We need a new economy that encourages entrepreneurs to bring to the market innovations inspired by the way ecosystems work and modelled on the blue Earth, says Gunter Pauli
Nobody is in any doubt that the world needs a new economic model. Our imperative now is to find a way to meet the basic needs of the planet and all its inhabitants with what the Earth produces. Many big steps have been taken in the sustainability and green movements, but the question we should be asking is: have we done enough?
The answer? We have only just begun
While the debate on climate change escalates and poverty levels remain alarming, we must search for solutions that allow us to make that quantum leap forward. The economic models of the past have collapsed. The centrally planned economy of command and control never did master the efficient allocation of resources, and whilst it did provide the basic need of many, it could not sustain itself.
The market economy evolved in parallel, with a system whereby companies pursued economies of scale, increasing production to ever higher levels, in the hope that the marginal cost of each additional unit would be lower than that of previous one.
This unleashed a wave of mergers and acquisitions, whereby companies leveraged their assets in order to control competitors. When debt became untenable, the financial wizards invented sophisticated financial instruments that created assets based on next to nothing. Then that scheme collapsed, forcing even the largest companies and financial powerhouses to admit defeat.
Until now, the only serious response to the capitalist and communist development model has been the Green Economy with its aim of achieving sustainable production and consumption that expands from ecology to social and economic objectives. But whilst ‘green’ may stand for ecological and social performance beyond what the traditional market economy has envisaged, the way the Green economy has materialised means it will remain a fringe phenomenon.
During the organic movements of the 1960’s , farmers and consumers protested against the toxins polluting the food chain. The concept of fair trade emerged, mobilising consumers to pay a reasonable yet higher price to the farmers, especially in the Third World. Supporters of this new model questioned the parameter of success and argued for those objectives society wished to achieve, including eradicating extreme poverty, ensuring universal primary education and promoting gender equality and female empowerment.
Unfortunately, the Green Economy underpinned by fair trade has not taken off well. The main challenge is that it requires companies to invest more and consumers to pay more. This is justified when the world economy is expanding and unemployment is decreasing but is a more difficult strategy when demand drops, consumer confidence dwindles and people know their jobs are in jeopardy.
Since planned economy, market economy and even green economy have all failed to solve world poverty and the environmental crisis we need to move from romance and critique to a pragmatic redesign of our entire economic system. The time has come to go beyond green, and to look at Gaia as a whole. She is blue- as spotted from space-and is characterised by a blue ocean and a blue sky. With this in mind, I have named the new system The Blue Economy.
The aim of The Blue Economy is to stimulate entrepreneurs to bring innovations to the market that have been inspired by the way ecosystems work, and not by how individuals species function; moving from the core business competencies to the search for a bundle of activities where the best is cheap, social capital is built and every one aims to meet the basic needs of everyone else.
Improving a product or a process without taking ecosystems into consideration has unveiled unintended consequences. For example the use of corn as feedstock for biofuels and bio plastic has increased the cost of tortillas in Mexico, putting food security for millions at risk. The use of palm oil for biodegradable soaps has destroyed huge tracts of rainforests and with it the habitat of the orangutan. The demand for shiitake mushrooms – a delicious and nutritious substitute for animal protein – has increased the logging of oak trees, which serves as substrate. The first design principle of The Blue Economy is based on the observation that within ecosystem all matter and energy cascades from one species to another belonging to a different natural kingdom. What we refer to as ‘cascading of nutrients, involves partaking of locally available resources, employing all contributors, and using the waste of one as the resource for another.
This cascading is demonstrated by the astonishing work of Father Godfrey Nzamujo at The Songhai Centre in Benin, and by Paolo Lugari at Las Gaviotas in Colombia. In their models we see that spent biomass becomes the growing medium for desirable mushrooms, and the spent substrate becomes protein rich fees for livestock. Their bacteria inoculated animal manure generate biogas in a ‘digester’, the slurry that is then realised from that digester becomes the nutrient source for algae farming, and the prolific growth of organism that, in turn, become fish food.
Professor Jorge Alberto Vieira Costa’s work in Porto Alegre Brazil, redirect CO2 exhaust from the local coal-fired power station to provide the nutrient needs of spirulina algae for the production of protein – rich food supplements and the sustainably harvested biofuels in a scheme that demonstrates how an excessive or unbalanced by-product can be converted from pollutant to resource. The additional investment costs are low, since the infrastructure required is already available thanks to the warm water retention basin – a source that is locally available.
The second principle of The Blue Economy is based on the observation that ecosystems rely first and foremost on physics and only secondarily on chemistry. Physics is predictable, indeed the law of gravity has no known expectations, warm air raises, cold water settles on the bottom. Following this principle would allow us to reduce mined metals, smelting of ore and processed chemicals in our consumptions patterns.
The physics – based mechanism developed by numerous creatures, from zebras to termites, display more mastery of air – and humidity control – than any of our mechanical and electronic systems solutions. We see this in the design of Anders Nyquist’s Laggarberg School in Sweden, or the Eastgate Shopping and Office Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, where the air is continuously and naturally refreshed without the need for costly pumps and heaters or coolers. These buildings demonstrate that we can cut capital costs merely by exploiting pressure and temperature differentials.
Each year we discard some 40 billion batteries in toxic landfills. Yet every ecosystem generates electric currents based on differentials in pressure, pH and temperature. While these micro-current are too small to replace a coal –fired power station, they could provide a substitute for these billions of ‘disposable’ batteries that are not only expensive to make and to operate, but polluting in the extreme. This has been shown by Germany’s Frunhofer Institute, where a prototype cell phone generates electricity from the temperature difference between phone and body, while converting the pressure from the human voice into piezo-electricity, which provides power as long as the user is talking.
Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, and Ashok Khosla, President of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, have stated: “We can find ways of utilising physics, chemistry and biology just as ecosystems do. This is no longer the realm of science fiction: it is actually here and now.”
And this is The Blue Economy.
This article is published with permission from Resurgence Magazine, UK
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