ustainability is my subject today.

When carnage is concentrated as it was on September 11 into one or two or three events then it affects us powerfully; but when tragedy is diffused it hardly enters our conscience.  The people of earth who die of hunger or hunger-related illnesses would fill 300 crashing jumbo jets every day.   Three hundred crashing jumbo jets every day. It's true, you can do the arithmetic.  More than 40 million people die from hunger worldwide every year and that number is increasing.  Practically none of this is shown on television.  Most of it is one miserable human being dying alone in some forgotten place, 40 million or more times a year.  Forty million human beings perishing while barns in other parts of the world are bulging. 

That's the way almost all environmental degradation happens: diffusely and inequitably.  That's the way pollution is attacking our life support systems of spaceship earth: in diffuse ways and the poor feel it first.  But it hardly penetrates our conscience here in the rich northern hemisphere.  The timescales are so long, so very long, by our perception, for much of this degradation and for recovery when it happens.  Carbon monoxide, once it's emitted into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuel, stays in the atmosphere for over a hundred years. 

Now, here's where I risk losing you.  As horrendous as the tragedy of September 11 was, there's a bigger one happening all around us ubiquitously but diffusely so we hardly notice it.  What if we could compress the time spell of environmental degradation and concentrate the tragedy so we could look at it the way we look at the tragedy of American Airlines Flight 11  -- the way it was concentrated into those few seconds of pure terror on September 11, 2002.  What would we see?

I will try to paint that picture today. 

Emerson said, "Simplification this side of complexity is not worth a fig.  But simplification the other side of complexity is worth everything."  Don't give me simplification without first having worked through the complexity.  I promise you that after more than seven years of total immersion in this subject to me this is simplification on the other side of complexity.

Note the simple geometric shapes.  Notice the relative size and position of the square and the circle.  One is the environment and the other is the economy.  Which is which?  If you put that question to an economist you'll almost certainly get the wrong answer.  But ask the corollary question: Which one is utterly dependent on the other and which one would be quite well off without the other? Then it begins perhaps to come clear. 

As a result, the economy grows at the expense of the environment. There are flows in the other direction as well.  The economy dumps its waste and pollution and greenhouse gasses into the environment. 

And, as a result, the economy grows still more at the expense of the environment. And the question becomes, how long can this go on?  How long indeed can this go on? 

I trust you understand that big square there is the human capsule of spaceship earth.

So what is the condition of spaceship earth today, fellow astronauts?  Here's a bottom line -- a lot of business people want to go to the bottom line -- when you go to the bottom line, there's red ink.

What I'm about to say to you may be shocking, but it's factual.  My resources tell me there has not been one peer-reviewed scientific paper published in the last twenty years that would refute or even contradict anything I'm about to say.  Every life support system must supportus and 3 million other species on earth.   This life support system has a physical shell 8,000 miles in diameter -- the diameter of the earth -- and is only about 10 miles thick extending from sea level about five miles into the depths of the ocean and about five miles into the troposphere -- on a basketball size earth, it would be tissue-paper thin.  Every life support system in that biosphere is stressed and in decline -- long-term, systemic decline. 

Where is the red ink coming from?  It's coming from pollution in rivers and streams caused by municipal, industrial, agricultural and construction run-off.  It's coming from polluted and over-fished oceans with declining populations, fish stocks collapsing, coral reefs dying -- scuba divers know that's true.  It's coming from lakes polluted and dead from acid rain, industrial pollution and agricultural run off.  Forests, too, are dead and dying from acid rain caused by atmospheric ozone originating from our cities that goes into the countryside.  Not only the forests but the crop yields are stressed too.  This is not something we think too much about in this land of abundance but in China it is of surpassing importance.   Increasing pollution that accompanies the advancing industrialization of China will determine whether China can feed itself or not.  I made that statement at Fort Bragg, North Carolina two months ago to an audience of three major generals and I saw their faces blanche.  They could see still another reason for fighting a war in the future: food wars, water wars.  A China that cannot feed itself is everybody's problem: it's yours, it's mine, it's our children's and theirs and theirs.

The red ink is coming from the disappearing wetlands, from the swamps that are the beginning of the food chain that leads to us.  The red ink is coming from the devastated rain forests, the critical lobe of earth's own lungs.  The old growth forests, the haven for bio-diversity, are almost gone, mostly from clear-cutting -- a process that has destroyed the habitat for countless species. 

Over-dependence on aquifers is part of the red ink.  In areas of India and China water tables are falling five feet a year.  Spreading deserts, as well as farmlands denuded of topsoil are increasing in salinity from irrigation.  Aquifers and streams are pushed to the limit of their carrying capacity of feeding the livestock that feeds us.  The atmosphere itself polluted by countless toxics, carbon dioxide, and greenhouse gasses are building up inexorably.

The scientific debate about global warming is over; the debate is now political and economic because the science is clear and compelling.  In science the only thing more certain than compelling is obvious.  It's not certain, in scientific terms, if the sun will come up tomorrow; but it's obvious.  The only thing more nearly certain than obvious is compelling.  The threat is real.  Some 2,600 scientists -- atmospheric scientists from all over the world -- agree and only a minimal handful remain in skeptical disagreement.  The United Nations report issued a few months ago said temperatures may rise as much as ten degrees Fahrenheit during this century. 

The precautionary principle -- that's why you slow down when going around a sharp curve -- the precautionary principle says you must treat this as real because the risk of not treating it as real is just too great.   The Kyoto protocol, never signed into treaty, would have made only a tiny dent in the total but not nearly enough. The rate of emissions, the rate at which we are spewing this stuff into the atmosphere is accelerating but it must decline.  It must be turned down.  The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is estimated to be two-times its level in pre-industrial days.No one knows what a two-times world looks like, much less a three-times world, or a four-times world but we know that the ultimate example is Venus where surface temperatures reach 700 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Some scientists are arguing for a strategy of adaptation, that it's too late to prevent global warming: it's coming in this century so adapt to the changes that are coming and work now to mitigate the 22^nd century.  We have trouble getting our minds around a timeframe like that.  It goes so far beyond our own lifetime. And the stress is even beyond the troposphere where ozone shields us from deadly ultra violet radiation.  All of these are examples of the stress and environmental degradation we face.

I know that there are exceptions and they ought to be celebrated.  You can see across the street in Pittsburgh.  You couldn't forty years ago.  The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland no longer catches fire as it did maybe some thirty years ago.  There are eagles again on the upper reaches of the Mississippi, I am told.  The Great Lakes are becoming stabilized.  In London there are fish again in the Thames at Tower Bridge. In most western countries toxic emissions have decreased over the past twenty-five years.  In British Columbia the old growth forest is finally being protected.  The fragility of the deserts is being recognized at last.  Beach closings are down in New Jersey, for gosh sakes.  Well, down is better than up.  Clams are back in Puget Sound but the salmon are disappearing from the rivers that feed Puget Sound and we need lots more victories to celebrate.But these are the exceptions and there are huge deficits on the other side of the ledger by the name of Beijing, Shanghai, Bangkok, Sao Paolo, Mexico City, Cairo, Delhi, the Amazon, the spreading Sahara and on and on and eventually Atlanta and Columbia given enough time.

These examples may seem far away, but we must remember that there's only one global biosphere.  China's dust storms today become Seattle's pollution next week.  One result of this stress is the dimension of the extinction of species at a rate unknown since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago -- which of course cannot possibly be good news for our species because we are fouling our own nest and we cannot live without those life support systems any more than the other creatures can no matter that in our denial and our arrogance we may think we can.

And if that's not enough, you can add to that list a growing nuclear cleanup that no one really knows in how to deal with.  What language shall we use, for example, to instruct people 20,000 years from now in how to deal with the legacy of nuclear poison that we are leaving?  There's no language on earth that old, no language has been around for 20,000 years.  And plutonium is a 500,000-year problem. 

And to that you can add a billion -- that's with a "b" -- of earth's people unemployed, looking for gainful employment and not finding it; another billion living in starvation conditions -- 300 jumbo jets crashing every day -- and another billion hanging on by their finger nails -- half of earth's people in trouble, serious trouble, subsisting on two dollars a day or less.  That's the median income of earth, two dollars a day; half have more, half have less.  Many, much less.  Two-thirds of humanity is left out by this modern industrial and economic system.  Social equity is about human capital, as an environment is about natural capital.  Both are in serious trouble as we focus myopically on financial capital.

We cannot escape the consequences of that misplaced focus.  We witness the ravages of AIDS, for example and we wonder, what's next?   And I have not even mentioned such obvious problems as solid waste or choking landfills for which so many environmental efforts are striving to end.

Furthermore, especially for companies like mine, and perhaps yours, finite, exhaustible, non-renewable resources such as natural gas, coal, oil -- earth's natural capital -- are being gobbled up and used for energy and in the process converted to carbon dioxide to exacerbate the greenhouse effect.  And the beat goes on.  It is the crisis of our times and perhaps of all times to come.  It is a funeral march to the grave if we don't figure out and do what is necessary to reverse that deadly trend.

Truly, we have done a lot of damage, in a very short time, very quickly.   Now, what do I mean, quickly?  Let me try to put that in a certain perspective.  Suppose we represent the history of the earth, 4.5 billion years since the creation of the world out of the solar nebula, right up to today with a timeline a mile long.  For the first 240 yards there is no life.  This place is getting geologically organized.  And life began with that first, microscopic, anaerobic bacterium somewhere in the primordial oceans -- and survives and life lifts itself by its very bootstraps and proliferates into mind bending diversity as each species through its metabolic process, aided by sedimentation and sequestration, prepares the way for the next species and the next, gradually sweetening the earth, removing the toxic hostility of that early earth's atmosphere and sending down into the earth's crust to allow a biosphere to evolve on the surface.  Increasing diversity, decreasing toxicity, a sweeter and sweeter earth, an evolving biosphere -- a mutually reinforcing process finally producing a biosphere sweet enough that we could evolve into and survive.

At least six times in the history of earth that mutually reinforcing process has been reversed and toxicity increases and biodiversity plummets.  We don't really know much about the earliest of those events but when we examine the last hundred yards of that timeline we can see three of those reversals.  About 260 million years ago something cataclysmic happened, toxicity spiked and 96% of all life on earth vanished into extinction.  The greatest mass extinction in earth's history.  But life picked itself up and the process resumed until 65 million years ago when a comet or asteroid struck the earth in the region around Yucatan and that toxic hostility exploded forth again to encircle the planet and 75% of life on earth vanished, including the mighty dinosaurs.  They had been here 187 million years and they disappeared.   If it happened to them it could happen to any creature that walks the earth.

Life picked itself up again and the process resumed and eventually we, the self-named "wise man" emerged to occupy our tiny little time -- seven tenths of an inch, so far -- and create the industrial age to bring forth into the biosphere once more in this 3/1,000^th inch of time the toxic hostility that nature has so painstakingly buried down there right back into our living room, so to speak.  So much damage, so quickly.

And the result is that seven out of ten biologists of the American Biological Association polled four years ago agree the third mass extinction in earth's recent history is underway, now.  Uncounted numbers of species are disappearing at a rate unknown on earth since the extinction of the dinosaurs.  A thousand times the normal rate over that span of time.  Can anyone think that that is OK and not a problem for us?  How long can this go on? All the other mass extinctions were the results of natural disasters but this one is different.  It is the largest, unconscious act of the highest form of intelligence yet to evolve and the fruit of that intelligence, the industrial age.

Once one understands the crisis -- deeply understands it -- there is no way any thinking person can stand idly by and just do nothing.   Humans must do what they can but denial is alluring.  Denial is seductive.  And denial is natural.  We must get past denial to consider what must be done?

In such a crisis would you not look to your strongest institution on earth to step up to take the lead?  But who would that be?  The government?  I don't think so.  The government tends always to follow and seldom to lead.  Then what about the church?  Well, I'm afraid the church I go to doesn't quite get it yet.  So what about education?  Well, education, I'm afraid, is too slow and ponderous.  And while all of these have roles to be sure, it is not to lead? 

I got my wakeup call and I discovered the answer to that question in August 1994.  My personal mid-course correction came by reading Paul Hawken's book The Ecology of Commerce.  To me it was a spear in the chest, an epiphanal experience.  I met Paul about a year later and he told me before he sat down to write that book he had read over 200 books about the environment and more than a 1,000 papers and periodicals -- more than 25 million words about the plight of the environment so he had distilled and synthesized an awful lot into that little book.  It was for me a life-changing experience.  I agreed with Paul's central thesis: Of all the institutions on earth, the only one that is large enough, powerful enough, pervasive enough, wealthy enough, influential enough to really make a difference and lead is the "institution of business and industry."  My institution.  Perhaps your institution.  It is also the one doing the most damage. 

This institution must lead.  It must lead and turn us away from the abyss.  It must stop the mass extinction that unchecked will surely in time claim our species too.   If business and industry don't step up and lead, forget it.  It's over.  When all this became clear to me, seven years ago, I, an admitted plunderer of the earth, looking for leadership saw no alternative but to look in the mirror.  And I asked my people to join me and they said, "Lead what?"  A good question.  So we talked about it and we decided let's lead in the invention of the next industrial revolution.  It's time for the next industrial revolution and I said to them and I say to you this morning -- and this is my central message -- the first industrial revolution, which still goes on in spite of the information age and all that stuff, is not working.  And we're all part of it and we're all beneficiaries of it, I as much as anyone.  But it's not working.  It is unsustainable.  It is turning out to be a mistake.

It began 289 years ago with a coal company's steam-driven pump.  An Englishman invented a pump to extract water out of English coal mines so that coal miners could get at more coal to mine instead of hauling buckets of water out of the mine.  And for the first time ever nature was harnessed and turned against nature to exploit nature through the power of machines.  And then, the industrial revolution just grew from there and it just happened.  And what were its thrusts? Always, labor productivity -- increasing labor productivity.  More coal per man hour, more iron per man hour, more steel per man hour, more automobiles per man hour, more textiles per man hour and more carpets per man hour and so forth and so forth.  And it grew without any plan, except the invisible hand of the market -- and it came out wrong because the invisible hand of the market is also blind.  So today the damage-to-benefit ratio has gotten out of whack and so I believe we must have another, and better, industrial revolution and this time get it right.  Because time is running out on the industrialism as we have known it.  If that may sound just a little too radical and too outrageous, you'd probably not hear this stuff.  Denial is a whole lot easier.  Let me try another tack.

Dana Meadows was one of the smartest people I knew.  She died earlier this year.  She was a biophysicist, a systems expert, an author, a syndicated columnist, a college professor (she taught at Dartmouth), and a farmer.  Dana published this most elegant paper entitled "Places to intervene in a system."  In increasing order of effectiveness -- in a sort of David Letterman top-ten fashion -- she listed the places to intervene in a system -- nine, eight, seven, six and so forth.  Number nine on the list, the least effective place to intervene, is to change the resources, increase the resources going into the system.  Just the resources.  A little further along the list and a little more effective, regulate the negative feedback loop of the system.  A little further along, find the positive feedback loops of the system.  And still more, change the goals of the system.  Now, the most effective place to intervene in a system is to challenge the mindset behind the system -- the view of reality of how things are that underlies the system.  This is the place that is the most effective place she says to intervene but she also acknowledges that it is the most difficult.

I was quite taken by that and thinking about it I realized that obviously we have systems all around us, computer systems, transportation systems, regulatory systems, production and planning systems, accounting systems, banking systems and so on and so forth.  And we have the industrial system as legacy of the industrial revolution.  Then I asked myself what's the mindset or the view of reality behind the modern industrial system?  If you look at it you know it originated in another day and age and uses a view of reality today just as it did 289 years ago.  Here are some examples of the mindset:

• The earth is so large.  It is an inexhaustible source of materials.  We'll never run out.  There will always be substitutes available. 
• The earth is so large it’s a limitless “sink.”  It's able to assimilate our waste no matter how much or how toxic.
• We have limited time frames. The maximum life of a human being is our most likely working point.  In business we know too often just the next quarter; politics, just the next election. 
• Earth was made for man.  Made for man to conquer and rule.  Homo sapiens really needs no other species except for food, fiber or fuel maybe shade on a hot summer day.  The earth is all for himself.
• Technology is not an impediment especially when coupled with human intelligence.  Now, what do you mean, human intelligence?  Why, you know, left-brain intelligence: practical intelligence, realistic, pragmatic.  One that is results-oriented, unemotional boardroom thinking.  This will suffice, thank you very much.
• Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the market is an honest broker.
• Increasing labor productivity is the only route to abundance.  Well, that's a mindset from the day when people were scarce and nature seemed limitless.
• Happiness is to be found in abundance and affluence, material wealth and the trapping of affluence.
• I added this one to the list for the real estate developers: undeveloped land is empty land.
• And this one for the business people: business exists to make a profit. 
• And for the economists: the environment is a subset of the economy.

Paul Hawkens' book, The Ecology of Commerce and many others I have read since then, together with my own late-blooming consciousness, have convinced me that every element of that paradigm is wrong, dead wrong, and that the survival of our species depends on a new industrial system developing and the sooner the better based on a new paradigm, a new view of reality.

We need a different view of the world, if you will.  The earth is finite.  It is not infinite.  You can see it from space.  That's all there is to it.  It's finite both as a source for what it can provide and what is can assimilate and what it can endure.  There will come an end to the substitutes that are possible.  You cannot substitute water for food, or air for water, or food for warmth, or energy for air, or air for food.  Some things are complementary, not equivalent.

Most time frames are truly evolutionary and even geological in scale and we must learn to think beyond ourselves and our brief, puny time on earth -- maybe 1,000th of an inch for each of us.  It is sobering to think of our species and all the others not just in our own time span but across the evolutionary and geologic time.  Earth has another whole mile to go.  Is it too much hope for our species to get one inch of that mile?  To be here one inch of earth's one-mile time span?  That is 1,000 more generations to go to the 2,500 generations past.

Or this one: " Human kind was made for earth; not earth for man."  The diversity of nature is crucially important to the whole web of life including us.  Technology must fundamentally change if it is to become part of the solution instead of continuing to be a major part of the problem.  The technologies of the first industrial revolution shared common attributes: they are extractive, they rely on what can be taken from the earth; they are linear, a "take-make-waste" process; they are driven by fossil fuels for energy; and they are abusive, wasteful and focused on labor productivity. 

The technologies of the next industrial revolution must be renewable, not extractive.  They must be cyclical, not linear or take-make-waste.  They must be solar and hydrogen driven, not fossil fuel driven.  They must become benign technologies and waste-free even as nature is waste free in that one organism's waste is another's food.  There is the model.  And they must be based on resource productivity meaning all resources, not just labor.

What about human intelligence?   Cultivate the right side of the brain, the caring, the nurturing, the artistic, the subjective, the sensitive, and the emotional side -- the soft side of business.  Is it not at least as important as the left side?  Maybe even a little bit more important since it represents the human spirit?  If something doesn't feel right, it's probably not right, regardless of what the numbers say.

And the market.  The market is not always an honest broker.  It is also blind.  It can be at least opportunistic if not outright dishonest in its willingness to externalize any cost that an unwary or uncaring public will allow it to externalize.  It must constantly be redressed to give it sight.  Here's what I mean: Does the price of a pack of cigarettes established by the market, in its wisdom, reflect its true cost?  Of course not.  Not even close when you consider the societal cost associated with smoking.  Does the price of a barrel of oil reflect its costs?  Of course not.  Not anywhere near it.  Who's paying for the military power projected into the Middle East to protect the oil at its source?  Who is paying for the occasional Gulf war and loss of life to protect the oil at its source? Of course, you pay for that, through your income tax and after September 11^th there is a new externality associated with a barrel of oil.  What about the cost of hurricanes and tornadoes and gales and typhoons and mudslides?  Who pays?  Why of course, you do again, through your insurance premiums.  And what about global warming and the 9,000 square miles of the USA that will disappear under a rising sea level in this century?  Who will pay those costs?  Well, of course our descendents will pay for that.  Some have called this "intergenerational tyranny," the worst form of remote tyranny.  Taxation without representation levied by us on the generations not yet born.

Resource productivity, the productivity of all resources, not just labor, should amount to abundance for all.  We must figure out how to put a billion people to work.  Conserving what is truly the finite and diminishing natural resources.

Actual wealth.  That's the subject for another day but it surely lies somewhere else than in the trappings of affluence.

For real estate developers, undeveloped land is full, not empty.  It's teeming with life, and life must be respected.

And business.  Business makes a profit to exist but it must exist for some higher purpose.  Who wants to stand before his Maker and talk about the shareholder value he created?  Here we have the contrast between necessary conduct and noble purpose, between success and significance.

There is a problem, an immediate, proximate problem.  The life support systems of earth are unable to handle it.  Species are disappearing at an unprecedented rate and we too are threatened.  The undeniable and the unbelievable are true.  And there is a problem behind the problem: an industrial system based on the totally flawed view of reality: a discredited, disproved, wrong view that underlies the system.  The ultimate problem is the mindset behind the system -- that flawed view of reality in 6 billion minds that must change, one at a time.

The road map of our times to the next industrial revolution is in our heads -- the mindset behind the system.  My friend David Crockett, city councilman in Chattanooga, calls for "lobal change."  We must get our heads straight.  An industrial system based on a flawed view of reality will crash given enough time.  And I say again: time is running out for industrialism as we have known it. 

There is another great truth in this new world view -- the new industrial revolution.  The economy is the wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.  We must get that straight.  The economy is the subset of the environment.  We cannot hope to have a prosperous child without a healthy parent.  Or put it another way, what CEO do you know, given a subsidiary that requires constant, continuing injection of capital just to keep it going would hold on to that subsidiary for very long?  No one I know of.  And I would say that "Nature" is a better manager than any CEO I know and capable of being far more ruthless if she need be.  How long indeed can this go on?  A thousand more generations?  No way.  A hundred more?  Not possible.  Ten more -- 250 years like the last 250 years?  I don't think so.  Well then one, two, three generations, maybe?  That is the time scale of the urgency.

And you wouldn't know it from what I said so far, but I am actually in the solutions business, trying to find a way out of this mess.  I'm guided by a song we sang in Sunday school when I was a child, "Brighten the corner where you are":

First, you must understand the problem: the existing industrial system is destroying the biosphere.  And if you will realize that, you realize it is all a design problem that is a challenge to our community.  I believe it falls to our lot, in our allotted slip of time on earth, to intervene in the system to challenge and change the mindset behind the modern industrial system to create a mid-course correction for ourselves to give time for our spacecraft earth to heal the abuse of the industrial age -- this last 3,000^th of an inch -- and design and develop a new industrial system to replace the old one and move beyond the first industrial revolution and its extractive, linear fossil-fuel driven, wasteful technologies to the renewable, cyclical, solar, hydrogen-driven, benign restorative technologies of a new age.  I believe we must design and build a new system based on this new mindset that acknowledges a finite earth. A system that will put earth's billion unemployed people to work, because people are the abundant resource today we can use to conserve precious natural resources.  It's all so clear if we only apply the perspective of a species thinking in the truly long term, the evolutionary time, at least in thinking of how to live sustainably on a finite earth.

I think that we can do both.  We can heal the abuse and we can put people to work and we can do it profitably by harnessing the power of the market to do it.  But it must be an honest market.  I believe we can satisfy the imperatives of the environment, our social equity, and that of economics.  And I don't think it has to be done by balancing the trade-offs. That's the vision of the three-legged stool used so long to describe sustainable development and I think it's been used incorrectly.  Trade offs and compromise result in incrementalism and incrementalism has brought us to where we are today.

We need more innovation, more creativity.  We need more breakthroughs, new ways of thinking.  We need for the three E's -- environment, equity and economics -- to become mutually reinforcing and synergistic, not competing.  The next industrial revolution has got to get this part right and by the way, it has already begun.  It began with Rachel Carson who wrote Silent Spring in 1962, and it goes on.  I believe we have to get this part right about the three-legged stool and replace it with a different metaphor.  I would suggest a three-stage rocket in which each stage reinforces and boosts the others.  E x E x E = true prosperity.  Building capital in all three of its types -- financial or, economic; natural, or the environment; and human, that is equity -- in a virtuous, positive feedback loop.  Doing well by doing good is a better way to make a profit and move beyond success to significance.

What has become so clear is that there is this huge opportunity for doing well by doing good.  It's not only the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do, and with our economic support, we believe we can do it and try and get a new industrial system. Our target is 2020.  I hope to live to see the view from the top of Mt. Sustainability.  It's a good thing I come from a long-lived people.

There are seven faces to that mountain that we have been able to identify so far.  First, eliminate waste.  We are in the process of eliminating the very concept of waste.  In our business during the past six years we've come halfway.  We're aiming for absolute perfection in everything we do from scrap to quality.  Six years of increased productivity -- that's $165 million or about 27% of our income, more than enough to pay for all.

Emissions are the second face of the mountain.  We must make certain that whatever we release, whether it's molecules of gas or liquid or solid, to be sure it's benign.  You would not believe how hard that is.  The materials coming into our factories will go out, either as product or as emissions.  And the materials coming into our factories include substances that should never have been taken from earth's crust and that is true of every factory on earth and not just carpet factories.  So, while we can put filters on the end of the pipe to capture the pollution there, we'd rather put our resources further upstream and stop that stuff from coming in the first place.

The third face of the mountain is renewable energy.  We believe it must, in time, be solar.  Proper economy has you living on current income, rather than stored natural capital.  The sunlight reaching the earth is 13,000 times earth's daily usage of energy.  We have to capture only a tiny fraction of it and distribute it and in time we will, because it is an imperative.

The fourth face of the mountain is closed loop material flows.  We want to be in the position to mine the landfills instead of relying on virgin oil taken from the Middle East.  If we can mine the landfills for precious petrochemical molecules that have been relegated for the next 20,000 years -- that's how long carpet lasts in a landfill -- we will be able to use yesteryear's carpets for tomorrow's products.  The technologies don't yet exist.  They will be invented.

The fifth face of the mountain is resource efficient transportation.  It's basically in the hands of the automotive industry.  We will buy the most efficient vehicles available today.  We will locate our factories near their markets to shorten the transportation.  We will videoconference to save unnecessary trips.  We will do all those things and there will still be a carbon gap.  Today we close that carbon gap by carbon offsets with planting trees.  Trees for travel; it's a temporary fix.  With a lifespan of 200 years a tree will sequester the carbon generated from 4,000 passenger miles of a commercial jet.  What's 4,000 miles?  From Columbia to Atlanta to London and back.  When you get back, plant a tree.  In 200 years you'll be even with the earth for that trip.

The sixth face of the mountain is sensitizing the entire community of interests.  Our customers must understand the role they have to play in this.  We cannot do it without them.  We must make sure our suppliers must understand the role they have to play.  We cannot do it without them.  But our customers give us the leverage to bring our suppliers along, with everyone understanding their role and taking part.

And the seventh face of the mountain is to reinvent commerce itself.  When we get all the rest of it done, it will be possible for us to go to market in a different way.  Instead of selling the product we will sell the service the product delivers.  Well, what's that?  The color, the texture, the comfort under foot, the acoustics, the ambiance, the functionality -- all the reasons people have carpet today, not for the sake of owning 20,000 pounds of nylon.  It's the service that the carpet delivers.  We'll be able to sell the service and retain ownership ourselves in the means of delivering the service.  And what is the good of that? You can believe that we will make the carpet to last if we own it.  And we will also make it easy to disassemble into its components so it can be recycled because the day will come when those molecules will have enormous value compared to the price of virgin petroleum.

So that's the plan.  I wrote about it in my book Mid-course Correction.  It's the way we intend to reach the top of Mt Sustainability, which by the way, is the point that symbolizes leaving a zero footprint.  That is sustainability.  Taking nothing from earth that is not naturally and rapidly renewable.

Our company's progress so far in six years, I'm happy to report, is that the "carbon intensity" of Interface, Inc. -- that's the measure of all the carbon based materials and fossil fuels expressed as pounds of stuff taken from the earth per dollar of revenue for our company -- is now 31 percent.  The Kyoto protocols seek a seven percent reduction by 2012.  If we can do it anybody can do it, if they're only willing.

Why is all this so important?  Let me wrap up
it with a personal story.Early on in our journey, back in 1996, I was speaking with a group of our salespeople in Southern California explaining where we were going and not sure I was getting through.  But about five days later through my e-mail came a message from one
of those people in that meeting.  And when
that message came I tell you it was one of the most uplifting moments of my life because it told me, by golly one guy got it.  He sent me a poem that he had composed after our meeting:

For every day of my life since then, "Tomorrow's Child" has spoken to me and I share the message with you this morning. It is so simple and yet so profound: we are all part of the web of life, and during our brief visit here we have a choice to make.  We can run our lives like we can run our companies.  We can either help it or we can hurt it.  It's the old mindset versus the new mindset. It's exploitation or it's restoration.  Which will it be?  For you, it's your call.  And that is my keynote for your conference.

REFERENCES

Anderson, R. (2001, October).  Time for a new industrial revolution.  Keynote address presented at the 2001 South Carolina Environmental Symposium in Columbia, as transcribed and adapted by Michael Witkoski.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Tomorrow's Child reprinted by permission of Glenn Thomas, Bentley, Prince Street, Verona Marble, Burtco CYP. Copyright 1996.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr. Ray Anderson is Chairman and CEO of Interface, Inc., one of the world's largest interior furnishings companies with sales in 110 countries and manufacturing facilities on four continents.  Noted for its commitment to high quality design and innovation, Interface has a reputation as a corporation carrying the banner for the environment.  Mr. Anderson has articulated his vision in his books, The Journey from There to Here -- The Eco-Odyssey of a CEO (1995); Face It (1996); and Mid-Course Correction (1998).

Mr. Anderson was co-chairman of the President's Council on Sustainable Development, and in 1996 received the inaugural Millennium Award from Global Green, presented to him by Mikhail Gorbachev.  In 2001 Mr. Anderson received the George and Cynthia Mitchell International Prize for Sustainable Development.