Page 43 - ECOlogic Book
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investing, where investors screen companies for environmental “cleanliness”
is another example.
Still another is the 20 year old push for pollution prevention. In an article in
Fortune magazine, public relations expert, Howard Marder said, “For the past
20 years, the environmental movement has focused on cleaning up damage.
Almost overnight the focus is changing to prevention (not putting harmful
substances into the environment in the first place.) Marketers had nothing
to sell before, but now they can say, ‘Be part of the solution by buying our
product.” In the same issue of Fortune, Edith Weiner of a Manhattan
Management consulting firm is quoted: “Environmentalism will be the next
major political idea, just as conservatism and liberalism have been in the
past.” In the year 2009, we are seeing this prediction come true.
And finally, reinforcing the whole-to-part thinking that is breaking out
globally, there was a United Nations summit conference in Brazil in June,
1992, to explore and create ways that development and environment can
become mutually enhancing. Oneof the most promising ideas to come out of
that conference was the realization that the GNP is no longer an accurate or
even useful indicator of progress. This harbinger of a growing recognition
that we can’t have a healthy economy without a healthy environment has
been growing ever since.
There’s a scene in the movie, Mind walk where the scientist, played by
Liv Ulman, suggests that “ultimately, whether we like it or not, we are
all part of one inseparable web of relationship.”
This triggers a description from Tom, the poet, of the Hindu God
Shiva’s eternal dance of energy. “That’s physics!” says the physicist.
“That’s poetry!” says the poet. Is it science or poetry? Physics or art?
It’s both.
Biologist Brian Goodwin notes that “We are developing a science of
qualities – of sound and shape and color.” He acknowledges that
these qualities “. . . are also the basis of music, painting and sculpture,
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