Welcome to our annual Earth Day open Forum town meeting open Forum Town meetings or a joint production of Minnesota public radio stations in the Northland the FM New Station W scn classical music station WS C D and wir are on the Iron Range as well as the Duluth News Tribune providing daily coverage on issues of concern to Minnesota, Wisconsin. And Michigan residents additional funding is provided by nor West Bank's Duluth combining local commitment services and the capital strength of a diversified organization at our guests visit to the twin ports is also made possible today by Minnesota power company and by the University of Minnesota Duluth Spectrum lecture seriesToday's open Forum guest is businessman and author Paul Hawken Paul Hawkins 1993 book The Ecology of Commerce has been called an economic and cultural Masterpiece by The Poet Laureate of American capitalism. Another reviewer says Hawkins book May revolutionize the relationship between business and the environment and will take its place among the great and insightful writings that seek to increase the odds for planetary survival. The utne reader says his vision is neither left nor right but way up front in addition to the widely acclaimed the Ecology of Commerce. Paul Hawken has authored the books growing a business and the next economy and a shared his business expertise on public television today. We hope to hear the ideas that have stirred thousands of readers for how business can become a friend of the environment, please welcome Paul Hawken.Thanks, Bob, and thank you. For inviting me again to dilute. This is my fourth trip in the last 14 months. I don't know what's going on here. You're in trouble and I also want to thank the folks that sort of power and the University of Minnesota Duluth for bringing me here again, and my only request is that I want to come in the summer sometimes so please You Discount Ticket anything I'll accept it the Ecology of Commerce, which is the name of my last book is of course an oxymoronic phrase, but then we in this country are very accustomed to such phrases. We have things like Military Intelligence Postal Service. Political ethics with all due respect to our mayor, excuse me, but I mean talking about Congress. It certainly wasn't talking about local politics. And so and I named it that precisely for that reason because essentially when you put those two words together, they don't go together and that is exactly the problem. We all face as Citizens not only of the latter part of the 20th century, but going into the next Century. How do we put these two great systems together in a way that makes sense and I refer to both our commercial Industrial Systems upon which we Depend and without which we would not exist and I also refer to our living resource systems also upon which we depend in without which we cannot live with the interesting to me as a dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist. I admit it is however, it was that we sort of got it wired in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s that we could demonize business and essentially Fling our arrows against it and pretend in some way that have business would just go away that somehow our problems would be solved. But in fact a lot of the rhetoric from the environmental movement concerning the roles of Corporations and business fueled I think very much by the anger from the Vietnam War leading into the 70s was decidedly anti-corporate and having been in business for 27 years. And in a sense having been weaned on balance sheets. It occurred to me at one point that I should write a book about this relationship. And so that's the book was born. However, the original book was really about best practices. That is to say what are the if you'll excuse my California speak for a minute, but what are all the neat and groovy things a business can do to save the Earth, you know that smarmy little phrase and and that really was the title of the book it was called doing good business. The Ecology of Commerce is the College of Commerce was the subtitle And what happened was that I in my role as the head of my company and working with many other companies that are considered to be very forward and liberal and advanced and taking very many environmental initiatives had in fact, we thought led the way with respect to businesses relationship to the environment and I thought that would be very interesting if I made the list essentially of all these initiatives and what businesses could do and that would help other businesses and I feel good about myself. Well, you know, there's a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the book, which is that when you write a book or at least when I write a book, I collect papers clippings books that are pertinent to the subject and writing book is a little bit like being in love with the girl who has a yellow Volkswagen a woman has yellow Volkswagen because you never saw one until you fell in love and then you see them everywhere and it's the same way with writing. Once you get a thesis in mind. What happens is the whole world reorients itself. It's a little bit like being in love and in a sense that you cannot read the New York Times or an airplane magazine or anything in the same way because you clip and tear and you leave a wake behind you of magazines of them dismembered and so that is what I did and I had collected it for three years and I had a tremendous amount of material and then I have my little midlife crisis where I got divorced and lost my job all within 2 months time. And there I was with my contract contract and I decided that I should read all this material. I gathered since had nothing else to do and so during my midlife crisis. I read 25 million words on the environment back-to-back and I don't recommend it don't do it. I have a neighbor a friend Patti and Stewart brand who lived down the the dock for me the story anyway, and and we would have dinner every week and as I was going through this literature, you know working my way through it. They could tell that my countenance was changing my body with his changing my color. I should say my pallor was changing and they kept commenting at every so often politely saying, you know, you're looking rather Peak it and then you're looking rather poorly and then it's saying are you all right, you know and that's a no. I'm not all right, and then they literally said listen, we have a name of a good therapist. Would you like to see someone and There's and and I got so I literally got chronically depressed because I immerse myself into the literature both contemporary and classic so Falls and Odin's and Carson and Leopold cat and Ehrlich and I was just devastated by two things. One is my ignorance at the rate and breadth of environmental degradation that is occurring worldwide. I had served on the boards of many environmental organizations cumulatively for 35 years National Audubon conservation of National Trust for Public Land Point Foundation, which publishes the whole earth catalog and I had thought I had a good working knowledge of the problems and what to do about it and I realized I had a very poor knowledge of it and I was appalled at my ignorance and second of all I was disturbed because I couldn't write my book it absolutely blew my thesis right out of the water and I realized right then that if you took the best practices of the best businesses, World today, whoever you think those businesses are whether it's 3 a.m. Or Ben and Jerry's or Patagonia or whatever it was and you overlaid them over the practices of every business in the world today. We would not in any way Abate the problem we have right and the problem as I like to think of it sort of traditionally environmentalists have in a sense preceded any talk about the environment with really sort of piercing factoids, you know, that just sent chills down your back and and then when you're properly anxious and you have your adrenaline system going then they announced what the solution is and my problem statement is a little different than that and it is twofold the first problem is this that we argue and we disagree about what many of the problems are so we can set them aside and let's just not talk about those what we do know scientifically. Biologically and by standards of measurement that are both done by nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations as well as our own government. Essentially that every living system on Earth is in Decline and the rate of decline is speeding up. We don't have to be scientists or we don't have to be epidemiologists or wildlife biologist to understand that statement and to understand that that poses a problem for everyone everywhere in the world at the same time may be differentially for some now then later but in this world that is globalizing so quickly we face that problem together as one people on One Planet and the second part of that problem is this that we have an industrial commercial system that it basically has been a huge success and its success is to be measured by its throughput by its output by the way in which it has improved. Moved the lives of literally millions and millions of people primarily in Northern industrialized countries, although to a lesser extent in the South as well. Now, however, having said all that that we have an industrial system that has a metabolism just like you and I have a metabolism and the industrial system consumes. It eats material it eats resources. It eats energy. It digests them's and into services and products and then it spews out the products and it spews out a tremendous amount of metabolic waste and so what we can look at in terms of the world today is that the world the planet the Earth itself these living systems which we are losing our incapable of metabolizing and assimilating the metabolic waste of our industrial system. So here is the problem we have this business system. We have this living system and they don't fit they don't match. They don't work together and yet we need both and again historically Clay what's happened is that when the environmentalists have brought up concerns about this conflict about this degradation of our living systems and so forth. It has been widely and I think understandably interpreted as they moved to shut down the commercial systems and therefore threatening job security communities livelihood and crude producing its own set of anxieties. And so the solutions have been in heralded as being as in a sense in a sense a crafted and very carefully set of compromises between in a sense the scientific Community if you will with the activists and the business and some cases governmental Community going either way depending on who's in power or which department you're talking about. So today I want to proposition you and I want to proposition you that that adversary relationship that conflict is absolutely not the not a good description or a good way of seeing the problem. Furthermore. What I would say is in this proposition that the solution is in the problem and the problem with the way we have defined the environmental movement in this country is we haven't stayed with it well enough and what's happening because we are defending our mutual positions the environment versus business and so forth is that we have not created a way in which we can come together and literally discover that the solution is exactly in the systems that are being lost and that is to say that nature is not simply something that we should preserve or conserve or set aside or save for future generations and so forth it Actually something that they can teach us to how to how to change our Industrial Systems. It is the mentor it is the leitmotif it is the design it is an essentially the template that we can use and move what we're doing how we make things how we provide goods and services how we distribute them how we live In such a way that we bring that into in a cord and into harmony with living systems. And what I want to proposition you about is not that we should do it or not that it's a good idea and a neat thing but that in fact it's already happening and not only is it already happening but it represents what I call the largest transformation of our culture since the Industrial Age and not only is it the next Industrial Age which is not going to be its name by the way, but I just use that in some way to get some sense of discontinuity, but it is greater in effect in the information age the so-called post-industrial age the third wave or any other description of what's happening in terms of the exponential increase in computational and networking and communication powers that is in fact happening right now in our culture and around the world. It's subsumes it and overtakes it and it will dominate. Our education Our Lives how we do things our culture's our communities and it will dominate in a way that is going to be so fascinating intriguing engaging and interesting that we will wonder why we waited so long and essentially the next Industrial Revolution if you will is how to take this magnificent industrial system that we've produced and that we have created and incense inverted as you would putting your hand into a sock and grabbing the toe and slowly changing this profound relationship between living and in a sense commercial systems because right now if you look at Industrial Systems, they have certain assumptions underlying their viability, which is number one. There's an infinite base of resources to take those materials and second of all, there's an infinite sink out there to place the metabolic waste. We now know that that's not true. Okay, but what we don't Now by plugging up our pipes and stopping what's going out of the pipes is we still haven't thought of what is this new system and this new system isn't a linear take make waste system which characterizes industrialism throughout the world up until this very moment. But actually is it take make take make take make system that is cyclical that is circular that imitates and replicates what we see in living systems because in living systems, we do not see waste in the way that we can see if of waste always in living systems is food for other systems and there's some exceptions like the carbonaceous period but in a dynamic sense living systems reassimilate their waste as a nutrients for other living systems and it is in this sort of metabolic cycle that we are sense finding in Industry around the world models and Engineering examples and design solutions for what we see now as the degradation Mission of the planet now not only are we moving towards cyclical systems and this is happening more and more rapidly. But in fact, the other Revolution is happening with industry is called the for lack of a better term factor for Factor five Factor 10 efficiencies. And what the the the real the state-of-the-art thinking now in Industry particularly in Europe more than here is that we can reduce what we use the metals the woods the water. The energy that we use right now to produce our goods and services by a factor of 10 by 90 percent over the next 40 or 50 years with no diminution of the quality of the services that we expect from our products or companies or institutions or the services that they provide not only can we reduce it by 90 percent, but we can do so in a way that increases the net level of employment. Not only can we reduce it by 90 percent but we can do it in a way that has negative costs. It costs less than cost more. So not only can we redesign our industrial system. So they conform and harmonize with living systems, but will cost less than the way we're doing it today. And that's the revolution that's in place. It's not about biology. It's about a system becoming biological bio logical and it is in a sense informing both the pedagogy the education the disciplines the design criteria and essentially even the policy in other countries, and it's high time that this country got wind of it understood it and began to adopt it because that to it because not only is it a wonderful thing, but it's also going to be a competitive thing. That is to say the sooner. We learn the sooner. We understand it. The sooner. We apply it the better off. We are going to be we and it says import much of our environmental filtration equipment and some from Germany using technologies that were created here, but we didn't think we're very important. We created the photovoltaic industry and then the largest maker photovoltaics now is Siemens in Germany and so forth. So United States has produced the ideas that Technologies is the rest of the world that's getting ahead of us and getting ahead of the loop and we can't see that happen. Now, what do I mean by all this specifically I'll give you a very simple example. It's a carpet company interface, Georgia 800 million dollar company and they looked at their business. They make these broadloom carpets that you see on the floor for hotels convention Center's airports restaurants. And what they do is you can see is that It comes in very large rolls and they roll out the carpet they lay it and then every seven eight years depending on the usage pattern. They take the carpet away put in new carpet. The old carpet is thrown away into landfills while the carpet is down for the first six months it off gases and causes sick building syndrome because that's another problem altogether. Now, what happened is they looked at what's happening and you can see in this carpet already. There's stains you can see places that are dirty that are smudge you can see places that are cut up and so forth. So in a sense the carpet is starting to deteriorate, right? So at a certain point the convention center here is going to have to replace it probably sooner than they would like because it's very expensive. So what they did as a carpet company is they looked at the problem and say wait a minute are we in the carpet business to as a seller's or a we in the business to provide the service of carpeting and so what they did is they went to carpet tiles. And now what they do is they have a thing called The Evergreen lease and in the convention center such as this they lease the service of the carpet, but now they have 12 by 12 tiles instead of broadloom and not only 12 by 12 tiles. They service it every quarter so they come in they look to see like where there's a stain on the floor. They replace it immediately. They take it off and they put an exact same carpet tile that was there before except a new one. So not only do they do that but they in a sense provide a much better service to the company or the client than with they were receiving prior to that which is they always have a clean Immaculate carpet where the carpet wears out at a registration desk or at a Podium or at a ticket office or something like that. They replace it very often. So now they're using less material the client is paying less money. So they are the ones providing a more competitive product. The product on the floor is in much better shape. It's cleaner and better maintain all the time. They are using more labor to do so because they've shifted from I'm a economy of resources to one of service. So the less material more labor less costs higher margin less cost to the customer more competitive to beating their customers and they are almost finished on the technology where those carpet tiles can be in a sense. We melt it down there polymers and made back into carpet tiles so that they're closing the loop so that they will not require new material outside. So the reducing their environmental liability and their cost of production all at the same time. That's the next Industrial Revolution simple on one hand, which is seeing that this is a service there to provide a suppose the product and the other side of that is to engage in the very complex and interesting technology of how do you deconstruct the industrial world and reconstructed? And so what you're seeing is essentially is a world where we're going to look at our industrial through put all the stuff that we use all the stuff is produced. And it is becoming what's called technical nutrients and that is to say these nutrients are seen as food for the industrial system. And for example in Germany in the intelligent product system, what you're seeing is a country going to a time when there will be no landfills whatsoever and what they're telling their companies. Is that sooner or later you better design your products in such a way that you own them imperative perpetuity that is to say the yours forever. So they essentially when you sell a car you sell a refrigerator, you sell a VCR you're selling the license to use it and the licensee can use it for a long time. They can transfer the license, but when they're through with it, they do not throw it away. They do not consume. It it son consumable. They take it to a d shopping center and the D shopping center sends it back to the manufacturer the manufacturer cannot throw anything away. So they have to design it for not only disassembly. But for reassembly reuse and we manufacture and this is producing a materials revolution in terms of chemistry in terms of Engineering in terms of how you spec the products in the thermo plastic resins. And essentially these companies are assigned to design things like the Polyphonic polymers Plastics like very much the same as on this clock. I'm showing you that can be remelted in reformed now 70 to 80 times with no degradation of the material used so that they're seeing the feedstock is not something to be consumed and thrown away but something to be incorporated in to technical nutrient Cycles in Industry because the problem is this You either have substances like the water that's in this glass. They can go back into living systems or you have substances like this in this plastic that should not go into living systems and our confusion as industrialists as business people is we have no incentive and no way to really create closed loop systems right now. And so what's happening is our industrial world is going into our natural world is going into our Lakes. It's going into our riparian systems is going into our soils. It's going into our animals is going to our bodies our bones. Our mother's milk is going into our children. We are walking landfills. This is inefficient. And so the old idea that somehow. Well, you environmentalist have a really great idea. But you know it cost too much. I have a business to run. It's the other way around. And somehow we got it wired in this economic system that it's cheaper to destroy the Earth in real time. Right? I mean, that's what it says. Well, yes, it's very nice for you to talk about the spotted owl. It's very nice for you to talk about, you know primary for us and all that sort of stuff. But again, I've got a business to run it's much cheaper to clear-cut. It's much cheaper to use high input agriculture. It's much cheaper to use drift Nets in the Atlantic or the Pacific than it is to harvest fish. Sustainably. It's not it never was it never will be and somehow we have a price cost system that essentially tells us not only as consumers but as business people that is cheaper to destroy things in real time, and we know absolutely that that's not the case. Whether it's our roofs or shoes or houses are cars, whatever it is. We know it's much less expensive to take care of Machinery equipment people and products in real time. Keep your shoes polished. Keep your roof from leaking keep your oil in your car. Right? We know that how is it that we have a planetary economic system that tells us that that's not true. So the next Industrial Revolution is really about reversing this relationship. That is understandable in his historic origin. If somebody said from the forest service, there's enough blame to go around for everyone. So let's not spend time figuring out how to allocate it. And what I say, it's too late the 20th century to be right. Who cares? Because all you do is going to make somebody wrong and how can you do anything creative when you're defending yourself so we can is sense. Look at the pasta saying it's something we can learn from but going ahead into the future is not a future where in a sense. We're going to hammer out some arduous compromise between Commerce and natural systems. What we're going to do is reimagine and redesign everything that it is we make every process every product everything that we touch we use we feel everything that were involved is from this building to its carpeting to what you eat to the clothing on your body to the cars you drive in the next 40 years will be completely different completely transformed in any country or company that prefers to think that that isn't going to happen is going to get broadsided by other companies like the carpet company. I mentioned his figured it out first and is going to figure out how to do it much more efficiently. And we are doing it now. If you look at the industrial system the vanity about it is that it's efficient and it's very difficult to ring out incremental efficiencies at this point. And again, it's the other way around from a Nature's point of view from a thermodynamic point of view. It's the most inefficient it ever has been again, if you look at these light bulbs Up in the ceiling. There's I don't want to have dead Mike here, but I'm trying to find what they are. But essentially just what is the source of power here in Duluth. Is it Cole? Is it low sulfur coal? Okay and hydro, okay. Well, let's take the coal power. The coal power plant is in correct me if I'm wrong because you're here but it's about thermodynamically about 30% efficient that is to say plus or minus. And if it's 30% you're doing a good job, by the way, and these light bulbs are about seven percent efficient. So now we can say that the energy starting in the coal Fields by the time it comes down here and illumination. We're getting two percent of the energy of that coal on our tables right now as we speak. This is interesting since its Dale it in the sunny outside and there's a roof above us, but that's we don't need this light at all. There's a light all around this building but that's another subject. The point is it's only two percent efficient. Also, if you look at the efficiency of our cars, it's about the same. Efficiency only 2% of the energy in the gasoline that you buy moves and stops you on your way to wherever you're going the other 98% of the energy is completely wasted both in the engine and drivetrain and moving and stopping the two or three or four thousand pounds of Iron and Steel aluminum plastic that surrounds you when you're moving and stopping and is similarly if you look at pesticides 4.1 billion pounds a year only 1% actually kill the arthropods are the reason question. I can go on and on if you start to really break down the system is terribly inefficient all noise. In a city or pollution always is the cost and the sign of inefficiency. The National Academy of Engineering in zone study has shown that 94% The materials used by American industry are discarded before the final product. We throw away 80% of what we use. After one time use within 6 months, which means that 99% of all the stuff that we mind extract ship transport pipe. In this country is wasted within 6 months of production. Now if you call that success I would like to talk to you afterwards. But what I call it is an opportunity. So our agenda for the next 50 60 years is right in front of us. We are the inefficiency arbitrageurs we can go in there and it stands and start to literally exploit that Delta exploit the difference between theoretical efficiency, which can never be attained hundred percent unattainable and the actual efficiency that is being attained right now and you're seeing this for example with the hypercar that Amory Lovins Paul MacCready from the Pasadena Art Center in Pasadena and GMO working on carbon fiber cars variable speed electric motors on all axles hydrogen fuel cells a motor scooter engine. No batteries flywheel a car that is safer than the call you drive now that weigh 600 pounds that can go a hundred fifty miles on a gallon of gas right now on the road to have cars that can go 300 miles on the drawing boards on a gallon of gas cars that can go from Dr. Los Angeles and go back to Denver before they need to fuel up. Again. This is part of the next Industrial Revolution buildings today the require no energy whatsoever coming in that actually produce net new energy. We're talking about concrete's that are using microfibers instead of rebar to reinforcing filaments of Steel that come from waste that are come from recycling old automobiles. This concrete can be 1/4 thickness of existing concrete with the same shear and stress and load capacity. We're talking about again area after area photovoltaics the new solar X photovoltaics six-week energy payout on embedded energy six weeks to return the energy that went into the photovoltaic. We're talking about a system and Industrial system where we will use less and less stuff and our lives will get better and better and we'll use More people because at the very heart of this is a major disjunction a dysfunction a problem with our system and that is you and I are working harder and harder to make fewer and fewer people more and more productive in a world that has more and more people and less and less stuff and the way we're making fewer and fewer people more and more productive is to use more and more stuff. And so the next Industrial Revolution is a reversal of death where we're going to make our stuff our natural resources more and more productive. We need more and more people to do it. And we can do it at less cost than we're spending now. We can be more prosperous. We will literally lower productivity increase our profitability with the neoclassical School says is impossible because we're putting natural capital on the balance sheet. And once you do it is completely different and you can see the arguments the fights the command and control regulation all the sort of uneasiness about this as the very difficult transitional phase of the next Industrial Revolution, and I'm going to stop now and and try to answer some of your questions, but I want to tell just two quick stories. And one is about Bill Strickland is African American man teaches Vocational School runs it in Pittsburgh and he said something to me once that I thought was of critical importance and that is that you cannot teach somebody eligible who doesn't want to be here and the fact the matter is we have to understand that we have created a world in which our younger generation is saying to us in so many different ways. I don't want to be here and they keep raising the bar on high-risk Behavior so that they can be listened to and that we can hear them and we don't hear them at all. So they keep getting into more high-risk behavior and we still don't hear them and they increase the ante up the ante and then what we do is build the world's largest penal colony. It's called the United States. And we call it Economic Development our last gubernatorial race in California. The largest contributor to Governor Wilson's campaign was the prison guards Association. It's the biggest job Creator in California today. And what I'm saying is in a system that is so wasteful that literally waste 94% of its resources before the final product 99% in six months is a system that cannot take care of its people A system that takes care of its living resources includes and we'll take care of its human resources. And essentially we have an industrial system. Essentially. There's marginalizing hundreds of millions of people on the planet today. It is the end of work if we continue to work the way we are and the fact of the matter is people need meaningful. Secure jobs here and everywhere and there is no way that government welfare or any surrogate can stand up and tell somebody they are valued person in society unless it's really true. They're too smart. They'll figure it out. They'll take the check and do something else with it, but they know it isn't true. And so we have to understand that this system of marginalization of Natural Resources is a system that marginalizes our human society as well. So when we begin to transform and redesign and reimagine what it is to be a citizen in an industrial age how to use things when we begin to replicate it imitate natural flows of nutrients and energy in Industrial Systems. We also began to work towards the restoration and the renewal Of our communities of our towns of our deracinated rural counties of our inner cities of those peoples. That have in a sense been marginalized by industrialism. So it's not that social degradation and environmental degradation are linked. They are exactly the same thing. They're exactly the same thing. And you start to deal with one you're dealing with the other and the last thing I want to tell is story. I told last night I said, I wouldn't talk to many more times but here goes but it was a story told me by Rich Collins professor at UVA who described an art teacher who asked her third grade students to draw something that they love and the first student Johnny. She said, what are you going to draw? And he said I'm going to draw a picture of my mother because I love her so much. It's good and she has the next to him what he was going to buy and sell and buy picture of my home a dog Tree House. Everything. Love it. Great. She has married what she was going to draw. Mary said, I'm gonna draw a picture of God and the teacher looked at her and said Mary we don't know what God looks like and she said no, but you will when I finished my drawing so I don't know what this looks like either what we're talking about. But we will when we finish the drawing and that will be in our lifetime. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Paul will be accepting questions. Now polyps will stay at the podium and Craig Lincoln our help from the Duluth News Tribune will be Manning the microphone down here and assisting you if you'd like to come up to the microphone and ask questions in your book. You spoke about green taxes and about revamping the US tax system and taking away personal income taxes, which I found very appealing. Could you summarize what your ideas on revamping the tax system for the for Ecology is yes, most people do find that appealing the tax system now is a curious one because it taxes what we value or makes what we value more expensive which is people and therefore but the place is no tax on what we this value or what we want to reduce and what happens is when you tax people very highly. You have an incentive to reduce them because they cost so much and so the tax system gives us a perverse incentive with how to deal with human beings and at the same time those things which are not only untaxed but in many ways subsidized by corporate welfare, we have a welfare system in this country for sure and it has very little to do with people has everything to do with corporations. We subsidize would water soil energy and minerals in the society to a tune of about 60 to 80 billion dollars a year. It makes a mockery of the plaintiffs and the criticism of our so-called welfare system that deals with children and suffering and hunger and poverty and that system itself combined with the fact that the things that we want to reuse less of are not taxed has led to a movement called both ecological tax reform or the tax shift. This movement is very big in Europe. And there's no question that it will in a sense take place and what they're talking about their and is Shifting over a 15 or 20 year period very gradually all taxes from income from human beings to taxes on primary materials pollution toxin the congestion topsoil loss Etc. But mostly energy and primary materials. Now what happens is this is a revenue-neutral tax shift and putting the side if you will the issues of regression progression, which can be dealt with and I don't want to go into detail right now the basically so at the end of that time you don't if you don't change your lifestyle you pay the same amount of taxes you did before so there's no change in real income. However, people are cheaper to use so that's an interesting thing. So there's likelihood that more people will be hired at the same time things stuff is more expensive to use Who's there's a likelihood that you want to try to reduce that? So it produces efficiency in terms of materials and it produces in a sense incentive to use more people to produce that efficiency. What's interesting about it though. Is that the existing system? The only incentive is to higher a lawyer or an accountant or to cheat or both and which is really a stupid incentive furthermore studies show that it costs us a minimum of 250 billion dollars a year to collect the five hundred billion dollars a year in income from Individual. Some people say it costs twice that that it's a net. It's a no net gain whatsoever. But we'll use the lower figure of a quarter trillion dollars. That's how much time our accountants are lawyers. We bookkeepers is an essentially spend working on something that's completely unprotected unproductive. And so what ecological tax reform is saying look at you know Studies have been done that show the cost of the gasoline a gallon gasoline is countries about five or six dollars. Amory Lovins quotes the barrel of oil from Kuwait causes 92 dollars a barrel after will be Galveston, Texas $17 for the Kuwaiti s and $75 to defense department to keep the sea lanes open till we get the oil out of Kuwait and we pay a dollar thirty nine the pump for something that's really costing a $6 a gallon and we in a sense get the wrong message from that pricing system. We don't see what the true cost of gasoline is at ninety two dollars a barrel. We can produce a renewable energy system in this country that will hire more people make us more secure reduce our need for the defense department our military spending and produce more prosperity in our communities and at the end and that's what happens when you have a sense a cost price system that's disintegrated that doesn't show us the true cost of things. So that's what ecological tax reforms about. The point is it is going to be implemented in Germany and Sweden probably first when it We will have to look at it here because they will in fact lower their labor costs and therefore gain a competitive Advantage with us. Greg okay layout in your term win-win plan of action that Advocates of both capital and natural systems can buy into Well, I can only give specific examples because there is no big thing the example I gave this morning with the mayor and the head of the Chamber of Commerce. And from Duluth was something that they did in Chattanooga which in Chattanooga. They have a secondary Wastewater problem of a sudden rainfall causing runoff that overwhelms sewage system goes into the river causes a fish kills and other problems and the solution under the old system is a secondary wastewater treatment plant that cost 80 million dollars and requires five million dollars a year in energy costs alone to move and transport all that water much less digging up all the streets for new PVC pipe and what William McDonough and Associates Associates did working in conjunction with the city of Chattanooga is designed a win-win system. And what that was is to retrofit all the parking lots and the parking medians in the city both private and public property. To pervious systems that respect to the hydrologic cycle and allowed water to reach rain to recharge the ground water instead of to run off on asphalt and macadam and that system when implemented would cost about thirty million dollars, but the interesting thing about it is that it would be a paid for by the private sector because it would mitigate and avoid the building of the secondary wastewater treatment plant and therefore avoid taxes in perpetuity. So it was cheaper for the Walmarts and for the tub insurances and for the companies in Chattanooga to retrofit their parking lots, then it was too in a sense of pay this tax in perpetuity. Now when I say retrofit what it means is putting permeable Paving systems where grass could grow on the parking lot using fast-growing trees in the medians in the perimeter. So it essentially you change the parking lot to a park and literally you look at it from a bird's-eye point of view. It's green. You don't see the cars in the summer and interestingly enough when We propose that the city of Chattanooga and so forth and looked at a at a at a sort of map of the city and we change the parking a loss of which there are many to this system. What happened is the whole temperature of the downtown dropped in to such a degree in the summer. It's a four million dollars a year in energy costs for air conditioning so that now the city was saving nine million dollars a year in energy costs from the five. It would have had to spend on wastewater treatment and we then proposed the city that they should flow to 10 or 15 million dollar bond issue still less than the 80 million and use the income to hire summer youth to maintain the parks. There is to learn arboriculture and pruning and techniques and so forth so that the young people would have summer jobs maintaining and pruning the trees so forth and then finally as a plan they were going to build a Botanical Garden. Out towards the outskirts of Southern Chattanooga and they still are but we suggested that they use this sort of idea of a city in a forest as a concept to make the whole city of Botanical Garden. Why just put it in around a fence inside offense want to make the whole city that way and then the idea was that you can actually walk around the parking lot since on in Chattanooga and there will be signage and you could see all the different species of trees because they grow in that area because biologically so diverse so that in a sense the parking lots became pedagogical and not only did the students learn by maintaining them but the citizens learned by parking within them and you had a win-win situation the labor for transforming the parking lots with local the money stayed in the city and proved Prosperity use less energy less resources less material and the 80 million dollar power plant was a turnkey operation going to Bechtel or floor, which the money would leave Chattanooga forever and never come back again and to be no so So that is a win win win win win win win? Another one from an audience member said I'm a member of two organizations that provide quality organic food and organic farm in a Whole Foods Cooperative grocery store. How does your business philosophy relate to Agriculture and food production? Organic food production or sustainable agriculture is a perfect case of an example of the The Dilemma that we Face both as business people and as consumers and that dilemma is simply this and the industry has been rewarded for literally a hundred plus years for externalizing costs or another way to put it for bringing in the lowest price product of comparable quality sometimes dubious into the marketplace and that has produced all these perverse incentives for companies to continue and radically to re-engineer the structure and lower their costs put their pollution someplace else to put the cost another generation and what have you no incentive to internalize your costs whatsoever in this system. And so two things. First of all tax reform is an internalization of those costs. And what happened is the organic sustainable farmer is basically internalizing their costs voluntarily, they are not putting pesticides into the soil into their Is into the aquifer into the lake they are not using high input methods of fertilizer. They do not cultivate intensely. They are taking care of the soil. They are at least maintaining if not increasing the quality of their top soil and therefore preserving it for future Generations. Its fertility and is productive capacity and then they go to the marketplace and we say, oh that's very nice, but it's too expensive and and it's not because basically they're competing against somebody who basically is in a sense destroying our patrimony Our Heritage, which is our soil in our water and our air because agricultural methods also destroy our are shed as they way they're presently practice. And so one of the things that again why the Germans and sweeteners are looking at tax shift is it when you tax energy at real costs and tax pollution attacks pesticides. What happens is that you find that as I said earlier the cheapest food Is the food is produced sustainably. It's not the food that's produced industrially in Kern County or near, Bakersfield, California. Another one. What role do you envision in this Reformation by our undergraduate student bodies and their faculties. Well, the I have gone to many universities and colleges and I've asked people this one question how many people this is to students are believe that they will live in a better world than they do now 40 to 50 years from now and I would say of 10,000 hand or students maybe five or six people raise their hand and I think that says more than anything we could possibly say about the affair with all due respect the irrelevance of current educational system, which is that we are producing students who are hopeless who feel that this world is going to hell in a handbasket and actually maybe right from their point of view. So what the educational system has to do is to start is start to break down the barriers within the disciplines and start to organize educational the pedagogy in the curricula around systems. Thinking systems theory and systems teaching so that people in a sense begin to have for the first time an idea of how this nonlinear self-regulating system AKA planet Earth really works because when I was an undergraduate if I pass my chemistry test I violated with my physics teacher told me and if I pass my physics teacher what he told me I violated with my economics teacher told me right because my economics teacher said that the second law of Thermodynamics is irrelevant, okay to economics and so forth. And therefore we know as human beings that that's not true that they're all relevant and that we need a synthetic or synthesizing or integrative method of Education that does two things one is explains how this thing does work or doesn't work as the case may be and second of all provides people with the picture of view of vision and Imagination of how it can work and therefore what they can do and that for an idea of how They can make this world a better place than it is now 40 to 50 years. When and where did it what cause do you think non fuse non-fossil energy resources will replace fossil energy resources the studies that have been done by Royal Dutch Shell, which is the second largest company in the world about the same size as Exxon is that within 30 years and this is their own internal studies. It has nothing to do with what they do want or don't want it's just what they see. Is it within 30 years that non renewable energy will be uncompetitive with renewable sources. So they're using a 30 year timeline and I think that they would probably exempt coal in the smallest sense of competitive. But if you start to factor in the pollution of coal as a cost and so forth and they would include call as well right now on our wind power their contracts are being signed and wind power at Five cents a kilowatt hour. They think that before the end of this decade wind power will be down to three point nine cents the new photovoltaic cells. I mentioned earlier and so forth. We'll be down to eight to ten cents a kilowatt hour probably within the next five to ten years to be no question that within say 15 years. It'll be cheaper to build a house Off the Grid than on the grid. We want to stay on the grid. However, in order to feed the grid so that the grid becomes a networked interactive system this Dynamic and efficient as opposed to isolated in the same way that the internet works precisely because we're on the net not because they're isolated from it. And the sense we will see the same thing in terms of energy flows. But as I say in some cases already, it is more competitive. It's just that it can't compete with the inertia the momentum or the perverse incentives of the system as it presently stands. Go ahead besides taxes. Do you see any other policy moves that could be done to bring our commercial systems in biological systems in line with each other? Well besides taxes that probably the most important thing is to admit that 10,000 regulations is not going to get us there because we have a hundred eight thousand chemicals inventions World War Two of which about 10,000 active production almost none of which have been studied really for the the effects that we should have studied them for which is really the transgenerational effects on species and on subsequent generations of human and Wildlife populations. And therefore there's never going to be a way we will ever get our hands around that one and figure out which safe at which tolerance and what's level in which environment at what time span. So what I think we need to do is go to a standard system very much way. The Germans are which is when the Germans are talking about The very soccer princip the return principle the idea that products that made like television should be returned with the setting is a standard. They don't tell the manufacturer what's in it or what shouldn't be in it. They just say you got to take it back. It's yours. Well, let me tell you when BMW and other companies, you know found out what was in their products. They went right back to their suppliers and said my goodness, you know, I mean, we don't want lead and cadmium in our Plastics. We don't want you know isocyanates. We don't want this stuff and they said well, you've never never asked, you know, what do you want? You know? Well, we want stuff that we can reuse. It doesn't kill our workers when we were use it. Well, okay. Well, so what's happening is that rather than create a you know minutiae a regulation about these substances are creating a level and a System of accountability and responsibility that makes the manufacture want to detoxify his or her workplace or product flow. And so I think what we have to think about is very imaginative simple standards than a sense produce Innovation as opposed to the what I call the LF EPA which is the lawyers full employment practice accident. When and to what extent will distributed decentralized workplaces be established as a preferred option for work energy and time efficiencies? Well, I would answer that question by saying however, did we think that huge large mess? Decentralized work facilities made sense and they actually have made sense increasingly as energy has become less and less expensive and that is basically 450 years the cost of a BTU has gone down and as the cost of BTU has gone down. It has made sense in a sense to centralize manufacturing distribution. Remember the used to be there is again now for other reasons, but you know local breweries and local bakeries everywhere and and and what happened is when two thin-walled glass and because our transportation systems is so cheap that the economies of scale favored mass production at some point whether it's through taxation recognizing external costs or through the actual rise of resource prices such as we began to see in the Pulp and Paper business. We're going to see energy crisis go up and I don't say that in the apocalyptic way that was talked about the 70s just going to go up with Going to run out of energy that was a big mistake will always have energy and various and Sundry forms. The thing is it'll go up to point. Then it will start to reward different methods of distribution different methods of working. We're already seeing that of course in telecommuting in the home office, but that has to do with two things that has to do with the fact of what we spoke about earlier about people being so darn expensive and how to use less of them. And nothing has to do with the fact that people are being laid off and restructured in re-engineered in such a rapid way in a sense. People are reassembling themselves as virtual, you know, appendages to a large corporations, but eventually you're going to see decentralisation for the same reason you saw centralization the forces that created it or going to in a sense reverse and I say, I don't say that as I don't know when or how but it will happen, I think Fairly soon, although not necessarily in the next 5-10 years. Paul I have to bring our program to a close at this point open Forum Town meetings are a joint production of Minnesota public radio stations in the Northland as well as the Duluth News Tribune providing daily coverage on issues of concern to Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan residents, and additional funding is provided by Norwest Banks Duluth combining local commitment services and the capital strength of a diversified organization at our guests visit to the twin ports also made possible today by Minnesota power company and by the University of Minnesota Duluth Spectrum lecture series again a thank you for coming. Thank you for talking to us Paul Hawken. Thank you.