and the environmental impact caused by the technology used to supply each unit of consumption" (Ehrlich, Ehrlich, & Daily, 1995, p. 26). Ehrlich puts this in the form of a simple equation:
Garrett 's classic paper on the Tragedy of the Commons highlights this dilemma (Hardin, 1968); he argued that the practice of allowing sheep to graze on common land in England led to overgrazing by individuals who wanted to take a larger share of the common resource, especially as the population grew. Here the P factor is the main culprit, coupled with the desire for an increase in A. The eventual result is environmental disaster--an overgrazed commons that provides insufficient food for any of the people that share it.
As population increases, other common resources like food, water and air are threatened in the same way. Hardin argued that this tragedy has no technical solution; it can only be solved by recognizing "the necessity of mutual coercion"(Hardin, 1968). We will have to abandon the idea of a commons in breeding, and agree to restrictions. Hardin is generally receptive to strategies like China's one-child restriction as means to achieving this end.
Hardin recalled that a member of the Indian delegation to the first U.N. Conference on global population claimed that development was the best contraceptive. Hardin went on to deride this strategy, and pointed-out that the Indian government gave its states wide powers to restrict population.
In contrast, there are those who argue that increasing affluence will reduce the growth in population (Bast, Hill, & Rue, 1994). This kind of growth is especially important given the widespread poverty that exists in much of the world. In order to lead to a reduction in population, growth needs to be accompanied by a change in the status of women (Kennedy, 1993). "With greater opportunities for education (especially female education), reduction of mortality rates (especially of children), and greater participation of women in employment and in political action, fast reductions in birth rates can be expected to result through the decisions and actions of those whose lives depend on them" (Sen, September 22, 1994, p. 62). Sen cites the example of the Kerala province in India, which is one of the poorer provinces, yet has a relatively low birth rate. The key is that Kerala also has a very high rate of female literacy (87%) relative to other provinces (average of 39%) and a low rate of infant mortality. (Miller, 1996, 230; Sen, 1992, 62).
The Kerala example suggests that increasing affluence is not sufficient to lower birth rate. Providing greater opportunities for women may be the best hope of reducing population increases. In traditionally male-dominated societies like India, this also involves giving women a stake in decisions involving property and distribution of communal resources (Agarwal, 1997). Increasing affluence makes it more likely that women will have increased opportunities, but it takes enlightened policies to insure that this occurs.
Environmental impact is not a product of population alone--it also depends on consumption: "According to one calculation, the average American baby represents twice the environmental damage of a Swedish child, three times that of an Indian, thirteen times that of a Brazilian, thirty-five times that of an Indian, and 280 (!) times that of a Chadian or Haitian because its level of consumption throughout its life will be so much greater" (Kennedy, 1993, p. 32). If the global standard of living continues to rise, environmental degradation and resource exploitation might continue to rise even if population falls.
In contrast, there are those like Mark Sagoff who argue that "The insistence that affluence is a principal cause of the world's environmental ills hides the extent to which poverty, not wealth, is responsible for land degradation, extinction, deforestation, pollution and other problems" (Sagoff, In Press, p. 3). Affluence (A) and technology (T) can actually be factors in reducing environmental impact (I), partly because they lead to a reduction in population (P). Well, A and T can also contribute to a reduction in another P--poverty--which further contributes to the reduction in population growth:
Third world countries are, for the most part, subsistence economies. The rural fold eke out a living by using products gleaned directly from plants and animals. Much labor is needed even for simple tasks. In addition, poor rural households do not have access to modern sources of domestic energy or tap water. In semiarid and arid regions the water supply may not even be nearby. Nor is fuelwood at hand when the forests recede. In addition to cultivating crops, caring for livestock, cooking food and producing simple marketable products, members of a household may have to spend as much as five to six hours a day fetching water and collecting fodder and wood.
Children, then ,are needed as workers even when their parents are in their prime. Small households are simply not viable; each one needs many hands. In parts of India, children between 10 and 15 years have been observed to work as much as one and a half times the number of hours that adult males do. By the age of six, children in rural India tend domestic animals and care for younger siblings, fetch water and collect firewood, dung and fodder. It may well be that the usefulness of each extra hand increases with declining availability of resources, as measured by, say, the distance to sources of fuel and water (Dasgupta, 1994).
This kind of subsistence living involves a tremendous amount of environmental damage. Someone who is starving has little concern for the commons--she or he will take whatever is needed for food and fuel, and move on when resources are depleted. In El Salvador, for example, subsistence farmers who were driven from their homes during the civil war "have to clear more land than before because the soil is poor. In addition, most fuel is unavailable or extremely expensive, leaving wood the cheapest and most available means of cooking. The deforestation accelerates soil erosion, which in turn causes rives to fill with sediment, killing water life" (Farah, 1997, p. A17).
Perhaps an American baby causes less of some kinds of environmental damage than one from Chad, or Haiti, or El Salvador, because the American baby does not depend on slash and burn agriculture. Affluence may have a beneficial impact on the environment, if the affluence is widely shared in a society and not concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs.
Enter the third factor, technology, which in Ehrlich's simple equation multiplied the negative effects of population and affluence. In 1971, Barry Commoner argued that ,
Economic growth is a popular whipping boy in certain ecological circles...The rate of exploitation of the ecosystem, which generates economic growth, cannot increase indefinitely without overdriving the system and pushing it to the point of collapse. However, this theoretical relationship does not mean that any increase in economic activity automatically means more pollution. What happens to the environment depends on how the growth is achieved. During the 19th century the nation's economic growth was in part sustained by rapacious lumbering, which denuded whole hillsides. On the other hand, the economic growth that in the 1930s began to lift the United States out of the Depression was enhanced by an ecologically sound measure, the soil conservation program (Commoner, 1971, p. 139).
More recently, Commoner contrasted this ecologically-sound growth view with that of those who argue that the environment can only be saved
if human society gives up further economic growth, and with it the continued attack on the environment. Others would exact a sterner tribute, requiring that the world population--and with it the present scale of economic activity and environmental stress--be reduced. At the edge of irrationality there is the view of Earth First! that the treaty should require modern industrial society to "give way to a hunter-gatherer way of life, which is the only economy compatible with a healthy land" (Commoner, 1990, p. 191-2).
Rachel Carson, in her classic Silent Spring, objected vehemently to the widespread use of chemical insecticides:
As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life--a fabric on the one hand miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation", no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.
The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth (Carson, 1962, p. 261-2).
But Carson was not against using technology to control insect populations. Instead of chemical tools, she advocated biological ones: bacteria that attacked undesirable insects, natural insect predators and the use of radiation to create sterile males of an undesirable species.
The Commoner and Carson examples suggest that technology can be a solution to environmental problems, allowing sustainable growth, provided we take new technological directions. In other words, T(echnology) could be changed from a variable in Ehrlich's equation that increases pollution to one that decreases it (for some persuasive arguments along these lines, see Bast, et al., 1994). In the rest of this chapter, we will consider technologies that may pave the way toward sustainable growth.
In his provocative novel Ishmael, Daniel Quinn (1992) argues that about ten thousand years ago, a new kind of Taker civilization emerged, one based on the idea of dominion over the Earth. The Takers developed agricultural technologies that gave them the ability to produce more food than they needed, thereby expanding the population. The alternative hunter-gatherer and herder cultures Quinn refers to as Leavers, to indicate the way in which they allow nature to limit their population and guide their choice of food and other resources:
The Takers systematically destroy their competitors' food to make room for their own. Nothing like this occurs in the natural community. The rule there is: Take what you need, and leave the rest alone"(Quinn, 1992, p. 127).
For Quinn, any attempt to promote sustainable development without a change in Taker attitudes would be a failure. What is needed is for human beings to change the fundamental myth, or story on which most of the civilized world operates: "the old horror of Man Supreme, wiping out everything on this planet that doesn't serve his needs directly or indirectly" (Quinn, 1992, p. 249).
In terms of moral theory, Quinn believes in creating virtuous people by altering the myth most of us live by--once we have internalized a new myth, we will know how to share resources, not just with other human beings but also with other species. Aldo Leopold advocated a land ethic, which "changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such" (Leopold, 1966, p. 240). But how does one acquire this new myth, or view? It will not be enough to hear it--one will have to take the hero's inward journey oneself, or be uniquely prepared by one's previous life experience.
It is also not enough to substitute one myth for another. One should not hold either a Leaver or Taker position dogmatically. The hunter-gatherer model used by Quinn to exemplify the Leaver perspective could not work for a world populated by billions--in order to return to that state, there would have to be a horrific decline in global population. Moral imagination is a tool for combating dogma, for recognizing that there are different ethical perspectives that can be applied to a problem. The hope is that by exercising moral imagination, practitioners will become reflective, considering alternative views and arriving at decisions that are better than one could develop from only one frame of reference.
The way out of the Taker dilemma is not to return to a more primitive society, but to change one's attitude towards nature. Carolyn Merchant describes Aldo Leopold's land ethic as ecocentric--she feels that his privileges nature over the human, in contrast to egocentric or homocentric views, the former privileging the individual human and the latter the human species as a whole. The Leaver ethic is not ecocentric--it sees humans as part of nature, no less or more important than the whale or the nematode. As Quinn says, "We have as much business being stewards of the world as infants have being stewards of the nursery" (Quinn, 1994, p. 144).
Merchant proposes a partnership ethic, in which "the greatest good for the human and nonhuman community is to be found in their mutual, living interdependence" (Merchant, 1997, p. 49). This suggests a way out of the Taker/Leaver dilemma. Humans are not infants in a nursery; we are in kinship with nature, sometimes taking a more dominant role, other times listening and being guided.
William McDonough has developed a set of principles which he and Paul Hawken use to achieve this kind of partnership (Hawken & McDonough, November, 1993). They place particular emphasis on one of the heuristics employed by Bell in his invention of the telephone: follow the analogy of nature. According to Hawken,
Business has three basic issues to face: what it takes, what it makes, and what it wastes, and the three are intimately connected. First, business takes too much from the environment and does so in a harmful way; second, the products it makes require excessive amounts of energy, toxins and pollutants; and finally, the method of manufacture and the very products themselves produce extraordinary waste and cause harm to present and future generations of all species, including humans. The solution for all three dilemmas are three fundamental principles that govern nature. First, waste equals food. In nature, detritus is constantly recycled to nourish other systems with a minimum of energy and inputs. We call ourselves consumers, but the problem is we do not consume. Each person in America produces twice his weight per day in household, hazardous and industrial waste and an additional half-ton per week when gaseous wastes such as carbon dioxide are included. An ecological model of commerce would imply that all waste (sic) have value to other modes of production so that everything is either reclaimed, reused or recycled. Second, nature runs off of current solar income. The only input into the closed system of the earth is the sun. Last, nature depends on diversity, thrives on differences, and perishes in the imbalance of uniformity. Healthy systems are highly varied and specific to time and place (Hawken, 1993, p. 12).
It was McDonough who articulated these three principles: waste equals food, work from current solar income and respect diversity (Hawken, 1997). Here nature provides a model for the partnership. As Barry Commoner noted, "in nature, there is no such thing as 'waste.' In every natural system, what is excreted by one organism as waste is taken up by another as food"(Commoner, 1971, p. 36) . If a way could be found to follow the analogy of nature, making wastes into food, preserving diversity and using no more of the Earth's fuel resources than are replaced by the sun's energy, then one could have sustainable growth that would respect the diversity of species and the rights of future generations to clean air, water and abundant sources of energy. Indeed, McDonough wants to go beyond sustainability to restoration because he wants to leave the Earth better than it is now (McDonough, 1997). Paul Hawken expresses this philosophy in terms of an economic golden rule for the restorative economy: "Leave the world better than you found it, take no more than you need, try not to harm life or the environment, make amends if you do." (Hawken, 1993, p. 139).
Julian Simon, a frequent critic of environmentalists, has argued that the greatest resources is the human mind, that innovation can overcome environmental challenges (Bast, Hill, & Rue, 1994). I think Hawken and McDonough would agree with him. We do not have to go on designing things the way we have done in the past; the human mind is capable of inventing restorative technologies. But the first step will be a change in mental models:
In today's industrial economy, standard thinking is cradle-to-grave: companies who make chemicals should work with end-users so the wastes are properly and safely disposed of. This methodology is an improvement over the "no deposit, no return" mentality that preceded it, but it remains in essence, a license for industry to persist in manufacturing toxins. In addition, the final disposal solutions available today are unacceptable--all of them--including deep-well injection, incineration, and fly-ash storage. Today, when many people's bodies in industrial nations are, technically speaking, too toxic to be placed in landfills, it is time to establish a pathway to eliminate the poisons, a chain of actions and consequences that energizes business, that stimulates innovation, that preserves employment, and restores the environment. A cyclical, restorative economy thinks cradle-to-cradle, so that every product or by-product is imagined in its subsequent forms even before it is made. Designers must factor in the future utility of a product, and the avoidance of waste, from its inception (Hawken, 1993, p. 71).
For Hawken and McDonough, the place to begin is the corporation. Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface, Inc., the world's largest commercial carpet manufacturer, had an epiphany when he read Hawken's Ecology of Commerce. At the time, Interface had slipped from its number one position. Anderson had called in a turn-around expert who made him feel like an outsider in the company he had created. Anderson "was stunned to read about the breadth of toxins accumulating from one generation to the next and the speed at which natural resources were being depleted." Mr. Anderson could see his own company on every page: carpet mills sucking up hydrocarbons and spewing out toxins. He wept, thinking about his grandchildren's future. "It was a spear in my chest," he says. (Petzinger, 1997, p. B1). Anderson learned from Hawken that "business and industry, the largest, wealthiest, most pervasive institution on earth, must take the lead in saving the earth..." (Anderson, 1995, p. 6). Anderson decided to transform Interface. He needed a system, and turned to The Natural Step, another organization Hawken was involved with.
This page was last edited: Wednesday, July 14, 1999