DEVELOPING A PLAN FOR THE PLANET

A BUSINESS PLAN FOR SUSTAINABLE LIVING

IAN CHAMBERS & JOHN HUMBLE

GOWER        2011

The Green Economics and Sustainable Growth Series

PART 3

 

PART I: UNDERSTANDING OUR CURRENT SITUATION (Cont.)

 

A word on complacency, fear and the need for cautious optimism and action

It is east to state that we must cooperate in acknowledging the problems and work in unity to solve them. However, as we have seen already in the response to some of these global challenges over the last decade, the human response has at times been often confused and contradictory.

• Cautious optimism can lead to an understanding of the mainstream evidence for the large-scale problems which have to be faced, but also awareness that there are existing practical problems and best practices which can be drawn on.

Attitudes such as, ‘There is no time to spare. We don’t know all the answers but we know enough to make a big difference – so we can begin to act now’, ‘We need to educate and motivate the complacent and fearful people to join us’, ‘Everyone has a part to play’ provide an important framework for action, in the face of sometimes overwhelming challenges.

• Failure to act can be blamed for the collapse of earlier human civilizations. It is important therefore to spend a few moments looking at what led to this collapse and lessons we need to learn from these in order to tackle the global challenges we are currently facing.

Fortunately, the reasons for the collapse of civilisations are captured well by Jared Diamond in his book Why do Civilisations Collapse? Sometimes they are destroyed by powerful neighbours and political changes. Many times, however, they have been driven by environmental changes, and a failure to address these, such as the degradation of the water supplies in the Fertile Crescent.

In the broadest sense, the global challenges we face now on Planet Earth are a combination of all of these factors – environmental, political, social and economic. So are there any lessons we can learn from these past civilisations which enable us to act and avoid a similar collapse?

Fortunately there are, and these can be best captured in the lessons we can learn from the experience of the small, isolated Pacific Island: Easter Island.

Easter Island Case Study – The Collapse of a Civilisation

On Easter Sunday 1722, Dutch Admiral Roggeveen landed on Easter Island in the Pacific, the world’s remotest inhabited island, a mere 159 square miles in area. He found a few thousand people living in abject poverty, fighting one another over meagre food supplies and even resorting to cannibalism.

Yet, to his surprise, there was evidence of a once flourishing civilisation, with over 600 huge stone statues each 20 feet or so high. These statues could only have been produced by highly skilled craftsmen, who not only carved well, but knew how to transport and erect the statues, and with a social structure to support these craftsmen.

• There were a number of clans, each with a leader, who managed the community resources, religious and ceremonial activities, including the building of the statues.
• The ocean was the main source of food, accessed by fishermen in their large canoes to what was seen to be an unending supply of nourishing fish and dolphins.

Two key challenges led to the inevitable collapse of this complex and sophisticated community. Firstly, as the population grew substantially, perhaps to as many as 15,000 people, the demand for crops and fish escalated. Secondly, the rich forests and the island’s other natural resources were steadily destroyed, in part due to the increasing population’s need for canoes, buildings, fuel and other resources. A further major depletion came from the huge demands for timber to transport the giant statues from the quarries to their chosen sites. Large numbers of people dragged and guided the statues over tracks made of these tree trunks.

• They continued to cut down trees until the last one had gone. Their cultural ambitions blinded them to the threats to their quality of life.
• It could be argued that this is not dissimilar to what is happening on Planet Earth as a whole today.

The consequences were disastrous. Without timber, canoes could not be built and fishing became limited to onshore reed boats. Even the nets were no longer available because they had been made from the paper mulberry tree. Soil erosion led to reduced crops and the major source of food became chickens.

• Many native birds, mammals, reptiles and plants were pushed to extinction through hunting or habitat destruction. Streams and springs dried up with the loss of the forests.
• The social structure broke down as rival clans fought for limited resources.

The parallels, therefore, between the experiences of the Easter Islanders and our current situation on Planet Earth are clear. The challenges are similar: unsustainable population growth, limited energy, food and water supplies, major impacts on forests, land and other plant and animal biodiversity.

Similarly, we on Planet Earth have nowhere else to go. This is our only Planet, if the resources run out here we, like the Easter Islanders, have nowhere else to go.

Easter Island therefore is a timely reminder to us in microcosm of the significant consequences of over-exploiting limited essential resources and the failure to think ahead. So let’s look at what lessons we can learn from the collapse of the Easter Island civilisation.

v  A lack of understanding of the impact of interconnectivity:it is obvious, if we use our resources faster than they are replenished disaster is inevitable. When the Easter Islanders lost their forests they lost the capacity to fish, their land was degraded, fuel became a problem and the population was decimated by ill health. A classic case of interconnectivity. Yet, right now on Planet Earth we are destroying our forests, using up our limited water supplies and creating Climate Change. Our population continues to increase whilst our resources continue to decrease. The outcome is as obvious as in Easter Island – yet we do not have a coordinated global plan to address these issues. Whereas the Easter Islanders may not have had the understanding of this interconnectivity to make the necessary changes, our current generation does not have his excuse. We need to therefore ask ourselves what needs to be done to put a plan in place to make sure we do not follow the path of the Easter Islanders.

v  We need to anticipate the impact of population growth and resource usage: We also need to recognise that the Easter Islanders were a clever people, who created a complex civilisation, and for many years a good quality of life. Why did they not anticipate the risk of deforestation and resource depletion? We however, have no such excuse. We have rich scientific knowledge; we know how to monitor weather patterns; we have great insights into the state of our planet, of health problems, of environmental issues and many of the solutions to these challenges. Ignorance is not a plausible reason for inaction.

v  Limited resources need to be effectively managed to avoid conflict: As resources dwindled, bitter conflict arose between the different clans. The danger with this, as we have already seen, is that resources, manpower and technology – which could be focused on addressing the issues – are focused on addressing the conflict. Competition and argument between the clans led to inaction. We have already seen this same situation delaying proactive action on Climate Change over the last decade. Further, we can already see how energy, water and other resource shortages are creating conflict in our world when the obvious solution is to work out equitable sharing plans. We need to learn the lessons from the experience on Easter Island, and recognise that a cooperative approach to understanding the challenges, putting a good game plan in place to address them, and implementing this plan is key to our success. We can only speculate as to the different world that would have been discovered on Easter Island had this approach been taken.

v  That means planning ahead on a global scale: We can summarise that the Easter Islanders did not have the skills base and management abilities to anticipate their long-term requirements for sustainability and plan ahead. We have no excuse. We have a vast reservoir of knowledge and experience of problem analysis, setting objectives to address these problems, building management action plans and monitoring progress with creative information technologies. Why then are so many of the challenges we face not managed properly? Whatever reasons that may have existed until now, the requirement to rapidly and effectively deal with the global challenges means that good planning and management are critical for the survival of our civilisation.

v  And avoid complacency: Following a long-established way of life, taking for granted that resources would always be there, meant that the Easter Islanders apparently lost sight of the increasing urgency to deal with the growing risks. If we look at our approach to tackling many of the global challenges, we could argue that, similarly, we lack a sense of profound urgency – but without any excuse. We live in a globalised world where the challenges of conflict, global warming and population growth know no boundaries. We are increasingly dependent on one another. We will survive or decline together. Planet Earth is our only home. Like the Easter Islanders we have nowhere else to go.

The lessons from Easter Island are clear. We need to look openly and honestly at the challenges that we are currently facing, cooperatively build and share solutions to these challenges – and most importantly – put a business-planning approach together that can enable us to tackle these issues in a coordinated and global manner. For the last of these we have drawn on the experience of global business practice in building this global planning approach.

However, identifying business and business practices as part of the solution will not rest easy with those who contend that the fundamental business models of industry and globalisation are to blame for the current crises. For this reason, it is important to spend a little time looking at why leveraging the skills, knowledge and capabilities of business are essential if we are to succeed in tackling the global challenge.

Why take a business-planning approach?

Business and trade has been taking place for thousands of years as the human race has developed different skills, technologies, products and services that other people wanted and which could be ‘traded’. With this business practice, skills in innovation, wealth creation and management across borders developed.

This is the situation today, whether the transaction is a global deal involving millions of dollars, or a local activity providing services to people. Therefore, the basis of business brings important capabilities to the human race which can be quickly harnessed to address the challenges. Two of the most important of these are wealth creation and innovation.

• An increasingly valuable third capability is that many of the management approaches developed to address business challenges and opportunities on a global scale provide important best practices that can help all of us.
• These types of best management approaches are available now, are proven, and can be easily adapted to the current challenges.

Time is no longer on our side. We therefore need to use our best management approaches to help us fast track the development of planning of solutions and actions to address our global challenge. The global management business-planning approach is therefore used to develop the framework for a global Plan for the Planet. Frameworks are also provided for the adaptation of these approaches to tackle the global challenges to each agent – whether that is government, business or people.

A word on idealism

There are some people who argue that this cooperative approach of working together as a human race to address the global challenges is too idealistic. It would be good if it could happen but the human race has not always behaved in this way. With increasing population and dwindling resources is conflict over existing resources inevitable? Not necessarily, as the human race has survived and thrived by working together, whether hunting or farming, building and innovating. If we look at history, there have been much greater periods of cooperation than there have been of conflict.

So let’s summarise again how the rest of this book is structured to enable everyone to become part of the solution, not the problem:

Chapter 1: Understanding our Current Situation

Chapter 2: Understanding the Key Global Challenges

Chapter 3: Developing a Plan for the Planet

Chapter 4: Managing a Plan for the Planet

Chapter 5: Delivering a Plan for the Planet

 

Chapter 1: Understanding our Current Situation