For years now I haven't cared about the debate over whether "global warming" is happening or whether it is "human induced." I think it is a moot question that we keep arguing about instead of doing anything useful about our profligate habits.
Watching a preview of "The Eleventh Hour" the other day, I was struck by something Ray Anderson of Interface, one of the largest carpet manufacturers in the world, said. He declared that one truckload of finished products requires 32 truckloads of waste. That's the problem right there. It has nothing to do with whether 9 out of 10 scientists agree about the rise in ocean temperatures in the Arctic or whether the hockey stick graph is a fraud or revealed truth.
I say we have a wasteful, silly, addictive consumer culture. We should be thinking about how to become a zero emissions society instead, where zero emissions is a goal as zero defects are a goal in W. Edwards Deming's Total Quality Management system of statistical quality control.
This concentration on zero waste, zero emission, zero defects is an empowering tool. I remember attending a conferences in the mid-1990s with corporate EHS types and how jazzed they were at figuring out how to reduce waste and rethink the manufacturing process to make it not only clean and green but safe and profitable. These guys were having fun tackling hard problems. They were happy to bust their brains doing something immediately useful.
One of the presentations I went to in those days listed the ways in which waste affects the bottom line: you pay to buy it, you pay to warehouse it, you pay to process it, you pay to collect it, you pay to dispose of it. Any company pays for its waste at least five times. That's crazy.
And it has nothing to do with the current "debate" over global warming and climate change.
I won't waste my own time arguing about climate change and global warming. I'd rather spend it working on solutions.
"The Eleventh Hour" spends more time on solutions than "An Inconvenient Truth" but it doesn't present a clear vision of an ecological future. We need a third film that will do just that but there is no current vision of an ecological future. That's what we need. Perhaps it's time to reread Ecotopia and Ecotopia Rising. They are the last visions of a positive future that I've seen in the popular culture. I once asked Ursula K. LeGuin and Kim Stanley Robinson to point to science fiction novels that offered a positive vision of an ecological future. Neither of them could point to anything much beyond those two decades-old books.
I know what my vision of the ecological future is but it is an old, old vision. I saw it on a January day in 1975 when I visited New Alchemy Institute and found them harvesting carrots from the winter mulched ground. That's not a vision you can sell on TV.
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