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Posted by Allan Chochinov | 23 Feb 2007
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Andrew Zolli blows it open with his feature story in Fast Company this month, outlining the conditions, opportunities, and reasons for the coming Eco-Innovation Revolution. It's hard to pick a paragraph to quote here, but here are a couple:
As if on cue, however, a suite of new global forces is emerging that will remake the operating environment for global capitalism, obliterate the walls--and the distinctions--between the Friedmanesque Hatfields and the Naderesque McCoys, and inject a "greed is good" mentality into our approach to grand social problems. The clinical, value-neutral capitalism of old is about to follow the recently departed Friedman to the grave.
and
As with the Industrial and Information Revolutions before them, the protagonists in the "Eco-Innovation" Revolution will take the field with new approaches, ideas, and technologies that will upend our notions of production, consumption, wealth, and invention. Our current economic system was devised in an era in which labor was scarce and natural resources were abundant. We're moving into an era in which the opposite is true, and that's going to change capitalism's playbook for good.
Okay. One more:
Resource scarcity is going to be a front-page business issue as well, affecting industries from transportation to electronics. According to estimates by the International Institute for Environment and Development, at today's levels of production, there may be only another 28 years' worth of copper in the ground, another 21 years' worth of lead, a 17-year supply of silver, and 37 years' worth of tin. We will certainly get better at extracting, recycling, efficiently using, and finding replacements for these materials, but it's likely that basic industrial inputs will come under increasing pressure in the decades to come. A shortage of industrial-grade silicon, for instance, has recently spooked both the solar-cell industry and Silicon Valley. Moore's Law never assumed we'd run out of sand.
And those three paragraphs only set up the premise. He's got lots of positive, concrete examples of how we can do better.
Absolute required reading.
(Thanks to Xanthe, who also suggests this.)
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Comments
I saw a funny article the other day that was making fun of this sort of idea. It talked about the ratio of horses to people in the late 1800s and about how there wasn't going to be enough land to grow enough crops to feed the horses to support the millions of people in New York and Chicago that we will have in 2007. You could probably take any period in history and there would always be something critical they were about to run out of. In reality, we find sustitutes (like cars) or find better production methods before it's a problem. The peak oil theory is a great example. It asssumes no substitutes are available when in realty we can make as much oil as we want for $80 a barrel. It's just cheaper to get it out of the ground at the moment. And it probably won't matter anyway since at the current pace of growth, solar and wind will be able to supply 100% of our energy in less than 25 years.