Towards the end of 2008, a report issued by the National Intelligence Council (summarised here) offered its predictions on what the world may look like in 2025. Among its best guesses are increased conflicts over scarcer resources.

The report has stimulated a lot of reflection on the mechanism we most often use to maintainsecurity and stability; namely, trade. It is frequently said that economic systems are best suited to keep the world at peace. The example of the EU, for one, demonstrates a group of formerly warring states successfully held together by trade and mutual economic interest.

While the trade = peace maxim may be true in times of relative prosperity over the short term, it may not hold up in the long-term—at least not using our current economic model. Prosperous trade ideally creates wealth for all nations involved; however, most trade is based upon unsustainable extraction of natural capital. Economic ties keep the peace only until the fruits of those economic ties (the financially uncounted social and environmental damage we incur to create trade) come crashing down on us.

Once conditions of natural capital and ecosystem services deteriorate, a number of unpleasant scenarios become possible For example, there may be landslides from erosion due to profitable logging, or water shortages from selling or diverting profitable water. With too many converging “natural disasters,” isolated misery turns easily to shared discontent and anger, and social forces can be brought to bear on natural ones. Domestic stability unravels, nationalism gains popular appeal, sabre-rattling begins, and border tensions simmer as a convenient outlet for internal problems. Conversely, a neighbour may decide it is really a regional stability-promoting favour to annex another neighbour in trouble (and, conveniently, its water/natural gas/oil/good cropland).

Most simple of all, trading nations that have been eating up the same forests and water and soil begin to fight over the dregs. A recent article in the UK Times discusses how water shortages have had a more catalytic role in wars over the past 500 years than previously thought. 

 

Once a country is domestically shaky, it just takes one stress that is otherwise manageable in isolation (e.g. a bad crop year, or the breaking point in an economy built on debt and borrowing) to tip the situation towards instability and violence. Domestic upheaval creates regional instability.

There are three critical steps to ensuring peace:

1. Healthy environment and people

2. Stable international trade based on #1

3. Peace based on #2

Yet our international diplomatic efforts typically begin with trade negotiators at the level of #2. We try to base peace on trade as if trade were divorced from healthy environment and people. This is an incomplete picture of where stability actually comes from. And, if the authors of the National Intelligence Council report are correct, we are coming to the point where we will experience more conflict over the resources we diminished trying to generate trade and stability.

Lastly, does it not seem somehow disingenuous to base peace on the desire for profit, on a few more percentage points growth over last year? To base peace on the slippery scare to greed?

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We draw on nature for any number of technological innovations. Usually these fits of inspiration come from looking at the level of the individual organism and deriving a product of benefit to humans. Using a shark fin design for underwater energy generation is one example; exploring the elastin in the knees of high-jumping fleas for use in spinal disc prostheses is another.

Beyond the mimicry of organisms, we sometimes achieve limited mimicry of ecosystems. A well-known example is the use of constructed wetlands to treat wastewater. Here a template (the wetland) for providing a critical ecosystem service (effluent treatment) already exists in all its elegant, evolutionarily-tested efficiency.

(Rather large constructed wetland, Columbia Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant)

 

A wetland, though, is part of a larger system, a finely integrated network of ecosystems that keeps the planet running--and us breathing, drinking and eating. The immensity of it, of the ecosystem services we use as humans, has been estimated at $33 trillion dollars annually . That’s a sum almost double the GNP of all nations of the world combined.

Our own human systems, though they pale by comparison in magnitude or dollar value, are still formidable, so much so that they wreak havoc with the natural systems on which they are founded. Given that natural system templates are all around us, it is perhaps puzzling that our human systems do not more closely emulate them. In fact, the systems of nature and modern business couldn’t be more different. Business is for the most part linear: we extract, refine, consume, and dispose. Nature is cyclical: one species’ waste is another one’s food. In effect, the concept of waste does not exist in nature. Waste is not just wasteful, it’s perilous. Inefficiency will, over the short and long term, get you bumped off.

In The Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken suggests we ought to take a sheet from nature’s book and start modelling business on basic principles in ecology:

1. there is no waste

2. everything functions symbiotically

3. products are non-toxic and life-giving

He writes:

“We humans have yet to create anything that is as complex and well-designed as the interactions of the microorganisms in a cubic foot of rich soil. No ecologist would claim to fully understand the workings of an ecosystem, but all praise the minutiae within, the economy that governs, and the wondrously designed interaction and diversity that marks that cubic foot of soil, that produces the maximum amount of life with the absence of waste” (103).

It may be a long time, if ever, before we can understand or mimic the functioning of a cubic foot of soil, but there is no reason we can’t begin to use the concepts of no waste and symbiosis in industrial design.

An example of early-stage industrial ecology cited by Hawken already exists in Kalundborg, Denmark. There, a coal-fired power plant sends its waste heat to an oil refinery, a pharmaceutical company, greenhouses, a fish farm, and homes of local residents (making 3,500 oil burning residential heating systems redundant). Excess gas produced by the refinery is sold to a sheetrock factory and to the coal-fired plant (which saves 30,000 tons of coal). The refinery retrieves sulphur and calcium sulphate from its gas: the sulphur is sold to a chemical company, and the calcium sulphate to the sheetrock factory. Waste heat from the refinery heats a local fish farm, whose sludge is used as fertilizer by local farms. The farms also receive refined sludge from the pharmaceutical company. Fly ash from the coal plant is used in road construction and concrete production.

 

As a prototype of industrial ecology, the system has a few bugs to work out. Does it operate within the carrying capacity of the ecosystem? Can locally-available materials sustain the processes indefinitely? Are the products non-toxic? There is always room for improvement. However, the incredible part of the Kalundborg model is that the industrial symbiosis evolved organically, without planning or legislation. Industries saw cost-saving opportunities and pursued them – environmental benefits were realized as a side benefit. Consider the potential economic and environmental benefits of a symbiotic model that was intentionally designed, of mutually-beneficial industries that were coevolved.

In ecology, it is understood that species which are coevolved—that is, change over evolutionary time in response to each other and their environment—are more efficient at partitioning available resources. This is why waste in nature does not exist – some organism has evolved to use it as a resource. There is no reason why industries could not also coevolve and learn to partition the resources available to them in the most efficient way possible. As in nature, such industrial symbiosis could eliminate waste. And if, in our full capacity as creative beings, we cannot find a productive use for certain types of waste, then perhaps it is time to reevaluate why we produce these wastes in the first place.

As for the future of a symbiotic industrial model, we can once again look at the frontiers of ecological research. The current holy grail of that field is the question of biodiversity and ecosystem function: do more species make an ecosystem work better? If yes, would a high diversity of symbiotically-functioning industries also be more efficient?

Understanding, rather than mimicking, highly diverse natural systems is still the order of the day. A landmark biodiversity study cited in The Ecology of Commerce details a 1983 experiment in a Panamanian rain forest. Researchers collected 163 species of beetles from a single species of tree – beetles exclusive to that tree species. In an expanded study of 19 trees, 80% of the 1,200 beetle species discovered were new to science. Given 50,000 tree species in the rain forest, the researchers calculated that 8 million new-to-science species were busy going about their various beetling business.

Bearing in mind that we cannot even estimate the nearest order of magnitude of life on this planet – is it 2 or 100 million?—we should be humbled by the scale of interrelatedness we find, by the natural systems in existence, by how they all fit together with such parsimony. Humbled, awed, and inspired by these models of what we must strive for in a sustainable, no waste, symbiotic and life-giving community. Inspired also to not destroy the very models we are striving to become.

 

recommended reading:

The Ecology of Commerce  by Paul Hawken

 

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