Speakers' Comments From Annual TreePeople "Grove" Reception and Second Nature Charrette Kick off at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, May 14, 1997

RUTH GALANTER

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great hope that the work that you are doing here will be presented in a form that will not only allow you to dream, and me to dream, and my colleagues to dream, but that will also allow those of us who are charged with overseeing the future development of the city to translate that dream into simple instructions; instructions that we can incorporate into planning codes, building codes, and the various regulatory instruments by which we manage the growth and change of our city.

You know, everybody in California is an environmentalist. We live in a stunning natural region that none of us wants to see degraded. The most ardent environmentalists in California are the 3rd and 4th graders. These boys and girls, as we have now learned, won't take any nonsense from their parents or brothers and sisters when they see them doing something that they think harms the planet. We have seen these boys and girls change the attitudes of their families, insisting that they get serious about recycling. And now you KNOW that mom is ALWAYS going to put the aluminum can in the recycling bin because she is going to get nailed the minute she doesn't!

So our hope is that we can, with the help of the children, perform the same miracle for water conservation that we have for recycling household waste. The water that we have now is all the water we will ever have. And as our population continues to expand, we will almost certainly have to figure out a way to get by with much less water per person than we have become accustomed to. We are already in a position where we have to make better use of the water we've got. This will most certainly become more and necessary as the next few year pass.

But we can do all this. We can make these changes. All of this can be done, but it requires somebody thinking about it and someone asking the critical question and then getting the rest of the people, the public officials who are charged with the responsibility to direct and control growth in particular, to realize that these folks are not unrealistic dreamers with unrealistic proposals. Rather they are serious and accomplished individuals who have spent a lifetime studying these problems. Individuals who understand that there are actually very dangerous economic implications associated with our ignorance of these burgeoning problems. And if we ignore them any longer we do so at our peril.

So what it takes is asking the questions, asking questions and providing some attempt at answers, even if the answers are incomplete. And you know ladies and gentlemen that it is very hard for me to imagine, in this day and age, why there are not many more people asking these questions and providing some sort of positive vision for the future. It just seems to me that we should have caught on by now.

What we need, and what I really hope will come out of your experience here, is something that we can show people! Some physical vision of how we can change our way of doing business that works! What we really need from you, and from your vision, are simple, practical, and enforceable rules. But first, before we get to the regulations, we need the vision behind them. Your job is to come up with the grand vision and, second, to come up with the specific pieces from which this vision will be built.

Ruth Galanter is Los Angeles City Councilwoman from Council District 6.

FELICIA MARCUS

Above all else, one thing that becomes clear when we study the many complex and pressing environmental and social problems of our time: It is that it takes not just one thing, but many things to solve them. First and foremost it takes vision. It also takes strength, moral strength, strength of character. It also requires us to expend a lot of our creative energy in figuring out how to actually make things happen in the complex and fractured world we live in.

I believe that the key to solving any environmental problem is to first recognize that the problem doesn't exist out there, away from us as people. The problem IS US as people. It's a problem FOR US. Any environmental problem is, at its core, about how we behave as a people and how we work together to solve the problems that we create.

Felicia Marcus is the Region 9 Administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

PAUL HAWKEN, KEYNOTE ADDRESS

I know you didn't come to see me. You came to see this really cool place. At this podium, where I am standing, there are lots of buttons that you can't see but I can, with touch screens and everything else you can imagine. And if I start touching anything up here things will really start to happen. I'm not kidding it's like a whole techno village up here at my fingertips.

Thank you Andy for inviting me to speak here tonight. Andy Lipkis is one of my heroes because there are very few people in the world who are "doing it." And what is Andy doing? That's the question. "It," doing "it," what is "it"? I'm starting to call "it" the "Big One." And this "big one" is not simply a reframing or redesigning or re-imagination of industrial society. It is-in a sense-creating a path, a future that no one architect can describe, that no one person can foresee. And I say that guardedly and with great humility-not humility for myself, but humility for us all. I say that because it has happened before. If you look back to the eighteenth century, at the beginning of the industrial age, nobody knew they were doing "it" then either. They certainly were working hard and there were people like Andy and others who are here who had a very clear sense of where they were going. But nobody understood those individuals either. Nobody understood that they were doing "it".

In fact, if you had stood in front of the British Parliament building in 1770 and said, "I have this great idea. I'm going to improve the productivity of human beings by a factor of one hundred or two hundred in the next thirty years." You would have been thrown out! "It's impossible!" they would have said. But of course it wasn't impossible. It happened and the results are all around us.

And what they produced was a civilization that works extraordinarily well in many senses -and if you don't think it does I'll start pushing some of these buttons to prove it - but in some other ways it works very badly. Here's the problem: industrialism is extraordinarily inefficient and I mean extra-ordinarily inefficient and getting more so all the time. And this is the paradox, the conundrum of the industrial age is in the contradiction between the efficiency and elegance of our industrial components, and the inefficiency and squalor of the larger industrial society. We can see this contradiction in this room, in our technology, in our cars, our houses and our buildings. We see that, individually, the components of industrialism become better and neater and more efficient every year. But in fact the system as a whole is becoming less and less efficient. It is a "systems" problem. A systems problem of this kind occurs when at the same time you are trying to optimize the components of the system, you diminish the health of the system itself. And it happens because we're not thinking in terms of the larger system.

And so what you're doing in this charrette is beginning to think of L.A. as a system, which indeed it is whether we pretend to know it or not. It still operates as a system but it is deeply concealed. I'll give you an example of just how hidden it is.

Andy Lipkis and I were asked to come up and talk to the National Forest Service a couple years ago for a watershed management project they were working on in the San Bernardino National Forest. I asked them what their goal was and they said "Watershed this and that." I said, "That is not a big enough goal" and they said, "What would be a big enough goal?" I said, "Making the L.A. river perennial," and they said, "Was it?"

They had lost sight of the system that they were very much in charge of and it happens all the time. This is because we have a couple hundred years experience in transforming natural resources into tools, services, products, engines, highways, buildings, infrastructure and technologies that make you and I more productive-huge successes. But there is a also a huge cost. The cost is that, regardless of how we disagree about which environmental problems are worse or better, or whether there is in fact global warming or not, this much we do know: every living system on earth is in decline and the rate of decline is speeding up. We know that. There is no exception to that. There are regional exceptions for sure. We hope L.A. will be one soon. But, in fact, there are no global scale exceptions to this rule. Industrial systems are destroying living systems.

An average US citizen uses up 1.3 million pounds of material a year to support an average lifestyle. The biggest part of this amount is the seven hundred and eighty thousand pounds of water used every year per capita in this country. Now, this figure does not include water used for agriculture, nor does it include storm runoff. This is what I mean about efficiency and inefficiency. Think about how much you actually see or touch of this 1.3 million pounds. Not so much really. But, that amount is what is generated on your behalf. So that's the basic system, efficient in the components but enormously inefficient as a whole.

And this situation has led to two completely different ways of looking at the world, ways that I label the "blue" way and the "green" way. The "Blues" I call the business people and the "Greens" are the environmentalists. And most of our most important contemporary arguments sort themselves out along these "blue" vs. "green" lines, particularly in media. On one side the "Blues" typically say, "Everything has gotten better now, why are you complaining. Everything will be fine someday." Meanwhile the "Greens" are saying, "No, no, it's not going to be all right someday. Its all going to hell."

And then when it comes to responses to our problems, the "Blues" always propose the same thing - "economic growth will solve our problems." Meanwhile the "Greens" talk about material self-sufficiency, conservation, and reduction right on down the line. At the core of their disagreement is the difference between two words: substitutability and complementarity. The "Blues" believe that we can use the engine of economic development to work our way out of our problems and that we can find substitutes for whatever materials we run out of along the way. This has been their dominant belief since the apocalyptic predictions outlined in the Limits to Growth were proved to be wrong. They were proved wrong because the critical materials chosen in that study turned out to be not so critical, in many cases, after all. And ever since then the business community has been saying, "Hey we haven't got a problem. No more copper? No problem. We'll go to fiber optics." And so they think the world is substitutable.

The other term is complementarity. Complementarity is an interesting term. Here is an example of what it means. If you are up in the Rocky Mountains, and it's late fall or early winter, and you are in a remote location, you need three things: warmth, food and water. They are all complements. You take away one and the others can't substitute for it. You have no water, but you have dry food, you're gonna die. You have food and water but no warmth, you're gonna die. You have warmth and water, but no food, you will die. You need all three. That's what a complement is.

Systems, it seems, are not substitutable. They are characterized by complementarity between crucial parts working together, providing services. Thinking in terms of systems and complementarity allows us to think of nature in a very different way. As a consequence, the relationship between business and nature is changing quite dramatically. Business is slowly understanding that nature is not really a repository of commodities that we take and then transform into useful goods-rather we are slowly seeing nature as a flow of services, as "natural capital." Natural capital provides these complementary services to us, not just materials.

On May 15, 1997, Nation magazine, will publish an article that will be one of the most important pieces in Nation this year. In that article they will simply say that there is a flow of thirty-two to fifty trillion dollars a year into the global economy from nature's services. They are capitalizing this at very conservative levels. Now the world GDP is approximately twenty to twenty-one trillion dollars a year. So we're talking about an amount coming in from nature itself that is as much as twice the yearly value of the economic flow of the entire global industrial system. The problem is that these services are not replaceable. They simply cannot be replaced. These are not single commodities like coal. These are interconnected living systems that cannot be replaced once lost. Unfortunately we don't understand how the systems that provide these services work all that well; and that our actions threaten these systems, and that our under-valuation of one part of the system can threaten the whole. For example, you can do all the watershed management in the world for the Red River Valley; but it won't do you any good if climate change produces a five hundred year storm in your system designed for the 100-year storm.

I have lately been consulting with major corporations trying to help them get a handle on this new way of thinking, Shell Oil being one of them. When I worked with Shell I asked them, "You are businessmen. You believe in substitutability. My question to you is this: which of these natural systems can you substitute for? Which technologies can replace these ecosystem services? And if they can replace them how much will they cost?" And so we went over this list very slowly, one by one by one. At the end they decided there wasn't a single system that could be replaced at any cost.

So these are the services that are flowing into our economy. These are the services that are flowing down the paved L. A. River into San Pedro Bay. These are the services that industrial systems-the way they are presently designed-diminish, destroy or prevent from flowing into society as a whole. These services are diminishing and we are now up against a new set of limits, the limits to nature's services. In the last two or three hundred years or so, every fifty to a hundred years we have come up against a limiting factor. But this one, the limits on nature's services is, as I said at the beginning of this talk, the "Big One." Lets go back to our example in the Rocky Mountains again-air, water, food, warmth. In my example those are the limiting factors and lets say they are all diminishing. Lose one completely and you're a goner. How do you increase living factors? In the past we have "solved" it in increases in human productivity; with slavery, immigration, high birth rates, and the replacement for human energy provided by oil. But, now we're coming up with a new limiting factor to economic development and it's nature's services. So I asked Shell about this new set of limits and they said, "You're right, we can't replace these services." And we can't.

So when we talk about sustainability, or, the term I prefer over "sustainability" which is "restoration," we're talking about how a society can shift from one that emphasizes human productivity to one that emphasizes the productivity of natural capital. And we, Andy and other participants in this charrette, are standing up in front of a mythical Parliament and saying, "No, I think in the next thirty or forty years we can actually increase the productivity of our natural systems by ten, fifty, or a hundred times." And nobody will believe us because they can't see it. But that's exactly what we have to do. That's exactly what we are going to do. We're going to -as a civilization-take these services and make them so much more efficiently utilized-by our cities, by our society, by our countries, by our companies-that it will make this time period in history look like the mess that it truly is. The 1.3 million pounds per year of stuff that we metabolize in order to produce an average American lifestyle will drop dramatically while our efficient and respectful use of nature's services increases dramatically. That's what we're going to do.

And so it gives rise to the following thesis, that the world is moving from an era in which man made capital, i.e. productivity-which we needed more of in the beginning of the industrial revolution-is no longer the limiting factor. It's not fishing boats, it's fisheries, it's not saw mills, it's forests, it's not tractors, it's viable and arable land. The limiting factor is nature's services. To overcome a limiting factor you need to maximize the productivity of the limiting factor in the short run while investing in increasing its supply in the long run. That's exactly what TreePeople is doing for the City of L.A., even if the city of L.A. doesn't know that it needs it yet-maximizing productivity of the limiting factor in the short run.

There is an important human factor to all this as well. When the limiting factor changes then changing human behavior becomes very important. The behavior that used to be economic becomes un-economic at that point. But old habits die hard. That is why you get the "Blues" saying: "This always worked before. Why are you talking this way? Look around you. Be grateful. Don't be so critical. We worked so hard for you. You're an ingrate, ungrateful." And this attitude prevents the "Blues" from realizing that a behavior that used to be economic is becoming un-economic.

So economic logic remains the same. We're not talking about reinventing economics; we're actually talking about sticking to that same logic. But the pattern of scarcity in the world changes. It's not stuff that is now scarce, its not the materials. It's not human productivity that is scarce. What is now scarce are nature's services.

So this design charrette is about re-imagining Los Angeles. But, what is it that we are imagining? Is it an image of a city where trees grow and water flows? No, that's just the beginning. We are talking about restoring an entire working system. This is the city that got paved over. This city got roaded over. This city got parking lot and transported over. This city was devastated. It's like almost every other city in America except worse. So, if we can make it happen here, we can make it happen anywhere. So you, the participants in this charrette, have the best opportunity yet to turn it around because, really, L.A. needs the most help of any major city in the United States.

And, speaking from my heart, I want to also tell you that you we have just enough time to do what we need to do, but no more. So we don't need to panic, but we need to get right to work. It is in this sense that I agree with Adrienne Rich who says, "I cast my lot with those who year after year with no special powers choose to reconstitute the world." And that's what you're doing, reconstituting the world. It's going to take really out-of-the-box thinking. I mean, it's going to take in-the-box-thinking too, but new boxes. It's going to take you, in the next four days, to places where you don't know how to go. It's going to provide you as city officials, both elected and appointed, with new ways to see and re-imagine your cities. Ways that are very different from those that you have today. This charrette isn't about being safe; it's about being courageous. It's not about being secure; it's about doing the right thing.

David White, a friend of mine and a poet has a piece about a "typical business executive." It is a sort of Dickensonian reprisal piece about the classic American executive who works hard all his life. He shows this person their future, takes this executive to his tombstone and he scratches off the moss to read his epitaph and it says, "He made his mortgage payments." And I tell you that story because another friend of mine, William Irwin, who is also a poet, talks about that same thing. "What do we do? What legacy will we leave for our children?" he wonders. He told me that on the day he left Robert Graves' household, where he was tutored, Graves turned to him and he said, "You have one story to tell in your life and only one story."

And so my question to you is what is your story? What story do you want to tell in your life? This is your place. Los Angeles is your place. You don't know who you are unless you know where you are. So these four days are about finding out where we are here in Los Angeles. Where are we? What does it do? What did we cover up? What does it want to become? How beautiful can it be? We don't know. What is your story? What is L.A.'s story? What is the real story? That is your work, your story.

And when I say again, that this is the "Big One," it truly is. Can you imagine somebody saying to you, "I want you to design a system and you have a hundred years to do it. When you're done, this system should put endocrine disrupters into basically every body, pollute the air, pollute the water, destroy natural systems, put five million men in prison, destroy the environment, have people commuting forty five minutes a day on freeways breathing poison gas. And I want you to do this and design it. Can you design such a system?" You can't, you can't imagine designing a system that's so wasteful and inefficient!

So here's the "Big One": Can you now imagine a world that really works? Imagine a world where the resources are not scarce, but super abundant? Where it's not a question of how much, but a question of who? Where it's not a question of how much I can take, but a question of equity and fairness and justice for all? And the thing is, those tools, those techniques, those powers-we already have them, know them. Nothing needs to be invented. Not one single technology is required to make that world happen.

I know that we might be tempted to look at it and think, "Oh my God who made this mess called Los Angeles?" Its like Frank Lloyd Wright once said, "If we shook the world-shook the United States-everything that was loose would all end up in Southern California." That is how this mess happened. But at least it's loose, right? At least it's not like Boston! So let's do something. Let's re-configure the loose stuff and re-imagine it in such a way that this city works. Let's finally make Los Angeles the City of Angels. Thank you very much.

Paul Hawken is a businessman, environmentalist and author. He has founded several companies including Smith & Hawken, the garden retail and catalog company. He serves as Chairman of The Natural Step, a non-profit educational foundation whose purpose is to develop and share a common framework comprised of easily understood, scientifically-based principles that can serve as a compass to guide society toward a sustainable future. Mr. Hawken is the author of several books published in over 50 countries, including the best-selling, Ecology of Commerce (1993). His book, Growing a Business, became the basis of a PBS series which Mr. Hawken hosted and produced. The program explored socially responsive companies and is shown on television in over 115 countries.