Page 83 - ECOlogic Book

It was Ford’s ingenuity and inventiveness that made mass production
possible, inaugurating the American Materialistic Dream. It brought to their
fullest fruiting the hydropower generation of electricity, the wide use of
synthetics and the ability to transmute raw materials into durable, affordable
products at an astonishing rate.

It also inaugurated the vast depletion of natural resources and the
disappearance of species at a rate far exceeding their natural evolutionary
comings and goings.

We remember the classic story of the assembly line worker who told by his
supervisor not to pick up the bolts he dropped because it cost more to pay
him for the time it took him to pick them up than it would to throw the bolts
away and buy more. That story and others like it that were generated by
the Industrial Revolution changed American Consciousness. With such
stories, the Industrial Revolution brought in wasteful attitudes, replacing the
conservation ethic of the continent’s early settlers. It brought in the
pollution of our waterways and the very air we breathe. It opened a hole in
the ozone layer and a hole in our Yankee confidence.

There are many who doubt that the same attributes that got us into this
environmental mess can get us out of it. On my darker days I am one of
them. The technological fix has failed us in the past and it will fail us in the
future as well. We cannot hope that by doing more of what we did wrong,
we can fix our broken world.

But we can use our inventiveness and inquisitiveness – the “people” genius
of this place – to find ways of working with natural systems instead of
against them. We can “manage waste out of the system,” and learn to
imitate the natural world’s ways of doing things. “Cradle-to-tomb” can be
changed to “cradle-to-womb”, or, as some are saying, “cradle-to-cradl,” as
we begin to think of industrial processes as cycles rather than linear
processes. In his book, The Ecology of Commerce Paul Hawken puts it this
way:
We should be trying to design systems that are
elegantly imitative of climax ecosystems found in
nature. Companies must re-envision and re-imagine
themselves as cyclical corporations, whose products
either literally disappear into harmless components,
or whose products are so specific and targeted to a
specific function that there is no spillover effect, no
waste, no random molecules dancing in the cells of

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