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.
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