Plenary Lecture at the 3^rd National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment:
“Education for a Sustainable and Secure Future”

Sponsored by the National Council for Science and the Environment

Thank you, Tony.  What an honor to be introduced by an American hero!  Ambassador Benedick, ladies and gentlemen, it is a privilege to speak to this august group.  I bring greetings from Atlanta.  I know my accent is strange to most of you (and I have a bit of a lisp), so tune your ears while I begin with a story.

It has been going around.  If you’ve heard it, please bear with me.  It makes a point.  It seems that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson go on a camping trip.  Night comes on, and they go to bed.  In the middle of the night, Sherlock Holmes wakes up and punched Watson awake.  "Watson, what do you see?"  Watson looks up and in his inimitable way says, "Meteorologically speaking, I see we're in a high pressure zone.  The sky is perfectly clear.  Cosmologically speaking, I see an expanding universe with billions and billions of galaxies, each containing billions and billions of stars.  Astronomically speaking, I see our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and five first magnitude stars.  There is Altair, Arcturus, Deneb, Vega, and Regulus.  Astrologically speaking, I see that Mars is in Capricorn and Saturn is in Sagittarius.  Chronologically speaking, I deduce from the position of the stars that it's 3:15 a.m.  What do you see, Holmes?"  Holmes hesitates a moment, collects himself, and then replies, "Watson, you idiot.  Someone has stolen our tent.”  Hang onto that punch line.  We’ll come back to it.

Perhaps your breakout sessions yesterday obviated everything I intend to say.  Perhaps not.  Dr. Colwell’s remarks last night encouraged me to say it anyway.                                       

I am a Georgia Tech engineering graduate, Class of ‘56,  the Founder, Chairman and, for 28 years, the CEO of Interface, Inc. – a $billion manufacturer of carpets, textiles, and architectural products for institutional and commercial interiors.  I am an industrialist, but I changed my view of the world in the summer of 1994.  After 21 years of unwittingly plundering the earth, I read Paul Hawken’s book The Ecology of Commerce (Harper 1993).  It came for me at a propitious moment.  Our customers, especially interior designers, had begun to ask, “What’s Interface doing for the environment?”  So, I had agreed, reluctantly, to speak to a newly assembled environmental task force of Interface people to address this awkward question.  Awkward, because I could not get beyond, “We obey the law; we comply.”

Hawken’s book changed that.  It convicted me on the spot, not only as a plunderer of Earth, but also as part of an industrial system that is destroying Earth’s biosphere, the source and nurturer of all life.   I began to understand, reading Hawken, things I never learned in college:  that there is red ink everywhere – that every life support system and every living system that make up the biosphere (where we and the other creatures live), that spherical shell that is 8,000 miles in diameter (the diameter of Earth) and only about 10 miles thick -- extending about five miles downward from sea level into the depth of the oceans, and about five miles upward into the troposphere, that spherical shell that contains and nurtures all life – on a basketball-size Earth, tissue paper thin – that every life support system and all the living systems that together comprise the biosphere are stressed and in long-term decline, and the rate of decline is accelerating: Where is the red ink coming from?

• Polluted rivers and streams from municipal, industrial, agricultural, and construction sources.    
• Polluted and over-fished oceans.  PCBs accumulating in orcas.  Fish stocks collapsing, coral reefs dying. Scuba divers know it’s true.    
• Lakes polluted, many dead from acid rain, industrial pollution, and agricultural runoff; forests, too, dead and dying from acid rain and atmospheric ozone, originating in our cities, drifting into our rural areas; affecting crop yields adversely, too.  We don’t think about this in our land of abundance, but it is of special importance to China.  Increasing pollution from advancing industrialization will determine the balance of whether China can feed itself.  A China that cannot feed itself is everyone’s problem.  Yours, mine, our children’s, our grandchildren’s, and theirs and theirs.    
• Disappearing wetlands -- the beginning of the food chain, that leads to us at the other end.    
• Devastated rainforests, a critical lobe of Earth’s lungs; old growth forests (haven for bio-diversity) almost gone, mostly clear cut, destroying habitat for countless species.    
• Depleted and polluted aquifers.  In parts of India and China water tables are falling 10 feet a year.                                
• Spreading deserts.    
• Farmlands, denuded of topsoil, increasing in salinity from irrigation, and toxified by pesticides, turning into deserts.    
• Range lands, pushed to the limit of their carrying capacity to feed the livestock which feed us.    
• Atmosphere, polluted by countless toxins, CO₂ and other greenhouse gases building up, inexorably to create climate aberrations -- global warming; the scientific debate about global warming is over; the debate is now political and economic.  The science is clear and compelling.  The threat is real; 2600 scientists from all over the world agree; a dwindling handful hold out in skeptical disagreement.  Another U.N. report recently published says average temperatures could rise 10 degrees Fahrenheit this century.  That would be devastating!  The precautionary principle dictates: We must act as if global warming is real, the risk from not acting is just too great.  The Kyoto protocol were it ratified into treaty, would make only a tiny dent in the total problem.  It’s only a beginning, and not nearly enough.  Many scientists are advising a strategy of adaptation.  It’s too late to prevent, so adapt to, drastic changes in Earth’s climate in the 21st Century, and work now to mitigate the 22nd Century.  We have trouble getting serious about a time frame like that, that extends beyond our own lifetimes.    
• And even the stratosphere itself, beyond the troposphere in which ozone shields us from deadly u.v. radiation.    
• All severely stressed by man-made degradation.

I know there are exceptions, and they ought to be celebrated:  Maybe the ozone hole is healing.  Let’s hope the current report is a trend, not a blip. You can now see across the street in Pittsburgh.  The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland no longer catches on fire.  There are eagles again on the upper reaches of the Mississippi.  The Great Lakes have stabilized.  In London, there are fish in the Thames at Tower Bridge.  (The Minister of the Environment, 40 years ago, took the Pariliament down there and made them drink out of it -- it didn't take them long to clean it up! It illustrates what “The Power of One" can do.)   In many western countries, toxic emissions are down over the last 25 years.  British Columbia’s old growth is finally being protected.  Beach closings are down in New Jersey. (For God’s sake!)  Well, down is better than up.  Clams are back in Puget Sound.

But the salmon are disappearing from the rivers that feed Puget Sound.  We need many more victories to celebrate, because the general pattern worldwide is frightening and getting worse.  For every positive exception, there are huge deficits on the other side of the ledger: Beijing, Shanghai, Bangkok, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Cairo, Delhi, the Amazon, the spreading Sahara and Gobi, and on and on, eventually my city, Atlanta, and your city. Some of those places seem far away until we remember, there is only one global biosphere.  China's sandstorm today becomes Denver’s fallout next week.  One result of the stress from human intervention is that species are disappearing into extinction at a rate unknown on Earth since the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.  This is not good news for our species, either, because we are fouling our own nest, too.  We cannot live without those life support systems anymore than the other species can, though in our denial and arrogance, we may think we can.

And, as if that were not enough, you can add to that list a growing nuclear cleanup that no one knows how to deal with.  What language shall we use to instruct people 20,000 years from now how to deal with this legacy of nuclear waste we are leaving them?  (What is it?  Seventy-seven thousand metric tons and counting, in the U.S. alone.)  No language on Earth is 20,000 years old!  And to that, add one billion of Earth’s people unemployed; and to that add another billion living in starvation conditions; and another billion hanging on by their fingernails.  Half of Earth’s people, human beings, in serious trouble, subsisting on less than $2 a day, many on much less. Two-thirds of humanity left out by the present economic system, except perhaps to be exploited.   Social equity (attention to human capital) like the environment (attention to natural capital), lost in the shuffle, as we focus myopically on financial capital through the lens of a misbegotten economic system.  We cannot escape the consequences of that misplaced focus.  We witness the ravages of AIDS and we wonder, “What’s next?”  September 11^th gave us one “what’s next.”  Now, we wonder, what’s next?

Furthermore, especially for companies like mine, finite, exhaustible, non-renewable resources -- natural gas, coal, and oil -- Earth’s stored natural capital, capital, mind you -- being gobbled up at an obscene rate, most of it burned for energy and, in the process, converted into carbon dioxide to exacerbate the greenhouse effect.  And the beat goes on -- it is a crisis: the crisis of our times and all time to come.  Because it is a funeral march to the grave, if we don’t figure out and do what’s necessary to reverse the deadly trend.

Back to that task force and that first speech, I was struck to the core by Hawken’s central point, that only business and industry, the major culprit, is also large enough, powerful enough, pervasive enough, wealthy enough, to lead humankind away from the abyss toward which we are plunging.  It was an epiphanal experience for me, a “spear in the chest”, and the resultant speech went way beyond compliance, to put our company on the path toward sustainability.  I myself became a recovering plunderer.  At Interface we call this new direction, climbing Mount Sustainability, the point at its peak symbolically representing zero environmental “footprint” – our definition of sustainability for ourselves, to reach a state in which our petro-intensive company (energy and materials) takes nothing from the earth that is not naturally and rapidly renewable, and does no harm to the biosphere: “zero footprint.”

We simply asked ourselves in the summer of 1994, “If Hawken is right, who will lead?"  Unless somebody does, nobody will.  It is axiomatic.  I asked, "Why not us?”  The people of Interface responded magnificently, taking on this higher corporate purpose as their own.  It has added meaning to their lives and, at the same time, engaged our customers, suppliers and communities in countless opportunities to do the right thing for Earth.  “Doing well by doing good” has emerged as a viable paradigm, perhaps THE  paradigm of true business success that will prevail in the 21^st Century.  It is a better way to bigger, and more honorable, profits – and beyond profits, to purpose; beyond success to significance.

We are approaching the challenge of Mount Sustainability on seven fronts –  the seven faces of the mountain.  The entire industrial system, including the educational sector, must climb these same seven faces, if it is to become sustainable:

This is our Master Plan: