permaculture

[Stella <stella@finca-luna.com>]

I knew the story of Ray Anderson (and infact have used it in our PDC  
teaching for a few years now)   .. but I´d never seen this lecture of  
his before.

it is 4yrs old, & it is awesome.

This guy is a business man & industrialist - and one of the more  
inspiring permaculturists that I know of.

long but well worth making the time to read in full, especially for PC  
educators


.........


http://www.ncseonline.org/NCSEconference/2003conference/page.cfm? 
FID=2504

A Call for Systemic Change

Ray Anderson
Chairman, Interface Flooring Systems, Inc.

Plenary Lecture at the 3rd National Conference on Science, Policy and  
the Environment:
"Education for a Sustainable and Secure Future"
Sponsored by the National Council for Science and the Environment

January 31, 2003

It seems that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson go on a camping trip.
Night comes on, and they go to bed.
In the middle of the night, Sherlock Holmes wakes up and punched Watson  
awake.
"Watson, what do you see?"
Watson looks up and in his inimitable way says, "Meteorologically  
speaking, I see we're in a high pressure zone. The sky is perfectly  
clear.  Cosmologically speaking, I see an expanding universe with  
billions and billions of galaxies, each containing billions and  
billions of stars. Astronomically speaking, I see our own galaxy, the  
Milky Way, and five first magnitude stars. There is Altair, Arcturus,  
Deneb, Vega, and Regulus.  Astrologically speaking, I see that Mars is  
in Capricorn and Saturn is in Sagittarius.  Chronologically speaking, I  
deduce from the position of the stars that it's 3:15 a.m.
What do you see, Holmes?"
Holmes hesitates a moment, collects himself, and then replies,
"Watson, you idiot.  Someone has stolen our tent."

Hang onto that punch line.  We'll come back to it.

I am a Georgia Tech engineering graduate, Class of '56, the Founder,  
Chairman and, for 28 years, the CEO of Interface, Inc. - a billion  
dollar manufacturer of carpets, textiles, and architectural products  
for institutional and commercial interiors.
I am an industrialist, but I changed my view of the world in the summer  
of 1994.
After 21 years of unwittingly plundering the earth, I read Paul  
Hawken's book THE ECOLOGY OF COMMERCE (Harper 1993).
It came for me at a propitious moment.
Our customers, especially interior designers, had begun to ask, "What's  
Interface doing for the environment?"
So, I had agreed, reluctantly, to speak to a newly assembled  
environmental task force of Interface people to address this awkward  
question. Awkward, because I could not get beyond, "We obey the law; we  
comply."

Hawken's book changed that.  It convicted me on the spot, not only as a  
plunderer of Earth, but also as part of an industrial system that is  
destroying Earth's biosphere, the source and nurturer of all life.
I began to understand, reading Hawken, things I never learned in  
college:  that there is red ink everywhere - that every life support  
system and every living system that make up the biosphere (where we and  
the other creatures live), that spherical shell that is 8,000 miles in  
diameter (the diameter of Earth) and only about 10 miles thick --  
extending about five miles downward from sea level into the depth of  
the oceans, and about five miles upward into the troposphere, that  
spherical shell that contains and nurtures all life - on a  
basketball-size Earth, tissue paper thin - that every life support  
system and all the living systems that together comprise the biosphere  
are stressed and in long-term decline, and the rate of decline is  
accelerating: Where is the red ink coming from?

* Polluted rivers and streams from municipal, industrial, agricultural,  
and construction sources.
* Polluted and over-fished oceans.  PCBs accumulating in orcas.  Fish  
stocks collapsing, coral reefs dying. Scuba divers know it's true.
* Lakes polluted, many dead from acid rain, industrial pollution, and  
agricultural runoff; forests, too, dead and dying from acid rain and  
atmospheric ozone, originating in our cities, drifting into our rural  
areas; affecting crop yields adversely, too.  We don't think about this  
in our land of abundance, but it is of special importance to China.   
Increasing pollution from advancing industrialization will determine  
the balance of whether China can feed itself.  A China that cannot feed  
itself is everyone's problem.  Yours, mine, our children's, our  
grandchildren's, and theirs and theirs.
* Disappearing wetlands -- the beginning of the food chain, that leads  
to us at the other end.
* Devastated rainforests, a critical lobe of Earth's lungs; old growth  
forests (haven for bio-diversity) almost gone, mostly clear cut,  
destroying habitat for countless species.
* Depleted and polluted aquifers.  In parts of India and China water  
tables are falling 10 feet a year.                                   *  
Spreading deserts.
* Farmlands, denuded of topsoil, increasing in salinity from  
irrigation, and toxified by pesticides, turning into deserts.
* Range lands, pushed to the limit of their carrying capacity to feed  
the livestock which feed us.
* Atmosphere, polluted by countless toxins, CO2 and other greenhouse  
gases building up, inexorably to create climate aberrations -- global  
warming; the scientific debate about global warming is over; the debate  
is now political and economic.
 The science is clear and compelling.  The threat is real; 2600  
scientists from all over the world agree; a dwindling handful hold out  
in skeptical disagreement. Another U.N. report recently published says  
average temperatures could rise 10 degrees Fahrenheit this century.
That would be devastating!  The precautionary principle dictates: We  
must act as if global warming is real, the risk from not acting is just  
too great.
The Kyoto protocol were it ratified into treaty, would make only a tiny  
dent in the total problem.
It's only a beginning, and not nearly enough. Many scientists are  
advising a strategy of adaptation.  It's too late to prevent, so adapt  
to, drastic changes in Earth's climate in the 21st Century, and work  
now to mitigate the 22nd Century.
We have trouble getting serious about a time frame like that, that  
extends beyond our own lifetimes.
* And even the stratosphere itself, beyond the troposphere in which  
ozone shields us from deadly u.v. radiation.
* All severely stressed by man-made degradation.

I know there are exceptions, and they ought to be celebrated:  Maybe  
the ozone hole is healing. Let's hope the current report is a trend,  
not a blip. You can now see across the street in Pittsburgh.  The  
Cuyahoga River in Cleveland no longer catches on fire.  There are  
eagles again on the upper reaches of the Mississippi.  The Great Lakes  
have stabilized.  In London, there are fish in the Thames at Tower  
Bridge.  (The Minister of the Environment, 40 years ago, took the  
Parliament down there and made them drink out of it -- it didn't take  
them long to clean it up! It illustrates what "The Power of One" can  
do.) In many western countries, toxic emissions are down over the last  
25 years.  British Columbia's old growth is finally being protected.   
Beach closings are down in New Jersey. (For God's sake!)  Well, down is  
better than up.  Clams are back in Puget Sound.

But the salmon are disappearing from the rivers that feed Puget Sound.
We need many more victories to celebrate, because the general pattern  
worldwide is frightening and getting worse.  For every positive  
exception, there are huge deficits on the other side of the ledger:  
Beijing, Shanghai, Bangkok, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Cairo, Delhi, the  
Amazon, the spreading Sahara and Gobi, and on and on, eventually my  
city, Atlanta, and your city. Some of those places seem far away until  
we remember, there is only one global biosphere.
China's sandstorm today becomes Denver's fallout next week.
One result of the stress from human intervention is that species are  
disappearing into extinction at a rate unknown on Earth since the mass  
extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.  This is not good  
news for our species, either, because we are fouling our own nest, too.  
 We cannot live without those life support systems anymore than the  
other species can, though in our denial and arrogance, we may think we  
can.

And, as if that were not enough, you can add to that list a growing  
nuclear cleanup that no one knows how to deal with.  What language  
shall we use to instruct people 20,000 years from now how to deal with  
this legacy of nuclear waste we are leaving them?  (What is it?   
Seventy-seven thousand metric tons and counting, in the U.S. alone.)
No language on Earth is 20,000 years old!  And to that, add one billion  
of Earth's people unemployed; and to that add another billion living in  
starvation conditions; and another billion hanging on by their  
fingernails. Half of Earth's people, human beings, in serious trouble,  
subsisting on less than $2 a day, many on much less. Two-thirds of  
humanity left out by the present economic system, except perhaps to be  
exploited.
Social equity (attention to human capital) like the environment  
(attention to natural capital), lost in the shuffle, as we focus  
myopically on financial capital through the lens of a misbegotten  
economic system.  We cannot escape the consequences of that misplaced  
focus. We witness the ravages of AIDS and we wonder, "What's next?"   
September 11th gave us one "what's next."
Now, we wonder, what's next?

Furthermore, especially for companies like mine, finite, exhaustible,  
non-renewable resources -- natural gas, coal, and oil -- Earth's stored  
natural capital, capital, mind you -- being gobbled up at an obscene  
rate, most of it burned for energy and, in the process, converted into  
carbon dioxide to exacerbate the greenhouse effect.  And the beat goes  
on -- it is a crisis: the crisis of our times and all time to come.
Because it is a funeral march to the grave, if we don't figure out and  
do what's necessary to reverse the deadly trend.

Back to that task force and that first speech, I was struck to the core  
by Hawken's central point, that only business and industry, the major  
culprit, is also large enough, powerful enough, pervasive enough,  
wealthy enough, to lead humankind away from the abyss toward which we  
are plunging.

It was an epiphanal experience for me, a "spear in the chest", and the  
resultant speech went way beyond compliance, to put our company on the  
path toward sustainability.
I myself became a recovering plunderer.  At Interface we call this new  
direction, climbing Mount Sustainability, the point at its peak  
symbolically representing zero environmental "footprint" - our  
definition of sustainability for ourselves, to reach a state in which  
our petro-intensive company (energy and materials) takes nothing from  
the earth that is not naturally and rapidly renewable, and does no harm  
to the biosphere: "zero footprint."

We simply asked ourselves in the summer of 1994, "If Hawken is right,  
who will lead?"  Unless somebody does, nobody will.  It is axiomatic.   
I asked, "Why not us?"  The people of Interface responded  
magnificently, taking on this higher corporate purpose as their own.   
It has added meaning to their lives and, at the same time, engaged our  
customers, suppliers and communities in countless opportunities to do  
the right thing for Earth.  "Doing well by doing good" has emerged as a  
viable paradigm, perhaps THE paradigm of true business success that  
will prevail in the 21st Century.  It is a better way to bigger, and  
more honorable, profits - and beyond profits, to purpose; beyond  
success to significance.

We are approaching the challenge of Mount Sustainability on seven  
fronts - the seven faces of the mountain.  The entire industrial  
system, including the educational sector, must climb these same seven  
faces, if it is to become sustainable:

This is our Master Plan:

* Waste elimination, emulating nature in our industrial processes,  
nature where one organism's waste is another's food.  This means  
revolutionary re-design and re-engineering of processes.         *  
Benign emissions, to do no further harm to the biosphere.  This means  
re-shaping inputs to our factories.  What comes in will go out - as  
product, waste, or emissions.
* Renewable energy, energy efficiency first, then harnessing sunlight,  
wind, bio-mass, and hydrogen - to cut the fossil fuel umbilical cord to  
Earth.
* Closed-loop material flows, to cut the material umbilical cord to  
Earth for virgin materials.
* Resource-efficient transportation, to achieve carbon neutrality by  
eliminating or off-setting greenhouse gas generated in moving people  
and products from Point A to Point B.
* Sensitivity hook-up.  This is the cultural shift, the mind-set shift,  
to sensitize and educate everyone - customers, suppliers, employees,  
communities - to the plight of Earth, and to inspire environmentally  
responsible actions.  I suggest that this is, perhaps, education's  
greatest challenge - your greatest challenge - overcoming and shedding  
a mind-set that embraces the status quo.
This is a good place to invoke the words of Frank Outlaw: "Watch your  
thoughts; they become words.  Watch your words; they become actions.   
Watch your actions; they become habits.  Watch your habits; they become  
character.  Watch your character; it becomes your destiny."  I would  
add: Even before thought, there is mind-set.  Watch your mind-set; it  
underlies the entire system.
* Commerce redesign, to create the true service economy selling service  
- in the case of carpets:  color, texture, design, acoustics, comfort,  
cleanliness - service, rather than product, retaining ownership in the  
means, and giving those products life after life in closed loop  
material flows; bringing about manifold improvement in resource  
efficiency.

I  have told this story of personal and corporate transformation in  
greater detail in my own book, MID-COURSE CORRECTION (Chelsea Green  
1998).

Fast forward seven years to 2001.  Deeply immersed in trying to expand  
my understanding of sustainability, as I have been since that 1994  
awakening, I find myself reading another compelling book, Janine M.  
Benyus's  BIOMIMICRY - INNOVATION INSPIRED BY NATURE (William Morrow,  
1997), recommended to me by David Oakey, Interface's Head of Product  
Design.
A fascinating story is unfolding:  An abalone quietly goes about  
building its protective shell from the "bottom up" as protein molecules  
self-assemble into a three dimensional latticework, like nano-scale  
apartment houses with protein walls, floors, and ceilings; then  
minerals, abundantly available in sea water, fill the cubical spaces to  
create the smooth and ultra-hard nacre.
The walls and ceilings don't line up in neat grids the way an architect  
would design such a development at human scale. Rather, the partitions  
of protein are offset in all directions the way a good bricklayer knows  
to do.
Miraculously, when stressed, this mother-of-pearl with built-in protein  
crack arresters, proves to be twice as difficult to break as the  
toughest ceramics made by the most "advanced" fossil fuel driven, heat,  
beat, treat methods known to man.  But which protein?  How does the  
abalone "know" to do this?  Where in its DNA is the code to be found?
Perhaps no one knows yet, though inquiring minds are seeking the  
answers, because therein lie new insights into advanced material  
technologies not yet imagined.

Preparing for this speech, I wondered whether such inquiries were  
happening in our Ceramic Engineering schools?  Were our ceramics majors  
engaged in the quest?  Were they being exposed to nature's far better  
way?  And I answered my wondering:  Probably not, because I read that  
these pursuits are happening in biology laboratories with shoestring  
funding, while our universities remain locked in their traditional  
mind-set and curricula, teaching fossil fuel powered heat, beat, treat  
technologies - the very ones that industry is using to destroy the  
biosphere.

A similarly fascinating story follows the abalone's.  It is the  
spider's production of its silk web, yielding a fiber that is five  
times stronger, pound for pound, than the aramide Kevlar®, the toughest  
man-made fiber yet developed by Dupont's heat, beat, treat technology  
which employs sulfuric acid at boiling temperatures.
Kevlar is strong enough to stop a bullet, but a weakling compared with  
spider's silk, made from bugs at body temperature.  And I wondered  
again whether our textile and chemistry students were learning nature's  
better way by studying spiders' silk.  I answered my wondering again:   
Probably not, because I read that these studies are happening in  
biology laboratories with shoestring funding, while our universities  
remain locked in their traditional mind-set and curricula, teaching  
heat, beat, treat technologies - the very ones that industry is using  
to destroy the biosphere.

The emerging field of work, endeavoring to answer the question "How  
does nature do it?" in material sciences and a growing number of other  
fields, is "Biomimicry" - nature as model, nature as measure, nature as  
mentor.
Biomimicry is in the early days of inspiring and helping define our  
sustainable future, not only in materials science, but also in food  
production (polycultural rather than monocultural, perennial rather  
than annual, crops); easier on the land, especially vanishing topsoil;  
in energy production (as scientists probe the mysteries of the complex  
physics and chemistry of nature's exclusive process of photosynthesis -  
easier on the atmosphere and climate); in medicine, e.g.,  
pharmaceuticals that are identified by watching animals in the wild  
cure themselves naturally; in storing and retrieving knowledge (through  
studying shape-based computing, learned from how our own cells process  
information); in architecture (as we learn from termite mounds); and  
even in industry, as we begin to look to natural systems to teach us  
more intelligent organizing principles for production that does not  
consume and destroy nature.  Abundance through waste-free processes:  
that is nature's way.  And we are light years behind in our feeble  
efforts thus far to emulate nature.

So I ask you who are shaping curricular and academic research:  Why are  
our universities not teaching Biomimicry?  Perhaps it is thought to be  
too new - and outrageous.  Nature, 3.8 billion years old, is too new?   
Given the 50,000 year history of educating homo sapiens to live with  
nature, perhaps it is latter day ideas for destroying nature that are  
too new, and truly outrageous.
The overpowering consideration that prompts the question about  
Biomimicry is the increasingly obvious destruction of the biosphere,  
being wrought by the industrial system that is being taught in our  
universities.
The mind-set that grips the entire industrial system, of which our  
educational institutions are integral parts, takes nature for granted  
as if a finite Earth were infinite, both as a source of stuff and as a  
sink for the system's waste - yours, mine, everybody's.
The universities, in their academic programs, credit requirements,  
curricula, course design, campus design, and campus operations,  
perpetuate this flawed mind-set from generation to generation, with  
scarcely a pang of conscience, much less a serious re-examination of  
the universities' roles in the destruction of the biosphere.
Obsolete curricula are clear symptoms of this obsolete, flawed  
mind-set.  And the clear evidence of the flaw is all around us in the  
form of declining natural systems upon which all else depends.

I ask about biomimicry by way of example, but biomimicry is only one  
aspect of the emerging, cutting edge thinking that has been inspired by  
the usual mother of invention, necessity; the necessity to find a  
better way to organize a civilization that wants to survive.
I could ask similar questions about other technical fields: renewable  
energy, closed loop material flows, reverse logistics, energy storage  
devices that are better than batteries, and green chemistry, e.g.,  
enzymatic chemistry in water.
Here, I refer you to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation  
and Development) Task Force on "Biotech for Sustainable Industrial  
Development," and its wonderful report of case studies:

Among them, the production of:

* PLA - textile fibers and polymers from corn dextrose
* Amino acids - precursors to healthy food and feed
* Acrylic acid - precursors to nylon and urethane polymers
* Low temp polyester through enzymatic condensation of diols and diacids
* Ethanol production from agricultural residue, cellulose into sugar,  
and
* Bleach removal from textiles to reduce processing energy; all from  
green chemistry (biotechnology) not being taught in our universities,  
which remain locked in their traditional mind-set and obsolete  
curricula - teaching destruction.

I could ask about economics and such issues as the elimination of  
perverse subsidies that incent bizarre behavior (tax credits for  
SUVs!), or such intriguing ideas as shifting taxes from good things  
(labor and capital) that you would like to encourage, not discourage  
through taxation, to bad things (waste and pollution) that you would  
really like to discourage, rather than encourage, even to subsidize; to  
internalize the externalities (the environmental and social costs) and  
to make prices ecologically and socially honest.
I could ask about history and whether the extinctions of past  
civilizations, whose extractive economies led to their ecological  
collapse, are being studied seriously.
The sad fact is that the answer is most likely overwhelmingly, "No," as  
our universities continue to teach and operate in, the system that is  
destroying the biosphere.

I raise all these question, and imply hundreds more, to suggest that  
adherence to the old mind-set, the old curricula, obsolete pedagogy,  
and short-sighted planning, are producing graduates who are trained to  
perpetuate the destruction of the biosphere.
Business, upon which so much depends, will never "get it" with  
graduates like these entering the work force.  It is a crime against  
nature, numbering perhaps 30 million species (some think as many as 100  
million), including humankind itself, for we are part of nature, not  
above it.

Why does this travesty go on?
 What are our educators thinking about?
Do they think Earth is infinite in its ability to meet our ever-growing  
wants (not needs, wants) here in the rich North?
Do they think Earth is infinite in its ability to absorb and assimilate  
the waste from our heat, beat, treat, destructive, voracious, consuming  
technologies?
Maybe they think we have all the time in the world to correct these  
errors.
We don't.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, in their Urgent Warning to Humanity  
(1992), concludes:
"No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert  
the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity  
immeasurably diminished."
Here we are, more than a decade later.
Maybe our educators think that all this is someone else's job, maybe  
another generation's.
It isn't.
The challenge is now.
What are they thinking?
Are you, they?
What an awesome responsibility to assume, presuming to send graduates  
into the world trained in the traditional way which is, in effect,  
destroying life on Earth!
The educational system is failing society, more precisely, society's  
future.
It is a crime.
Dr. Colwell spoke of obstacles in the educational system.
That's putting it kindly.

The crime is occurring in subject after subject, field after field.
Our economics students are taught a system of economics in which the  
externalities do not count - a market system that externalizes life  
itself.
Does, for example, the price of a pack of cigarettes, established by  
the market in its revered wisdom, reflect its cost?
Not close, considering the societal costs associated with smoking; but  
does the market, as we teach it, care?  No.

Does the price of oil, established by the market in its revered wisdom,  
reflect its cost?
Not close, considering the military power projected into the Middle  
East to protect the oil at its source, not to mention the occasional  
Gulf War and the future costs of global warming, such as 9000 square  
miles of America that will disappear under rising sea levels, this  
century alone.
Who knows what the 22nd Century will bring.
But does the market as we teach it care?
No. Do the accounting systems taught to our business students reflect  
this inescapable reality?  No. Yet, long ago, Einstein said,  
"Everything counted does not necessarily count, and everything that  
counts cannot be counted."
And, by the way, in how many of our universities are the causes of  
global warming, itself - the burning of fossil fuels for energy - being  
taught, and the research and development of alternative energy sources  
being pursued?

Instead, we continue to teach economics students to trust the  
"invisible hand" of the market, when the invisible hand is clearly  
blind to the externalities, and treats massive subsidies, such as a war  
to protect oil for the oil companies, as if the subsidies were  
deserved.
Can we really trust a blind invisible hand to allocate resources  
rationally?
Meanwhile, we continue to teach extractive, linear, wasteful, abusive  
technologies whose essential characteristics date from the dawn of the  
industrial revolution.
They are producing more sophisticated products, to be sure, but by the  
same fossil fuel powered, brute, abusive force that Thomas Newcomen  
harnessed to drive the first steam driven pump in 1712, the dawn of the  
industrial revolution.
And our universities, in their daily operation, set terrible examples  
by contributing to the abuse.

The tragedy is that our graduates, steeped in traditional technical  
education, liberal arts, economics, and the humanities, are themselves  
too often emerging from our universities blind to reality - oblivious  
to the realities of a finite Earth.
Blind to a growing population with increasingly unsatisfied needs -  
needs, not wants - two-thirds of the human population essentially left  
out of the modern industrial and economic system; half of Earth's  
people subsisting on two dollars a day, or less.
Why do our graduates (the few who do) have to enter the Peace Corp to  
learn these stark facts of life and death?

How many of our graduates are being taught to ask, for example, why  
China's Gobi Desert is spreading and generating dust storms that now  
reach Denver?
Do you know?  Does your Dean of Science know, or care?
How many of our universities operate as if the Gobi Desert was of no  
concern to them, though the Gobi's dust storms become Seattle's and  
Denver's fall out this year and, maybe, New York's next year?
How many of our graduates are being taught to ask about the causes or  
consequences of species extinction?
How many of our universities operate as if they had no responsibility  
for species extinction, though their furniture and their President's  
office paneling are produced from rainforest mahogany?
How many of our graduates are learning to measure the industrial  
metabolism of our factories, its effects throughout the supply chain,  
from mine and wellhead to landfill or incinerator, and the mountains of  
waste generated to satisfy society's wants?
How many of our universities operate as if their own waste could be  
thrown away (out of sight, out of mind), though their thermodynamics  
courses teach clearly there is no "away?"
And how many are learning about alternative industrial systems with  
factor 10 improvements in resource productivity?
How many are learning green chemistry?
How many are learning to design cities for no sprawl, or to structure  
laws and incentives to encourage the implementation of such designs?
How many are learning about the connections that lead to the vicious  
cycle of poverty and environmental destruction?
Down and down they spiral together!
How many of our universities are teaching through precept or example,  
ways to redress the overwhelming reality of our times, the  
deterioration and eventual collapse of the global biosphere, and  
humanity along with it?
For, if we persist in the present system, the one that is being taught  
and lived and practiced in those same universities, collapse is what we  
will surely get.

"Watson, you idiot, someone has stolen our tent."

Watson overlooked the obvious and got caught up in the details of the  
firmament.
What does that mean to us, here?  I heard it first from Tim Wirth,  
former Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, though I think he  
may have heard it from Sylvia Earle.
Tim said, "Get it straight, don't overlook the obvious.
The economy is the wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.
It's not the other way 'round, the way an economist might have you  
believe.
The economy is the child, the environment is the parent.
We cannot hope to have a prosperous child without a healthy parent."

Thinking about that, I asked myself, "What CEO do I know who, given a  
subsidiary that required a constant, continual infusion of capital  
(natural capital, in this instance) just to keep going, would hold on  
to that subsidiary for very long?"
Not one that I know of, and I'm pretty sure Nature is a better manager  
than any CEO I know, and capable of being far more ruthless if she  
needs to be.

The  biosphere's capacity to supply nature's services - air (plant  
transpiration), water purification and distribution (the hydrologic  
cycle), soil formation and maintenance (thus food), pollination and  
seed dispersal (thus primary production), insect control, nutrient  
cycling, the processing of our wastes, without any of which human  
survival is impossible - is threatened as never before.

When our educators finally confront the question, Why?, they need only  
look in their mirror for the answer.
Of course, they will have plenty of company in that mirror's reflection  
- an entire industrial, economic, as well as educational, system that  
has been led down the garden path by a blind invisible hand.
It is time to change that, and time is short.

The title of this conference is "Education for a Sustainable and Secure  
Future."
We may not want to hear it, denial is easier, but we have a long way to  
go.

Change is often hard and sometimes painful.
Yet it need not be, as we have learned at Interface, and the pain that  
is in store for humanity and the species with which we share Planet  
Earth will be infinitely greater if we don't change.
But, who will lead?
Unless somebody does, nobody will.
Why not you?
If you have the courage and wisdom to seek change, then, to quote  
Gandhi, you must be the change.
That is leadership.
The question is, can education lead?
Or can only business lead?
It really doesn't matter.
Education must be part of the solution.

The truth is, we have an essentially illiterate populace when it comes  
to the environment.
Our brightest minds, at least - the ones you shape - have just got to  
"get it."
As Paul Hawken says in The Ecology of Commerce, "The average adult  
American can identify 1000 commercial brands and a dozen species of  
plants."
That must change.

It is time for our educators, especially at the university level, to  
get off the sidelines as spectators and into the game as participants.
If Paul Hawken is right that only business can lead, who will prepare  
tomorrow's business leaders to lead responsibly?
You and your associates!
Environmental and social responsibility are critical - as much as  
financial responsibility.
So, challenge the status quo that, today, is preparing leaders to lead  
irresponsibly, because vast ignorance of the problem is allowed to  
abound.
If your job is to dispel ignorance, then put ecological and social  
ignorance at the top of your priorities.
Let your research help define the path society should choose for  
survival of homo sapiens, not its extinction, and the preservation of  
those other 30 million species.

Finally, set an example: green your campus operations and buildings,  
and green your supply chains.
If you want to reduce your environmental footprint and show students,  
faculty, and administrators how, the quickest and surest way is to deal  
with those suppliers who have already reduced theirs.
If you don't know who they are, find them; that is a good place to  
start learning from those who are doing it, the early movers.

This year's entering kindergarten class is your college graduating  
class of 2020.
That happens to be the year by which we intend for Interface to be  
totally sustainable.
What will those graduates need to have learned if they want to work for  
my company or our suppliers?
Certainly not heat, beat, treat technologies, not petroleum geology or  
petroleum engineering, not blind economics, not internal combustion  
engines, not the chemistry to make the next CFC or PCB, not the social  
pap of the rich North, and not globalization of a totally flawed  
industrial and economic system.

Instead, get them ready for a different future.
Paradigms are shifting.
The folly of the prevailing paradigm, represented by the "modern"  
industrial system, stands exposed in all its errors.
A new paradigm is taking hold: waste-free, renewable, cyclical,  
resource efficient, benign, socially equitable, in harmony with nature.
Get it into your curricula, pedagogy, research, operations, and supply  
chains now.
There is no time left for pondering, much less denial.

I have entitled this speech: "A Call for Systemic Change."
That's what I am presumptuous enough to call on you to create in  
education.
I do not ask you to do anything I am not trying to do in industry.
Unless somebody leads, nobody will. Why not you?

Let me conclude by telling you what drives me.
Why is all this so important?
I will sum up with the ultimate reason, as I close with this personal  
story.
If we listen carefully we can hear a distant cry from someone we know  
but may not have met, yet.  Let me tell you how I came to know this  
person.
On a Tuesday morning in March 1996, I talked about all of this to the  
Bentley Mills (one of the Interface companies) sales force during their  
annual sales meeting, bringing them along, but not knowing whether I  
was connecting.
A few days later, over my e-mail, totally out of the blue, came an  
original poem, composed after that meeting by one of the Tuesday  
morning participants.
It was one of the most encouraging moments of my life, because it told  
me that at least one person in that Tuesday morning audience (and I  
think he surely represented many people) "got it."
Here's what Glenn Thomas wrote:

        Tomorrow's Child

        Without a name; an unseen face
        and knowing not your time nor place
        Tomorrow's Child, though yet unborn,
        I saw you first last Tuesday morn.

        A wise friend introduced us two,
        and through his shining point of view
        I saw a day which you would see;
        A day for you, and not for me.

        Knowing you has changed my thinking,
        for I never had an inkling
        That perhaps the things I do
        might someday, somehow, threaten you.

        Tomorrow's Child, my daughter-son,
        I'm afraid I've just begun
        To think of you and of your good,
        Though always having known I should.

        Begin I will to weigh the cost
        of what I squander; what is lost                                 
                      If ever I forget that you
        will someday come to live here too.

        Glenn Thomas, ©1996


Tomorrow's Child speaks to us across the generations with a simple, but  
profound message:
"We are all part of the web of life.
During our brief visit here, we have a choice to make:
we can either help it or hurt it.
The old mind-set or the new?
Exploitation and destruction, or restoration?
Which will it be?

Every day of your life with every action you take,
every investment you make,
everything you buy and every student you teach

- it's your call."




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