Technology
and its Use
One of the most important
components of ecological entrepreneurship is the use of "green technology."
Green technology does not just mean waste reduction and recycling. It involves
completely rethinking the way we combine materials and energy to produce goods
and services. For example, current recycling efforts usually involve "downcycling,"
which means that recycled materials are used in "lower" uses; an example of
downcycling is the use of old tires in road paving materials. Certainly this
kind of use is better than burying or burning the tires, but it nevertheless
will eventually still lead to resource exhaustion. Interface, Inc., a large
textile manufacturing firm, has developed carpets and flooring materials that
involve no downcycling; the used carpet and flooring are the primary ingredients
for making more of the same kind of carpeting and flooring.
Interface's carpet and
flooring redesign is an example of biomimicry, another central idea to green
technology. In nature, there is virtually no such thing as waste; any dead
material becomes an input for some other life form; biomimicry seeks to emulate
this cycle in industrial processes.
While the emphasis of
green technology is on rethinking the way products and services are designed,
it also involves simply seeking radical reductions in material and energy
use. Thus, green technology involves ideas such as hydrogen fuel cells, wind
generation, and bioplastics. An amazing application of green technology is
the HypercarTM, designed by the Rocky Mountain Institute. The HypercarTM combines
several forms of green technology that is dramatically safer, more fuel efficient,
less polluting, and less costly to produce (once under large-scale production)
than conventional internal combustion automobiles.
Ecological entrepreneurship
involves looking at technology in a holistic fashion. It advocates the use
of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which involves examining the costs and benefits
of materials, energy use, and technology "from cradle to grave." LCA takes
into account both direct costs and "externalities" (costs borne by others,
e.g. in the form of pollution) of the production, distribution, use, and disposal
of goods and services.
Most influential ecological
entrepreneurship writers tend to be "technological optimists," but only to
a degree. They believe that technology can go a long ways toward contributing
to a sustainable future, but they also generally recognize that western cultures
"consume too much," and that reaching a sustainable path will involve a combination
of technological, organizational, and social changes. Simply improving
technology to expand consumption will not lead us to a sustainable future. Technology must be appropriate
for human and natural communities, always remaining "the servant, not the
master."
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Organizational
Management and Relationships with People
As with more traditional
organizations, the ecological entrepreneurship-based organization's quest
for customers (in the case of firms) or funding and clients (in the case of non-profits)
is in the context of a highly competitive environment; for an organization
to contribute to community sustainability, it must itself be financially sustainable.
This requires sound organizational management.
But ecological entrepreneurship
goes beyond traditional management. It involves contextualizing organizations
into the lives of the people who comprise them and interact with them. Organizations
must provide work that is meaningful to the people who work for them; put
another way, it is inconsistent (if not illogical) to expect people to produce
quality work that contributes to sustainable communities if their financial,
security, and psychic needs are not basically met. Furthermore,
ecological entrepreneurship advocates argue that well-run organizations will
be more profitable and/or more successful at meeting their organizational
objectives. This relationship is especially true for the private sector, but
also needs to be recognized by non-profit organizations, which have a tendency
to heap great amounts of work upon highly-motivated, poorly compensated
individuals.
Contextualizing organizations
into peoples' lives in turn requires that the organization contributes to
community sustainability. Today's society expects people to recycle and conserve
energy at home, in additional to holding to traditional qualities such as
being considerate and neighborly. The ecological entrepreneurship-based firm
recognizes that people cannot be expected to behave in such a way at home,
and then go to work for an organization that does not espouse similar values.
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Customer
"Service"
One of the most exciting
ideas in ecological entrepreneurship is a reconceptualization of customer
"service." This paradigmatic shift is probably best illustrated by an example
(oft-cited by Amory Lovins and the people at Rocky Mountain Institute). Consider
the "market" for home heating. People generally buy a heating system, either
when they are constructing a new home, or as part of an existing home. The
system consists of some kind of machinery (gas or oil furnace, electrical
elements, hot water pipes, etc.) that convert some kind of energy source to
heat. Now, technology and the price of different forms of energy both change.
But consumers are often poorly informed about changing technology and/or fuel
types; making changes is expensive for individual consumers, and when they
do change systems, they are often left with an old system that often is junked.
Now, consider this: people own the system, but what they really want is the
heat. What if firms provide the service of the heat, rather than selling all
the machinery and all the energy? This may not seem to make much of a difference,
other than creating confusion. But if the firm provides the system to the
customer and charges the customer for the heat provided, several critical
incentives are created. First, the "heating firm," which would be leasing
hundreds, thousands, or conceivably millions of systems, has better information
and a greater incentive than do individual consumers to use the optimal technology,
and to keep it well-maintained. Even more critically, they will have an incentive
to design systems that are easy to modify, anticipate "upcoming" technology,
and are recyclable. This reconceptualization creates powerful incentives that
lead both firms and consumers to use resources more efficiently.
Interface, Inc., once
again provides a stunning example of reconceptualizing how firms provide service
to their customers. Interface seeks to lease floor surfacing (panels and carpeting)
to large office-based firms, essentially providing the "service" of floor
servicing, rather than the product. This makes sense, because much of Interface's
flooring is completely recyclable, so that used carpet that is a waste challenge
for the client becomes an input for Interface. If the client owned the flooring,
it would be much more difficult for Interface to reclaim and recycle it. Furthermore,
the leasing scheme makes it worthwhile for Interface to design flooring that
can be replaced in small sections. As a result, high traffic areas can be replaced
easily without ripping out the surrounding flooring, usually overnight while
the office is empty, rather than having to dislocate an entire office floor
for a week while the entire floor is resurfaced, a scheme that can cost clients
hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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Relationships
with Human and Non-human Communities
Ecological entrepreneurship
maintains that organizations have an imperative to be socially and environmentally
responsible. This imperative is both ethical, and a matter of good business
(or more general organizational) sense. Social and environmental responsibility
are relatively easier to come by for small businesses and non-profit organizations;
it is in the context of medium-sized and large corporations that ecological
entrepreneurship seeks to radically alter relationships with human and non-human
communities.
A significant number of
people in our society today believe that large corporations are evil, have
too much power, and are bent on using that power to foist a "corporate agenda"
on the rest of the world (especially via "the evil three," the World Bank,
International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization). These people
see large corporations as the vanguard of a process that replaces communities
and civic institutions with the cold, impersonal market imperative. They find
it very difficult to believe that large corporations could be force for good
in our society and contribute to a sustainable future.
A lot of the poor reputation
of large corporations is well-earned. Throughout history, powerful large corporations
have been responsible for tremendous economic upheaval at the cost of great
human suffering. Some of this blind pursuit of corporate profits has been
and is based on a callous disregard for the non-economic; some is based on
well-informed and appalling greed. The actions of a significant number of
large corporations have led to exploitation of disempowered labor that has
had direct and dire consequences for people and communities, and indirect
consequences through the despoilment of environmental resources. The activities
and influence of large corporations in our political system often makes a
mockery of democracy.
Corporations, however,
do not have to be evil. The beauty of the corporate structure (a structure
that relatively few people understand) is that it allows people to do big
things. These big things can just as easily be "good" as they can be
"bad.
The corporate structure permits the massive accumulation of the ability to
do things, both in terms of traditional capital (goods that make other goods,
e.g. factories, machinery) and organization (which can be conceived of as
a different form of capital). The absolute imperative that corporations must
make a profit to survive provides a discipline that makes corporations vastly
more efficient than government or non-profits at providing most of our goods
and services. This imperative has the power to unleash tremendous human energy
and imagination.
Ecological entrepreneurship
poses and answers a simple question: why should this organizational structure
that has such awesome potential not be applied to building a sustainable future?
While the profit imperative has led to types of corporate behavior (both internally
and externally) that are unequivocally bad for community sustainability, there
is nothing about corporations that makes them inherently bad. The power of
efficient organizations, the corporate unleashing of the human potential to
organize, plan, direct, and implement, can be applied for good (as well as
evil). In fact, many argue that putting the energy and efficiency of large
corporations on the "sustainability challenge" is the only way it will be
overcome. This is of course not to say that non-profits and government cannot
or should not play a large role in shaping a sustainable future; they must.
It is simply to say the corporations have proven to be very effective at what
they set out to do, to reach goals about which they care. People care about
income and security, but they also care about sustainability; the implications
are clear.
The common conception
of business is that it exists to make profits. Ecological entrepreneurship
in its strongest form views business and profits in a much different way:
profits are the means to continue the business, that the
business may
provide for its workers and serve its community. There have always been good
corporations that care in a deep and meaningful way about their workers, their
community, and the natural environment in this way. Ecological entrepreneurship
seeks to make such organizations commonplace.
The most challenging
aspect of corporations is when they get large. This is because for any
business organization to best serve its employees, it must be aware of the affect-laden
relationships that make up the organization and determine its relationship
with the surrounding community. This awareness has proven, thus far, to be
essentially impossible in organizations over several hundred people in size,
and is less likely to happen be developed in organizations with far-flung,
multilocation operations. (For a more in-depth perspective on organizations,
communities, and people, see Program Director Davis Taylor's essay, Ecological
Entrepreneurship: Culture and Corporations. Note that this is a working
paper and is independent of the Ecological Entrepreneurship Program.)
Author Michael Shuman goes so far as to argue that the optimal way for
corporations to contribute to community sustainability is to have them owned
by the members of the community. (You can see a review of Shuman's
pathbreaking book, Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a
Global Age here.)
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Organizational
Collaboration: Social Entrepreneurship
Ecological entrepreneurship
does not just apply to human activity within organizations such as
businesses,
non-profits, and government. It also envisions new ways of all three sectors
of society working together. For example, many thinkers from a number of different
quarters now argue that the era of government being directly involved with
community development should be over. "Big Government," they argue, does not
have the flexibility, initiative, or efficiency necessary for providing for
and building communities; while impersonal bureaucracy has its place in the
provision of certain goods and services (e.g. the armed forces), location-specific
community development is not one of them. A result of this emerging consensus
has been the exponential growth and role of "community development corporations"
(CDCs). CDCs are non-profit corporations that competitively seek large block
grants from government and private sources, and then disburse those funds
to promising regional and local groups and projects, including grassroots
non-profits and small and community-based businesses. Thus, Individual CDCs
operate under an implicit imperative, in that if they do not establish a track
record of successfully helping communities make real progress, they will be
unable to obtain both further funding from sources, and further community
groups with whom to work.
Most indications are that
CDCs are being much more successful at meeting the dynamic, location-specific
needs of communities across the United States. CDCs are non-profits working
with government and the private sector to provide resources for non-profit
and for-profit organizations. CDCs are an example of social entrepreneurship,
the application of entrepreneurial approaches to the needs and goals of local,
regional, and international society. Simply stated, social entrepreneurship
seeks to challenge existing ways of doing things, to see if community needs
can be met in better, more specific, more ethical, and more efficient ways.
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Ecological
Entrepreneurship and Human Ecology
It should be clear that
ecological entrepreneurship and human ecology are very interrelated. One of
the greatest abilities of the human species is to organize. To a significant
extent, the "human ecosystem" is distinguished by its organizations, be they
economic, political, social, or religious, and it is virtually impossible
to study human ecology without examining the role and function of organizations
If human ecology has an ethical imperative to make seek new ways to make the
world a better place, then human ecologists must be ecological entrepreneurs.
Ecological entrepreneurship
seeks to use this incredible capability to organize for the purpose of creating
socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable, communities. The
ecological entrepreneurship-based organization operates in the context of
the complex web of human ecology. It recognizes that human goals and motivations
are multifaceted, and that humans will only truly serve in an organization
that serves humanity. Ecological entrepreneurs must be human ecologists.
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Compiled
by Davis F. Taylor, Ph.D., director of COA's Ecological Entrepreneurship Program.
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