Taking Responsibility: A look at what it means to run a responsible business in today’s environmental situation.
Education information: BA/FA Sophomore Parsons The New School for Design Major: Integrated Design Eugene Lang Major: Global Studies mitcs432@newschool.edu Project Due: May 2015
Project By: Shanley Mitchell Class: Global Economies Teacher: Jonathan Bach SPRING 2015
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Introduction:
We are in an era where consumers are beginning to realize that almost everything we do both threatens nature and in unsuccessful when it comes to meeting our deepest human needs. You cannot put a price tag on our deepest human desires, and the devaluing of the priceless aspects of life as conscious being, sabotages our physical and economic health, while bringing our planet and its people into impoverishment and destruction. We must take responsibility for our actions. Humans have the gift of moral capacity and innate compassion for life and justice, we must begin to find ways to fully engage these gifts by making economic life more socially just and environmentally responsible, as well as less destructive to nature and the Earth that nurtures us. The amount of destruction we have inflicted on our planet in the name of capitalist consumerism feels as though we are living in a dystopian science fiction novel.
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As Yvon Chouinard says: “It is hard to imagine anyone rejoicing over the generally accepted landscape of only a decade ago: a suburban monoculture of tilt-up malls, cracker crumb housing, pandemic obesity cheap distractions, and expensive services- all at the expense of nature and not much good for us people who are apart of nature. It’s as though we’d handed Satan a hard hat and asked him to re-fashion our Earth according to his plan.” (Chouinard & Stanley, 2012, p. 17) We are living in a complex system that has borrowed from nature what we cannot pay back. We have harmed our planet with our fast paced consumerism and ignorance. This research paper argues that the best way for businesses to turn around this process of destruction is to look to the already genius structures in nature. My research seeks to address the growing need for taking responsibility and answer the question of what it means to be a responsible business in today’s environmental crisis. I argue that the best way for businesses to turn around this process of destruction is to look to the already existing knowledge within nature for insight on ethical strategies for businesses and even society as a whole. We must begin to put an eraser to the marks of destruction that industrialization has left on our environment.
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There are many pressing reasons for this Research. A connection to nature is biologically innate in humans. We have an affinity for nature’s perfectly genius paradise; but when people spend most of their time indoors, they miss out on learning from Mother Nature’s brilliant mind. Richard Louv knows this occurrence as Nature Deficit Disorder. This seemingly ridiculous diagnosis a very real issue that is dawning on our current and future generations. He suggests that problems associated with alienation from nature include depression, obesity, and attention deficit disorder. On the contrary, kids who have direct access to nature learn more efficiently because exposure to nature can reduce stress and increase attention spans.
If humans get to a point where we have no ability to truly experience and get to know wilderness (where the hand of man does not linger ) we would lose the countless benefits it has on our lives. In the late 1800’s, many transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau tried to teach society that we can learn directly from nature about how to live, and that we did not need the approaching industrial revolution. Perhaps this belief was before it’s time, because their message clearly did not prevail, and people have grown further and further from knowing nature. We have continued to grow into inhuman, unethical, consuming machines.
We have borrowed from nature what we cannot pay back: The amount of destruction we have inflicted on our planet in the name of capitalist consumerism feels as though we are living in a dystopian science fiction novel. In order for fast fashion brands to provide cheap and in-season clothing, that can keep up with the constant changing trends in the industry, they must cut corners.
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This corner cutting involves things such as: running cheap, un-unionized, and often unsafe factories in impoverished countries, untested chemicals, and many production processes that are harmful to our planet. The detrimental effects on the environment caused by the production of textiles are immense, and the need for ethical and sustainable alternatives in fashion is growing. Because of their short lifecycle, the benefits of these clothes don’t even come close to out weighing the damage that they cause. Over 90 million items of clothing end up in land fill sites globally each year. (McDonough & Braungart, 2002) We have added a number of chemicals that nature didn’t have to absorb and we didn’t have to deal with as health issues before the 19th century. The EPA identified an unfathomable 62,000 industrial chemicals in 1979. (Goleman, Daniel. Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. New York: Broadway, 2009. 153.)
The uses of these chemicals were dangerously unscreened and their specific uses in industrial industries went un-proscribed. Only a few hundred have been tested. The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is up 19% since 1959, has now reached it’s highest level in 600,000 years and continues to grow, making our hot climates hotter and cold climates colder, which increases the intensity of storms. (NASA. “Global Climate Change.” July-Aug. 2011)
As most people now know, every winter more of Antarcitica’s ice burgs calve into the ocean more and more rapidly each year. The Larson B Ice shelve was the size of Rhode Island alone, and took only 35 days to collapse. The Earth’s ecosystem processes thresholds, which, if crossed, could generate unacceptable environmental change. The proposed threshold for extinction was ten species per million per year. We are now losing species at the rate of 100 per million per year, which is terrifyingly 1,000 times the normal rate. (NASA. “Global Climate Change.” JulyAug. 2011)
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The planet’s 5th extinction crisis was that of the Dinosaurs.
We are officially now in the 6th extinction crisis. In 1960, humanity consumed about half of the planet’s potential resource capacity and by 1987 we exceeded it. (Murlow, John 2011 pg 40) Globalization, although amazing in many ways is largely responsible for this speed of destruction. It is a man made but not humanly controlled process. We have the power to re-write this dystopian fate. “Those who watch the forest be cut and raise their voice against it cannot be heard when the company that did the cutting does not belong to the community. And there is little community representatives can do. When local politics become sub-servant to distant economic power, the concept of citizenship, of its duties and possibilities, loses its meaning.” - The Responsible Company
Our current dilemma does not prevail because the answers don’t exist, but because we are not looking in the right places. Mark Twain cleverly explains our current perspective as: “Claiming that we are superior to the rest of creation is like saying that the Eiffel Tower was built so that the scrap of paint at the top would have somewhere to sit. It’s absurd but it is still the way we think.” Once we see nature as a mentor our relationship with and perspective of the living world changes and we can make innovations and decisions inspired by nature. The key to unlocking nature’s solutions for our human issues is called Biomimicry.
Biomimicry is a science that uses nature as a model. It studies nature’s models to imitate or takes inspiration from the designs and processes found in the natural world, to solve human problems. It also uses nature as a measure, by implementing an ecological standard to judge the “rightness” of our innovations. In order to fully use biomimicry to our advantage, we first must be able to fess up to the limits of our human mind, and our incompetence to out-smart Earth’s genius. No matter how clever we may think we are with our human inventions, they have already appeared in nature in a more exquisite fashion and with lesser damage to our delicate ecosystem. Even the wheel, which is often seen as one of the earliest human inventions: is found in the tiny rotary motor that propels the flagellum. Admitting our limits and implementing research in biomimicry may be an opportunity for us to begin a new phase of existence, in which we adapt to the Earth rather than the other way around.
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The Word: Bi-o-mim-ic-ry
Nature as a model. Biomimicry is a new science that studies nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and process to solve human problems, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf. Nature as a measure. Biomimicry uses an ecological standard to judge the “rightness” of our innovations. After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned: What works. What is appropriate what lasts. Nature as a mentor. Biomimicry is a new way of viewing and valuing nature. It introduces an era based on what we can extract from the natural world, but on what we can learn from it. - Benyus, Janine M. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. First ed. Vol. 1. New York: Morrow, 1997. Print.
W
e are a long way from doing sustainable business on a planet that now has a population of 7 billion human beings and growing.
pany)
(Chouinard & Stanley, 2012, The Responsible Com-
Everything we make does some damage even if an
“ethical company” produces the product. Although No human economic activity is yet sustainable, it does make a difference to do less harm. Lessening harm makes it possible to begin to imagine a restorative future. Clearly the way we go about our economic growth and structure, has many issues, but what does that have to do with biomimicry?
Society, Jeremy Rifkin introduces
Benyus gives a very detailed look
from using nature’s energy and con-
into the various ways conducting
verting it into goods and services.
businesses and economies can be
“Engineers and chemist point out
inspired by the way nature conducts
that in regard to economic activity
its interconnected systems and
there is never a net energy gain but
answers the questions: What if our
always a loss in available energy in
economy were to deliberately look
the process of converting nature’s
and function like the natural world
resources into economic value.”
in which it is embedded? Wouldn’t it
(Rifkin, Jeremy, 2014)
be more likely to be sustained and accepted by the natural world over time? In The Zero Marginal Cost
the fact that the laws of thermodynamics condition economic activity because all economic activity comes
A comparison in Benyus’s book that seemed to play a chord in the song about interconnectedness was about how complex systems such as a redwood forest, are not run by anyone in particular, but are instead controlled by countless individual interactions that occur inside the ecosystem. Just as how costumers in hundreds of countries make decisions on to buy or not to by, and those decisions in turn affect the price of goods. Natural selection works from with-in to shape the nature of life, just as the invisible hand of the market place determines whether a company lives or dies. When attempting to answer the question: “What does it mean to be a responsible company?� Benyus of course, brings in the perspective of biomimicry.
HOW DO WE USE BIOMIMCRY FOR DOING BUSINESS? Economies are like ecosystems;
concentrate on growth and how
both systems take in energy and
fast raw materials can be turned
transform them into products.
into products with out giving much
The problem is that our economy
thought to efficacy. (Benyus, 1997, p.
preforms a linear transformation,
284) “We’re acting as though we are
whereas nature is cyclic and nothing
only passing through, taking advan-
is wasted. As Einstein says, “The
tage of the plenty and then moving
significant problems we face cannot
on” says William Cooper, a professor
be solved by the same level of think-
of Zoology at Michigan State
ing that created them” and luckily the natural world is full of models
According to Cooper, there are three
for a more sustainable economic
types of species structures: Type I,
system – prairies, coral reefs, oak-
Type II, and Type III.
hickory forests, old growth redwood, and more. (Benyus, 1997, p.
Type I
255)
advantage of abundant resources.
species spring up to take
They typically use resources as These ecosystems do everything
quickly as they can, turning them
that we want to do: they self-orga-
into adult bodies then into numer-
nize into a diverse and integrated
ous small offspring – thousands of
community of organisms with a
insect eggs for instance. The idea
common purpose – to maintain
behind this rapid growth strategy is
their presence in one place, make
to grow you population, to maxi-
the most of what is available and,
mize throughput of materials, and
endure over the long haul. We are
then head to the next horn of plenty
nothing like the equilibrium organ-
with no time for recycling or ef-
isms we want to emulate. We are
ficiency. (Benyus, 1997, p. 287) This
opportunists that
type of strategy sounds eerily close
to home. Unlike Type I species, the “Type
II
system is there for the log haul, they wont spend their energy on making millions of seeds. Instead, they’ll make a few seeds and funnel the rest of their energy into hardy roots and sturdy stems that will see them through the winter. In the springtime, their prudence will pay off- they’ll rebound from their roots and will reach quickly for the sun, outpacing and eclipsing the Type I annuals. (Benyus, 1997, p. 262)
Type III species are masters of efficiency. They do more with less and are designed to stay on the land in the state of relative equilibrium, taking out no more than they put in. They do not have to go looking for sunlight because their seedlings can tolerate their parent’s shade. They have larger and fewer offspring that have longer and more complex lives. They live in elaborate synergy with the species around them and put their energy into optimizing these relationships. They manage materials endlessly in a cycle, no waste is produced and the only energy imported is from the sun. Biologists call these
species K-selected.” (Benyus, 1997, p. 263) Cooper states that: Type I species colonize rather than learning to close the loops. The reason the footloose strategy works for them is that new opportunities are always opening up. Back before our world was full, when we still had somewhere else to go, the Type 1 strategy seemed like a good way to stay one step ahead of reality. These days, when we’ve gone everywhere there is to go, we have to fine a different kind of plenty, not by jumping off to another planet, but by closing the loops here on this one. He believes that it won’t do any good just to “tweak the current system and hope that we’ll evolve, just as a common ragweed couldn’t be expected to evolve into a redwood.
Instead we must replace portions of our Type I economy with portions of a Type III economy, until the whole thing mirrors the natural world.” (Benyus, 1997, p.284)
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Nature’s Tricks of Trade in Design: According to Janine Benyus in: Biomimicry
Nature’s first trick of trade is that nature manufactures its materials under life-friendly conditions – in water, at room temperature, with out harsh chemicals or high pressure. Nature’s second trick of trade is ordered hierarchical structure. Structure granting function – from the atomic level all the way to microscopic precision is built in, and strength and flexibility follow. (like in the human tendon, in the Abalone shell, in the stacked plywood layers of a rat’s tooth.)
Nature’s third trick of trade is self-assembly. Nature grows its materials from the ground up, not by building but by self-assembling. While we spend a ton of energy building things from the top down – taking bulk materials and carving them into shape. Four tricks of trade when it comes to manu-factured materials: -Life-friendly manufacturing processes -An ordered hierarchy of structures
As a student studying design, the idea of using biomimicry when it comes to designing things fascinates me endlessly as I continue to realize it’s genius efficiency. Examples in Nature From:
Biomimicry by Janine Benyus Abalone shell: If you look closely between the bricks, you can see a narrow mortar of squishy polymer. The polymer acts like a thin smear of chewing gum it stretches ligiment like when its disks are pulled apart and slides and oozes in response to head on stress. If a crack does get started, stopping it in its tracks. Abalone is twice as tough as any ceramic we know of. Instead of breaking the shell deforms under stress and behaves like a medal.
On any level of the brick wall the hexagonal disks are composed of twinned domains that show mathematical patterns and repetition. Spider’s Web: Spiders learned to manufacture two materials in one – small crystallites embedded in an organic polymer. It is both strong and flexible, and can bounce back as good as new after being stretched 40 percent longer than it’s original length.
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Best things to learn from nature:
–
Nature runs on sunlight.
–
Nature uses only the energy it needs.
–
Nature fits form to function
–
Nature recycles everything
–
Nature rewards cooperation
–
Nature banks on diversity
–
Nature demands local expertise
–
Nature curbs excesses from within
-- Nature taps the power of limits - Benyus, Janine M. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. First ed. Vol. 1. New York: Morrow, 1997. Print.
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This Map explains: What businesses can learn from Redwood forests: It was Inspired by the book Biomimicry written by Janine Benyus. She thinks that our economy and businesses need to become “more like a red wood than a ragwood” She explains this concept in full detail in what she calls “The Ten Commandments of The Redwood Clan: organisms in a mature ecosystem” The adjcent map is my summary of the nine commandments that I find to be relevant to my reasearch.
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The first commandment is: using waste as a resource. Industrial ecologists are attempting to build a “no waste economy” where they envision a web of closed loops in which a minimum of raw materials comes in the door and very little waste escapes. The first examples of this no waste economy are a cluster of four companies that are interconnected in an eco-park located in Kalundborg, Denmark where each firm’s offal goes to the next company to become their raw material or fuel. (Hareskovvej. “Kalundborg Symbiosis.” Kalundborg Symbiosis.) Another way to use waste as a resource is the example of take-back laws in Germany. Companies must take back and use all their packaging or hire middlemen to recycle their packaging for them. This means that rather than companies saying “This product can be recycled” they say “we recycle our products and packaging”. (Environmental Protection Agency. “Roduct Stewardship | Partnerships.” EPA. Environmental Protection Agency, 5 Nov. 2012. Web. 07 May 2015) Take-back laws promote companies to create products that will either last a long time, have minimum packaging, or will be designed to be easily recycled or re-used.
The second commandment is: diversify and cooperate to fully use the habitat. In mature ecosystems cooperation is just as important as competition. Meaningful work collaboratively combines people who are doing what they love, while also giving back to the world in some way. When successful, this combination creates pure innovation and highlights human excellence. “The Responsible company owes it’s employees light handed, attentive management; openness about the numbers (transparency); encouragement to co-operate, across divisional lines when necessary, and to continuously improve processes; freedom to organize workflow with minimal delays or interference from higher-ups; and a penalty free whistle blow against wrong doing.” (Chouinard & Stanley, 2012) Forms of cooperation can also be seen in the partnerships that some animals form for mutual benefit. Industrial ecologist Michiyuki Uenhora makes the analogy: “We have plenty of arteries – ways of products to flow from the heart of manufacturing into the body of the economy, but we need veins as well – ways to return the products so that their materials can be purified and re-used.” (WRAP and the Circular Economy. WRAP, 2015.) As a part of Japan’s Ecofactory Initiative restoration factories are being built nationwide to refurbish or recycle products at the end of their life. This is also an example of a circular economy. A circular economy is an alternative to a traditional linear economy (make, use, dispose) in which we keep resources in use for as long as possible,
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extract the maximum value from them whilst in use, then recover and regenerate products and materials at the end of each service life. In The Zero Marginal Cost Society Rifkin confidently states that: “Using less of the Earth’s Resources more efficiently and productively in a circular economy and making the transition from carbon based fuels to renewable energies are defining features of the emerging economic paradigm.” Germany, Japan and China, Denmark, Netherlands, Scotland, Sweden, and various other countries announced their intention to create “circular economies” that promote reduction, reuse, and recycling of materials in production. In a Swedish case study, the first in a series of reports in 2015, analyzed the effects of three strategies underpinning a circular economy: renewable energy, energy efficiency and material efficiency. It concluded that by 2030, carbon emissions could be cut by almost 70% if a key set of circular economy policy measures were adopted. (Braw, Elisabeth 2014.) Why hasn’t the U.S. hopped on board creating a circular economy? In order for the U.S. to create a circular economy, they would have to get rid of tax breaks for oil and gas production, industrial agriculture, and other nonrenewable resources so that the prices would reflect true costs. The U.S. treasury pays 2 billion dollars a year to support the price of chemically heavy standard cotton in California (Braw, Elisabeth 2014.) , so it does not seem as though they are in any rush to join the other countries in creating a circular economy.
The third commandment is: gather and use energy efficiently.
As we know, not everything can be recycled, but even in a natural system, only nutrients and minerals can be circulated through the connections of an ecosystem; energy cannot. In the Second Law of thermo dynamic, energy is converted to heat in the process of doing work. As a result, the energy that runs “the juggler’s art” must be continually imported into the system. (Rifkin 2014) Rifkin introduces the fact that the laws of thermodynamics condition economic activity because all economic activity comes from using nature’s energy and converting it into goods and services. “Engineers and chemist point out that in regard to economic activity there is never a net energy gain but always a loss in available energy in the process of converting nature’s resources into economic value. The only question is: When does the bill come due? …The entropic bill for the industrial Age has arrived.” (Rifkin 2014) We too should use an external renewable source of energy in order to pay this so-called “entropic bill”. Specifically current sunlight powers such as solar, wind, tidal, and biodiesel all rely on current sunlight rather than the ancient sunlight that we use. “Ancient sunlight was trapped here on earth in the bodies of Cretaceous plants and animals. Because their remains we’re compressed with out oxygen, they never got the opportunity to decay. Now, when we burn these fossil remains as oil, coal, or
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natural gas, we complete the decay process all at once, exhaling the stored carbon into the atmosphere in large doses, violating the “no large fluxes” ecosystem lesson.” (Benyus, 1997, p. 162)
The fourth commandment is: Optimize rather than maximize. The lesson is to slow down the amount of material or items passing through the production and consumption system. William Cooper says: as the natural system matures, it redefines its concept of success. That’s what fitness is all about. In today’s economy, our definition of success is rapid growth – if you grow faster than your competitor, you win. In tomorrow’s world, winning will mean being more competitive, doing more with less, and being more efficient than your competitor. Companies won’t need to be as big - in fact, it might be more profitable to be small and produce high-quality goods and services. (Benyus, 1997)
The fifth commandment is: Use materials sparingly: Organisms build for durability but they don’t overbuild. They fit form to function; building exactly what is needed, with the bare minimum of materials and fuss. Green designers, like equilibrium organisms are learning how to do more with less. The need for companies to conduct life-cycle-analyses (LCA) is becoming more necessary because of our growing need to produce less waste and use less energy. The LCA teaches companies how to reduce the environmental impact of their products from start to finish of the creation of the product. It begins with the products origins as raw materials, then to their manufacture, span of useful life, and lastly disposal. (EPA. Environmental Protection Agency, 2015)
The sixth commandment is: Do not contaminate our habitat: Organisms must eat, breath, and sleep right in the “manufacturing facility” that is their habitat; they can’t afford to poison themselves. Neither can we. Perhaps the best and most obvious way to keep from polluting our air, water, and soil, is to stop producing toxins, or abnormally high fluxes of any sort, up front. ( Industrial ecologists call this pollution prevention or “precycling”. (Benyus, 1997. pg. 267.) 3M joined the effort for pollution prevention in the 1970’s with a program called 3Ps (Pollution Prevention Pays). By 1997 the 3P program saved them an estimated $750 million and spared the planet about 1.2 billion pounds of waste. The company adopted over 4,350 cleaner-production methods by product-reformulation, process modification, equipment redesign, recycling and the recovery of waste materials for resale. (3M 2007)
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The seventh commandment is: Do not diminish resources: At one time our economy was based mainly on renewable materials – wood, natural fibers, plant-derived chemicals, ect. Possibly one of our greatest mistakes was to replace an economy run by renewable materials to one run by nonrenewable ones such as oil, gas, and coal. The law of sustainability says that you should use nonrenewable resources at the same rate that you are developing substitutes. Don’t use nonrenewable resources faster than you can develop substitutes, and don’t use renewable resources faster than they can regenerate themselves. (Benyus 1997. pg 267)
The eighth commandment is: Remain in balance with the biosphere: The biosphere is the layer of air, land and water that supports life. It is a closed system, so no materials are imported or exported. Chemical building blocks of the biosphere are actively traded among organisms, but generally stay the same. Whatever is removed in the process of photosynthesis, respiring, growing, mineralizing, decaying, etc. is replaced in equal amounts. (Thomas & Wright 1989 ) The industrial system is an open one in which nutrients are transformed into wastes but are not yet sufficiently recycled, unlike the earth’s biosphere, which as a whole is characterized by a closed cycle. We must run businesses that are a closed cycle as well.
The 9th commandment is: communication and transparency: Mature communities and innovative productive companies, have rich communication channels that carry feedback to all members, influencing their path towards sustainability. This communication is known as transparency. A great example of transparency is Outdoor Industry Association is developing an assessment tool called the eco index for manufactures that measures the social and environmental impact of every single one of their products. Jill Dumain has been part of a working group of twenty companies that for two years met weekly by conference call to develop the relevant criteria. Nike invested 7 years of work and 6 million dollars to create its Environmental Apparel Design Tool. (The American Journal of International Law, 201, pg 1-15) The Eco Index measures impacts of manufacturing, packaging, and shipping, as well as consumer care and use, recycled content, and recyclability. It allows a company to manage it’s entire supply chain to improve water use and quality, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce toxic chemical use and waste, as well as monitor and improve pay and working conditions. The OIA group adopted a full transparency policy and hired the Zero Waste Alliance, whose vision is to have “a prosperous and inclusive future without waste”. The OIA group and the Zero Waste Alliance created a methodology for transparency that could work
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for both small and large companies some of the companies that participate include Nike, REI, and Timberland. The Eco Index council is now has a consumer facing second stage of their project that allows a customer to scan a QR code on a garment to see it’s social and environmental impact. Over one hundred companies to provide open source tools to benchmark their practices and measure improvements through their business reporting systems. (The American Journal of International Law, 201, pg 1-15) All of this talk of transparency leads to the final commandment, which is: source materials ethically and locally.
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WHAT DEFINES A RESPONSIBLE COMPANY?
The reality is that there is no truly responsible company. There are only companies that are responsible in varying degrees, who consciously use tactics to produce less harm while simultaneously improving the wellbeing of the business. Most of what we buy and sell to each other is unnecessary crap. We do not need anymore cheap, disposable clothing. We are killing our only planet for consumption of things we don’t need and that aren’t good for us in the long run. As mentioned, resources are growing scarce, and out of necessity people are becoming more and more aware of the environmental crisis. We consume more and more as our population and urban cities continue to grow. People (especially young people) are beginning to care and become conscious of what they are consuming and how it impacts the environment and its laborers.
Conclusion We must begin a transition into a postconsumerist society. The future of capitalism is dwindling, and new structures will emerge before we know it. In a post-consumerist society goods would most likely become more expensive because they would show their true social and environmental cost, prompting us to shop less as entertainment. We’ll be able to recover time for satisfying pleasures that derive from pursuing our deepest interests; we’ll have more time for friends and family, and meaningful work. We are beginning to understand the true human, ecological, and economic, costs of everything we make. We must make less, and whatever we make should be of high quality and the benefits of the product must out way its social and environmental cost. Yvon Chouinard, one of the founders of Patagonia believes that: “As everything becomes more expensive, costumers will become choosier and buy less. They will increasingly demand to know weather products qualify as healthy and humane. And broad innovative applications of social and environmental indexes will help costumers choose products made by companies that pay fairly and work to tangibly reduce their environmental damage.” (Chouinard & Stanley, 2012, p. 167) Responsible businesses will have to work more closely with NGO’s and interest groups to reduce environmental harm and improve working conditions throughout the supply chain. Companies will have to work as true trusting partners with their suppliers. (Chouinard & Stanley, 2012, p. 170) Profit will come from efficiently taking the time and effort to truly understand one another’s problems so that they can meet each other’s needs. Profit will no longer come from cheating or taking advantage of one another. Our post consumer society may put a lot of focus on biomimicry. Benyus believes that in a biomimetic world, we would manufacture the way animals and plants do, using sun and simple compounds to produce totally biodegradable fibers, ceramics, plastics, and chemicals. Our farms modeled on prairies would be self- fertilizing and pest resistant. To find new drugs or crops we would consult animals and insects that have used plants for millions of years to keep themselves healthy. The more our world looks and functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to be accepted on this home that is ours, but not ours alone. In a society accustomed to dominating or “improving” nature, this respectful imitation is radically new approach. Would be a revolution, unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution will introduce an era based not on what we extract from nature, but what we can learn from it.
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