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Sustainability and innovation: The way forward
Dexter Dunphy
Corporate Sustainability Project, School of Management, Faculty of Business, University of Sydney, NSW
Article Text
At the beginning of this century capitalism had triumphed over the two other main contenders for ideological allegiance - fascism and communism. At its time of triumph, however, capitalism faces its greatest challenge yet: its ecological base is unsustainable.
While we were preoccupied with last century's ideological conflicts, a fundamental shift went almost unnoticed. In Noel Perrin's words: '...the 1950s represent the swing point in man's relationship to nature, certainly in the United States, and probably in the whole world. During that decade we became stronger than our surroundings.' (Noel Perrin, Forever Virgin: The American View of America, in Daniel Halpern and Dan Frank, The Nature Reader, Picador, London, 1996, p.22). The expanding human population, equipped with new tools from mechanical to biological, became the most powerful influence on the biosphere.
This represents the fulfilment of the dream of industrial capitalism - that we can turn the world's resources into whatever we please. Like King Midas, we have been granted the gift to transform everything we touch to gold. Like Midas, we are learning that having our wish come true can be fatal. Any way you look at it, we cannot continue to conduct business as usual - we have to reinvent capitalism. However we do not yet fully understand what post-industrial capitalism will look like. There are powerful insights in this special issue of the Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice journal (ISSN 1447-9338: Volume 6(2) 2004) on Corporate Sustainability (ISBN 0-9750436-2-5: Andrew Griffiths (ed), eContent Management, Maleny, 2004) but they represent only early, sometimes faltering steps along the path to sustainability. What we do understand, however, is that we cannot continue to act as though the earth's resources are inexhaustible or ignore the impact of our lives and industry on the environment.
To achieve sustainability, we are faced with the need to innovate on a hitherto unprecedented scale. First we must reinvent the way we relate to the biosphere, including the assumptions of science itself. The basis of accepted science lies in the revolution in thinking initiated by Isaac Newton and a remarkable group of seventeenth century thinkers who, as Stephen Jay Gould points out, 'changed the very definitions of knowledge and causality, achieving a beginning of control over nature...' (Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, The Fox and the Magister's Pox, Vintage, London, 2004, p.11). From these thinkers we inherited the idea that we are outside nature and its master. We are more powerful than ever but must also understand that we are still part of nature and must be creative contributors to the health of the biosphere if we are to survive and thrive on this planet. We need a science that breaks out of Newton's mechanistic universe and from a spurious ethical neutrality; a science committed to planetary stewardship not pretending to be neutral while contributing to destructive resource exploitation.
The second area in which we must innovate is in developing new forms of social organisation, particularly in the way we construct and operate our organisational life, including governments. True, the old mechanical models of organisation are giving way to new networked and virtual forms. But the pace of innovation must be stepped up if we are to develop the new agile forms of governance and sociability required to make this new relationship with nature work. We need massive commitment to change and many more skilled change agents to make the transition from the old to the new ways. We are closer to knowing what we need to do but often lack the skills to implement the new order.
Finally we are faced with the need for radical innovation in production, manufacturing and distribution processes. This includes innovation to develop products that can be remanufactured and recycled with positive or neutral environmental effects. It also includes the progressive dematerialisation of our industrial production and, where possible, the translation of products into services. The design of the industrial technologies we use was predicated on the twin assumptions of limitless natural resources and nature's infinite ability to absorb any amount of junk and poisons that are the 'offcuts' of our chosen way of life. We now know that these assumptions don't hold. If we want to live healthy lives, we must be committed to create a healthy social and natural environment. We can't really throw things away because there is in fact no 'away' any more. Unfortunately too there is no quick technological 'fix', although many are committed to find such an easy way out of our dilemma. The task is more difficult than that - not only to redesign our tools but also ourselves.
Our ability as a species to imagine new tools and new worlds and then to create them has been the source of our expanding power. We have come a long way from the forests of Africa in the last 60,000 years (Paul Ehrlich, Human Natures: Genes, Cultures and the Human Prospect, Island Press, Washington DC, 2000, p.98). But our innovation to date has had unintended consequences that we must deal with to survive as a species. The critical issue we face is to turn our great innovative capacity to the central challenge of this century: creating a sustainable way of life on a planet with limited resources and an expanding population.
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