Intrinsic Sustainable Development: Epistemes, Science, Business And Sustainability

Epistemes, Science, Business and Sustainability

Frank Birkin, Thomas Polesie

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9789814405164
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Ciencias en general

Sustainable development sets the agenda for the 21st century. Human technological capability and needs mean that nature is and will be challenged and damaged in many ways. Whilst many social and technological innovations are being made to improve our survival prospects, they are likely to be insufficient to avoid continued social and ecological stress and the prospect of global tension if significant changes do not come about.

The ideas in this book offer a new solution to sustainable development problems. They are concerned not with what we know but how we know, or rather how we order knowledge and create understanding in the human world.

This book shows that some of the fundamental practices that shape modern society, especially in the business world, are the unwitting cause of unsustainable development. By extrapolating the epistemic analysis of Michel Foucault, a major social scientist, this book identifies a new episteme. It outlines a new way of ordering knowledge that better serves sustainable development.

This pioneering book synthesizes the sciences of human and natural worlds and applies the findings to the creation of sustainable business models and equitable lifestyles for all.

Contents:

• Approach:
  • Just Business
  • Natural Momentum
  • Accounting Constructions
  • Open Societies
• Modern Times:
  • Passive Nature
  • Modern Knowledge
  • Square-Peg Business
• Primal Knowledge:
  • Breaking Free
  • The Primal Episteme
  • Primal Wisdom
  • Primal Business
• Consequences:
  • Resistance & Assistance

Readership: Graduate students in sustainable business, CSR and environmental sciences; social and natural scientists; business professionals and accountants.

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PART I

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APPROACH

CHAPTER 1 — JUST BUSINESS

Attitudes

Fifty years ago, a child ran with amazement along the canal tow-paths in Middleport at the heart of the Potteries in the UK. At that time, there were still working-canals and in the eyes of that child, the bargees who came to deliver flints and kaolin to the ceramic industry were larger than life figures from another world. In contrast to the dull smoke-black, back-to-back houses squeezed in between the old, numerous and high-walled ceramic factories or “pot-banks”, the bargees had decorated their barges and buckets, poles, plant pots, dishes, mugs and anything else at hand with extravagant floral designs, brief sayings or just blocks, bands and flourishes of the most vivid contrasting colours. Too small and shy to communicate with these demigods riding their stately “water-home-businesses”, the boy could only watch with wonder as the sun-tanned bargees travelled out through industrial horizons of slag-heaps, firms, steel mills, noise, smoke and fire into the world unknown. The boy had no access to a working knowledge of nature that had supported mankind, and all other species, throughout many millennia. Instead his lot would depend on what he could learn from the society and culture into which he had been born. In his case on the skills, knowledge, aptitudes and dedication he could bring to making “pots" or mining, i.e., serving business in man-made processes.

A hundred years before that particular boy had been born, it was known that Potteries people were not healthy. In 1842, James Till was 43 years old and in poor health, as were many of the small, undernourished, pale, grimy “pot-bank” workers of the time. James had worked in the ceramic industry all his life. He reported to the Children's Employment Commission (Part II, 1842) just how he had managed to survive that long: “I have been a dipper 26 years… The liquid used is not bad now as it used to be; there is, however, a great deal of lead used as well as arsenic. It has often affected me, but not to the excess that it has some men. I live very regularly; I keep myself regular, never giving way to intemperance, as some men. I ascribe nothing to myself in this respect, but to a higher source. The way in which it attacks us is first in the bowels and stomach. I take care to take medicine occasionally; I suffer now from some affection of the liver; if it was not induced by dipping; it is certainly aggravated by it…” Victorian society and its institutions had effectively condemned James to a life of sickness and early death.

But the boy by the canal was lucky. His society had provided him with the opportunity to obtain a university education and to keep his health. For whilst the plight of James Till and of his thousands of unknown colleagues had been addressed by many and significant improvements to working conditions and housing in Stoke-on-Trent, life expectancy in the Potteries remained low by national UK standards in the 1950's with infant mortality and premature deaths from heart disease and lung cancer at stubbornly high-levels at the close of the twentieth century.

The child grew up, acquired knowledge of this and that, but always remembered and thought about his past. What the older boy had experienced in his earliest years remained to inform his understanding and influence his interpretations. During his school years, he could feel empathy for those who suffered and this led to anger. At the same time, he felt disgust for those who caused suffering, but such moments became increasingly rare. There were also times when he imagined that there were no good people who could benefit from creating or supporting the kind of social institutions that inflicted such hardship on others, that anyone not somehow belittled, limited or reduced in a suffering world was guilty of at least negligence if not compliance if they did not actively work to stop such activities. Only in later life when he came to take stock of his own complicity did he come to appreciate that the world was far too complicated for such judgemental simplicity.

When the older boy left the Potteries, he travelled the world going far beyond any horizons that the bargees are likely to have known. He spent much time in East Africa, where the world had begun for mankind. There he noted the hardships of tribal life as well as its colour and vigour. He still remembers the Masaai with bright “barge reds and yellows in their extravagant bead-work decorations and the tight unyielding grip of an elderly Masaai woman dark-brown, gaunt and desperate among the red brick-hard mud and cattle-skeletons of a water-hole during a draught. He gained a little sense of what the truly wild was like in its dangers, its meaning and value for people, the determination of life to make something, even celebrations, out of the bare minimum of resources and, through his reading and observations, some knowledge of the astonishing complexity of relations that maintains life in an intricate and uncertain balance on our planet.

The boy has now grown old. More recently he has been to China. He notes the warmth of the Chinese people and their large number of social links, their personal relations going from the extended family into distant “guanxi bonds; the number of such links enjoyed by each Chinese person seems to be rivalled only by the variety of their foods. Primary colours, bright reds and yellows, persist in China as does a deep-seated sense of beauty and order or “harmony which is the defining concept of ancient China, as old as China itself, and is instantiated in the structures of the Forbidden Palace in Beijing.

The older boy has also acquired a technical education, an accountant’s view of the world. He is pleased to note that the Chinese rate of economic growth is close to a miracle since it has vastly improved the lives of many people so that in 2003 the per capita annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in China exceeded $US1,000 for the first time. China’s GDP is now 4 times larger than that of 1980. It has lifted more than 250 million Chinese out of poverty, i.e., almost more than four times the population of the UK or just over 80% of the population of the USA have been lifted out of poverty in just over 20 years. This is what business can do.

This is indeed something to applaud. This is worthy of the bright colours of the bargees, of the Masaai and of the Chinese themselves; a celebration of life and human ingenuity and of social institutions that work so very effectively to help the most needy. It is a powerful message of hope for all the world’s poor (In 2005, 36% of the total population of the Least Developed Countries lived on less than $1 a day whilst 76% existed on less than $2 a day (UNCTAD, 2008)). The future for mankind’s poor looked brighter.

But the suffering of the poor in Africa and China is real and immediate for the older boy who remembers the world of his childhood. It was as if the Chinese had recreated in just a few years the harsh, inhuman, disabling conditions of industry in Victorian England. China has lost 7-20% of its GDP per year to pollution and other environmental damage in the last 20 years with 10 billion Euros being lost in 1992 alone. Of 412 test sites on China’s seven main rivers in 2004, 58% of them were monitored to be too dirty for human consumption; of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, 16 are Chinese; and an estimated 30% of China’s cropland is suffering from acidification at an estimated cost of $US13 billion (Nierenberg, 2006, p. 7).

Many Chinese suffered and a smaller number benefitted. This was also true of Africa and of the world in general. But the older boy now identified himself as one of the world’s beneficiaries. He had security, enough food, clothes and many other goods and he had the free time to enjoy himself on vacation. But the ongoing suffering of others was something he had not wanted.

Nor do many of the other global “beneficiaries want suffering to continue. They do what they can to prevent it, but the suffering continues. Sometimes without knowing it, they make the situation worse. Sometimes they make more problems than they solve. Sometimes it seems as if they can do nothing right. The older boy worried about doing the right thing for many years; there are many people who promote their “solutions in technology, economics and social systems and the older boy considered these. But at the end of the day, technology, economics and social systems had created the world in which we live; these could not in themselves provide the answers he sought. The older boy could not get away from the simple understanding of the child running along the canal bank. The world in which he had to live was made by people, and it had to be how they related to the world that gave life and meaning to what they did; it had to do with attitude.

Origins

One of the first memories that the older boy can recall is of the child standing beside his mother waiting for a bus home. It must have been in the early 1950’s and they had stood outside the Leopard Hotel in Burslem, one of the five Pottery towns of Stoke-on-Trent and once a pioneering, major manufacturing centre during the early days of the great British industrial revolution that has transformed the world.

The Leopard Hotel has been in continuous use as a public house since at least 1765. This fact is established by Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the Wedgwood ceramic company, a pioneer of the industrial revolution. Josiah’s correspondence reveals that he dined at the Leopard Hotel in March 1765 with James Brindley, the master canal-builder. The two were planning the construction of a new canal to connect the Potteries to the Rivers Trent and Mersey. This was needed since the Potteries of Stoke-on-Trent desperately needed a better means of carrying their fragile ware to market other than the trains of mules then in use. In 1766, Josiah Wedgwood cut the first sod for the construction of the canal and Brindley carried it away in a wheelbarrow.

Wedgwood was born in Burslem the Potteries town that sits on a hill overlooking Middleport. As a boy, he had had a bout of smallpox that left him with a weakened knee. This misfortune was to be the making of a great industrialist for the weak knee meant that he could not work the foot-peddle of the “potter's wheel” and hence he had to abandon the usual apprenticeship and turn his attention to designing rather than making ware. He was very good at his new job and in 1759 he established the Josiah Wedgwood Company which still existed within the Waterford Crystal Group to celebrate a 250th anniversary in 2009.

Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) could have been called an “entrepreneur” in his day; the term having been coined by Richard Cantillon (1680-1734), the Irish economics theorist. Josiah was a dedicated perfectionist, experimenting for example with over three thousand samples to develop the “Poland Blue” glaze. He was also notably irascible during tours of his factory when his personal “quality control” generated much emotional heat as defective ware was smashed on the shop floor. But Josiah’s unflinching obsession with glaze established Wedgwood as a market leader and that level of quality endures in the culture of the firm to this day. But the man’s focus and determination had effects beyond the creation of fine table-ware.

Josiah was a great industrialist, important scientist, humanitarian, opportunist and “lunatick . His factory in Stoke-on-Trent sold wares to Queen Charlotte of England. He was one the handful of Englishmen who could be said to be founders of the Industrial Revolution that changed the world. As a scientist, his studies of better ways of assessing kiln temperature with a pyrometer, his new invention, earned him membership of the prestigious Royal Society in 1783.

But it was Josiah the humanitarian who responded to William Fox’s 1791 anti-slavery pamphlet, An address to the People of Great Britain on the propriety of abstaining from West India sugar and rum. Josiah suggested that the appeal of the pamphlet could be further enhanced with the advertisement on the title page being replaced by the emblem of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Josiah had a wood-cut made of this emblem and produced it as a jasper-ware cameo in his pottery factory. This emblem contains the world famous design of a kneeling man in chains above the slogan “Am I not a man and a brother?” He mass produced these cameos which also served as the seal for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and had them widely distributed. In 1788, a consignment of Wedge-wood’s cameos was shipped to Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia. They were there worn as bracelets and hair ornaments, and inlaid with gold as ornaments for snuff boxes as the anti-slavery movement became fashionable.

Josiah’s opportunism was the basis for a major break-through for the fledgling Wedgwood Company when they became the first firm in eighteenth century England to copy the exquisite Chinese tea-services which used a fine mix of bone china typically decorated with blue and white designs. Josiah took from the ancient legacy of Chinese ceramic masters. New kiln-firing skills in China had brought about a ceramic age in the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) to make the production of fine-glaze ware commonplace and the Tang dynasty (616-906 A.D.) introduced blue and white wares but by the end of the Yuan dynasty (1280-1367) and the beginning of the Ming dynasty (1368-1643) these wares were generally of a poor quality, possibly due to a shortage of cobalt. It was during Yung Lo’s reign (1403-1424), that Chinese techniques improved and their wares attained the famous refined white-body and rich blue decoration. Wedgwood reproduced these ancient Chinese skills and his own UK industry flourished; royalties were not paid.

As an active member of the Lunar Society, an informal learned society of prominent English industrialists and natural philosophers, Josiah earned the nickname “lunatick . Their meetings were held in Birmingham on nights when a full moon would make journeys home easier and safer on dark roads lacking street lighting. As exceptional thinkers looking to the future, their nickname’s pun on “lunatics did not escape their attention!

Josiah had been a huge force for good, but he also helped create the world into which the child running along the canal side had been born; a world that had caused so much human suffering. Josiah could have done much better in another society with different attitudes, values and institutions.

It is the case that Wedgwood had lived during a pivotal moment in history (perhaps we all live so?), and he had enjoyed more than his share of luck but his life-line also reveals his enormous personal capacity for knowledge, genuine human concern and egregious vision. This man did accumulate great personal wealth, but it would be incorrect to think that money had been his prime motivation; his many diverse achievements reveal that much. Josiah’s exceptional “Human Momentum” had been as complex as it had been powerful, but it could have been very different.

Within the shadow cast by Josiah’s work we find the suffering of people such as James Till and a degraded environment, the same degradation was experienced over a century later by the child by the canal. Josiah’s great legacy, the furthering of the Industrial Revolution, has changed the world and many millions of people enjoy its prosperity. But the shadow cast by the work of Josiah and his associates has grown to encompass China and the rest of the world.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) is of course famous for casting light within this shadow. He made use of that selfsame 1863 publication of the Children Employment Commission in his case against Capitalism; notably reporting a Stoke-on-Trent doctor’s comments that each successive generation of pottery workers is dwarfed and less robust than the previous.

Less systematically, but more dramatically, John Ruskin that greatest of all Victorian Englishmen had this to say about the shadow of the industrial revolution:

“Gentlemen of England, if ever you would have your country breathe the pure air of heaven again, and receive again a soul into her body instead of a rotting carcase, blown up in the belly with carbonic acid (and great that way), you must think, and feel, for your England, as well as fight for her: you must teach her that all the true greatness she ever had, she won while her fields were green, and her faces ruddy; and that greatness is still possible for Englishmen, even though the ground be not hollow under their feet, nor the sky black over their heads.”

The Crown of Wild Olive, lecture III, 123-4 (1866)

The work of reformers such as Marx and Ruskin and countless millions of others has helped to take much of the suffering away from many people. But we do not want to develop a future world in which reformers are required; no more than we should plan for an unhealthy or litigious world for the advancement of doctors and lawyers. We should plan to have a world that can celebrate without reservation and with confidence and heartfelt meaning just as the bargees, Masaai and ancient Chinese tried to do. To do that we need to better understand where we are coming from, to better understand our origins.

Survival

For our own modern times, evolution provides the sweeping basis for scientific explanations of origins and survival. Evolution as a concept is found at many levels from the individual to the collective and the conceptual. In biology, evolution is value free; it does not necessarily mean improvements. But when applied specifically to mankind, evolution does often imply some kind of improvement, but this is merely a reflection of the hubris of a self-aware species.

For many members of our own species, Homo sapiens, their evolution and survival is of the conceptual kind. This means that it is no...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: Approach
• PART II: Modern Times
• PART III: Primal Knowledge
• PART IV: Consequences
• References
• Index