8 Ideasclerosis, Continued
If and when the ecological idea takes root, it is likely to change
things.
—Aldo Leopold
General George Lee Butler ascended through the ranks of the air
force from fighter pilot to the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command.
He was a true believer in the mission of the military and specifically
in the efficacy of nuclear deterrence, but he was also a thinking
man, and his doubts had begun in the 1970s. Finally, in 1988 during a
visit to Moscow, he wrote, “it all came crashing home to me that I really
had been dealing with a caricature all those years” (Smith 1997,
20). Butler was nearing the end of what he described as a “long and arduous
intellectual journey from staunch advocate of nuclear deterrence
to a public proponent of nuclear abolition” (Butler 1996). The
difference between Butler and many others in the military was that
“he reflected on what he was doing time and again,” and much of
what he’d come to take for normal did not add up. He wrote, “We
have yet to fully grasp the monstrous effects of these weapons . . . and
the horrific prospect of a world seething with enmities, armed to the
teeth with nuclear weapons.” To do so will require overcoming a “terror-
induced anesthesia which suspend[s] rational thought” in order to
see that “we cannot at once keep sacred the miracle of existence and
hold sacrosanct the capacity to destroy it” (Butler 1998). Butler, now
in private business, devotes a substantial part of his life to the abolition
of nuclear weapons.
Ray Anderson, founder and CEO of Interface Corporation, experienced
an even more abrupt conversion. In 1994, after 21 years as
the head of a highly successful carpet and tile company, he was asked
by his senior staff to define the company’s environmental policy.
“Frankly,” he writes, “I did not have a vision” (Anderson 1998, 39). In
trying to develop one, he happened to read Paul Hawken’s (1993) The
Ecology of Commerce, and the effect was, as he put it, like “a spear in
the chest” (Anderson 1998, 23). He subsequently read other books
ranging from Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
The effect of his reading and reflection was to deepen and intensify an
emotional and intellectual commitment to transform the company.
Anderson went on to define environmental goals for Interface that
has placed the company in the forefront of U.S. business, a transformation
that he describes as “a phenomenon of the first order” (Anderson
1998, 183). Instead of merely complying with the law, Anderson
aims to make Interface a highly profitable, solar-powered company
discharging no waste and converting used product into new product
through what the company calls an “evergreen lease.” The Interface
annual report reads like a primer in industrial ecology written by
thinkers like Paul Hawken,William McDonough, and Amory Lovins.
Anderson, now in his midsixties, has become a tireless and eloquent
advocate for the ecological transformation of business.
Butler and Anderson are extraordinary people. They were both at
the top of their respective professions when they came to the realization
that something fundamental was wrong. They were thoughtful
and honest enough to eventually see through the complacency and
pretensions that accumulate around organizations and institutions
like barnacles on the hulls of ships. They are deeply religious men
who saw the necessity for change in moral terms and had enough
moral energy to transcend the world of cold calculation to see their
professions in a larger human and humane perspective and enough
courage to risk failure, rejection, and ridicule.
People like Butler and Anderson are threatening to the stability
and smooth functioning of organizations and institutions. Butler’s
challenge to the defense establishment, an entity not famous for its
encouragement of new ways of seeing things, is the more daunting.As
the CEO of Interface, Anderson has considerably more leverage over
outcomes. But both men represent the kind of professional that Donald
Schon (1983) once called “the reflective practitioner.” In Schon’s
words, the reflective practitioner is inclined to engage “messy but crucially
important problems” through a process that combines “experience,
trial and error, intuition, and muddling through” (ibid., 43).
Moreover, the reflective practitioner
allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion
in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique.He
reflects on the phenomena before him, and on the prior understandings
which have been implicit in his behavior. He
carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a
new understanding of the phenomena and a change in the
situation. [He] is not dependent on the categories of established
theory and technique . . . his inquiry is not limited to
a deliberation about means which depends on a prior agreement
about ends. He does not keep means and ends separate
. . . he does not separate thinking from doing. (Schon
1983, 68)
In contrast, most professionals are “locked into a view of themselves
as technical experts, find nothing in the world of practice to occasion
reflection [having] become too skillful at techniques of selective inattention,
junk categories, and situational control” (ibid., 69). For them,
professionalism functions, as Abraham Maslow once described science,
“as a Chinese Wall against innovation, creativeness, revolution,
even against new truth itself if it is too upsetting” (1966, 33). But organizations
and institutions do not often reward mavericks who upset
rules and procedures or who question the unquestionable. To the
contrary, they are penalized, ostracized, or, worse, elaborately ignored
because they threaten what are perceived to be core values and comfortable
routines.
I D E A S C L E R O S I S , C O N T I N U E D 77
The problem that reflective practitioners face is that they mostly
work in rigid organizations or professions that function unreflectively.
Both Butler and Anderson challenged the fundamental worldview of
their respective organizations by seeing the organization and its larger
environment at a higher level of generality. From that vantage point
Butler could see that nuclear weapons only compounded the problem
of security, and Anderson could see the environmental and
human havoc caused by a prosperous company otherwise doing
everything by the rules. To accommodate people like Butler and Anderson,
an organization must meet “extraordinary conditions” that include
plac[ing] a high priority on flexible procedures, differentiated
responses, qualitative appreciation of complex processes, and decentralized
responsibility for judgment and action . . . mak[ing] a place
for attention to conflicting values and purposes” (Schon 1983, 338).
In short, an organization must be capable of learning (Schon 1971).
The concept of a learning organization sounds like an oxymoron,
but the human prospect depends every bit as much on the capacity of
organizations to learn as it does on individual learning. Few scholars
have thought more deeply about the possibility and dynamics of organizational
learning than Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor
Peter Senge. According to Senge, learning organizations are
those in which “people continually expand their capacity to create
the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns or
thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and
where people are continually learning how to learn together” (1990,
3). Learning organizations, Senge writes, “develop people who learn
to see as systems thinkers see, who develop their own personal mastery,
and who learn how to surface and restructure mental models
collaboratively” (ibid., 367). They foster people capable of seeing the
organization and institution at a higher level of generality and thereby
capable of challenging basic premises. In short, learning organizations
encourage creativity, innovation, out-of-the-box thinking, and the
heretics who speak to fundamentals. On such people and on such organizations
the human future depends.
“For twenty centuries and longer,” in Aldo Leopold’s words, “all civilized
thought has rested upon one basic premise: that it is the destiny
of man to exploit and enslave the earth” (1999, 303). And we’ve got-
ten good at it, multiplying and becoming fruitful beyond the wildest
dreams of our ancestors. Throughout history we learned mostly
driven by necessity: failure, war, famine, overcrowding. Now we have
to learn entirely new things, not because we failed in the narrow sense
of the word, but because we succeeded too well. In one way or another
all of the challenges of the twenty-first century are linked to the
fact that we’ve procreated too rapidly and produced more waste than
the earth can process. We suffer from a new dynamic of excess success
and must make a rapid transition to a more restrained and elegant
condition called sustainability. To do so, what must we learn? We
must learn that we are inescapably part of what Leopold called “the
soil-plant-animal-man food chain” (ibid., 198).We must master systems
dynamics, learning ideas of feedback, stocks, flows, and delays
between cause and effect. And we must learn to see ourselves as
trustees of the larger community of life, which is to say that we must
embrace a higher and more inclusive level of ethics.We must, in other
words, see the human enterprise and all of our own little enterprises
at a higher level of generality in a much longer span of time and restrain
ourselves accordingly. Who will teach us these things?
The fact is that much or even most of what we’ve learned about
this transition has been through the efforts of organizations not usually
regarded as educational and by mavericks operating as reflective
practitioners against the grain of their professions. Some of the best
work on ecological technology, for example, occurs in places like
Ocean Arks, Massachusetts, or Gaviotas, Colombia. The creative edge
in urban planning and design has been happening on the streets of
Curitiba, Brazil, or in cities like Chattanooga, Tennessee, or in new
developments like Village Homes in Davis, California, Haymount,
Virginia, or Prairie Crossings, Wisconsin. The best forestry management
is being practiced in the forests of the Menominee tribe in
north-central Wisconsin. The most advanced thinking about energy
use and automobiles comes from the Rocky Mountain Institute in
Colorado. Some of the best thinking about applied economics is taking
place at small institutions like Rethinking Progress, Inc., or The
Center for a New American Dream.We are learning industrial ecology
from companies such as Interface, Inc., and 3-M. The best analysis
of our global plight comes from institutions like the WorldWatch
Institute and the World Resources Institute.
I D E A S C L E R O S I S , C O N T I N U E D 79
But where, in the most critical and fateful period of human history,
does one find the prestigious and well-endowed institutions of
higher education? The short answer is that most have yet to summon
the wherewithal and energy to do very much. Relative to the transition
to sustainability, institutions of higher education are underachievers.
1 On balance, then, it is unclear whether higher education
will be a positive or negative factor in the transition ahead. What we
do know is that higher education can, in Jonathan Kozol’s words,
“prosper next to concentration camps . . . collective hysteria, savagery—
or simply quiet abdication in the presence of ongoing misery
outside the college walls” (1985, 169). It has certainly adapted comfortably
with the corporate dominated extractive economy that lies
at the heart of our environmental and social problems. Why?
The problem stems, I think, from a deep-seated complacency
that bears resemblance to the history of the U.S. auto industry. Consider
that slow-moving, dim-witted colossus, General Motors circa
1970, that failed to check its rearview mirror.Toyota and Honda were
in the passing lane. Our product, too, is often overpriced and of uncertain
quality. We have lost our sense of direction, becoming all
things to all people. Long ago we surrendered the idea of guiding students
to a larger vision of self and life in favor of merely well-paying
careers. On the most important issues of the time, we have sounded
an uncertain trumpet or no trumpet at all.We are being corrupted by
financial dependence on corporate interests that have every intention
of using higher education to their advantage. And a glance at the
rearview mirror shows competitors such as the Internet, organizations
offering distance learning, and other vendors coming up fast in
the passing lane.
The question, then, is whether the institutions that purport to
advance learning can themselves learn new ways appropriate for an
ecological era. What would it mean for the ecological idea to take
root in colleges and universities? It would mean, for one thing, that
such institutions would have to become learning organizations in
order to reinvent themselves. This requires rethinking institutional
1. Berea College, College of the Atlantic, Green Mountain College, Northland
College, Prescott College, and Warren Wilson College are notable
exceptions.
purposes and procedures at a higher level of generality. It would mean
changing routines and old ways of doing things. It would require a
willingness to accept the risks that accompany change. It would require
a more honest accounting to include environmental costs. Instead
of bureaucratic and academic fragmentation, the transition
would require boundary crossing and systems ways of thinking and
doing. Instead of being reactive organizations, they would become
proactive, with an eye on the distant future. Instead of defining themselves
narrowly, they would redefine themselves and what they do in
the world at a higher and more inclusive level.
What do these things mean in everyday terms? For one thing,
the transition to becoming a learning organization would change
who has lunch with whom. The requirement for openness would
tend to dissolve the barriers separating disciplines and encourage
bolder, more imaginative, and more useful kinds of thought, research,
and teaching. It would help to initiate a more honest dialogue
about knowledge and its relation to our ecological prospects.
The transition would require rethinking the standards for academic
success to encourage engagement with real and sometimes messy
public problems. It would expand the definition of our “product”
from courses taught and articles published to include practical problem
solving. It could change how we define our clientele in order to
educate, and be educated by, a wider constituency. It would change
the standards against which we evaluate institutions of higher education
to include our real ecological impacts on the world and perhaps
those of our graduates. Since learning, both institutional and individual,
begins with an ability to see things in perspective,
organizational learning might serve to deflate the pomposity that
often pervades the upper echelons of the academy. Finally, transitions
don’t often occur without leadership, and higher education
needs leaders as bold, honest, and capable as George Lee Butler and
Ray Anderson.
It is not whether higher education will be reinvented, but rather who
will do the reinventing and to what purposes. If we fail to make institutions
of learning into learning organizations, others will reinvent
the academy for less worthy purposes. If we fail to elevate professional
standards, those professions will be irrelevant to the transition
ahead, or worse, an impediment. If we, in higher education, cannot
I D E A S C L E R O S I S , C O N T I N U E D 81
make these changes, the possibility that the great transition ahead
will be informed by liberally educated people will also decline. That
means, in short, that the ideas necessary for a humane, liberal, and
ecologically solvent world will be lost in favor of a gross kind of global
utilitarianism.