Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [51]
Admittedly, WAGES and our half-dozen other social initiatives only begin to push Seventh Generation toward becoming an enterprise that truly restores and enriches society and the environment. But they are a big part of what gets me out of bed every morning and makes me eager to come to work. It’s my hope that our example will inspire other companies to move beyond the obligation to be less polluting, less wasteful, “less bad,” and to seek out innovative ways to be all nourishing, all replenishing, “all good.”
We’re just beginning the journey, but this much I know: our collective ability to transform the world requires us to raise our consciousness and ask better questions. What effect on the world do we seek to have? How can we help people realize their full potential? What role are we willing to play? I don’t know if these are the “right” questions, but I suspect they’ll lead to the right kind of conversations—deliberations that might even push other companies to embrace a model of deeper purpose. Our future depends on it.
Jeffrey Hollender is the cofounder and executive chairman of Seventh Generation, the leader in green household products. He is the co-author, with Fast Company founding and senior editor Bill Breen, of The Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Businesses Will Win (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), from which portions of this essay are adapted.
Getting Ready for Change
BILL MOLLISON
I had accepted that we were in real trouble by 1974 (the “Club of Rome” report1), and I live as though it is wise to make ready for trouble. After many years as a scientist with the CSIRO Wildlife Survey Section2 and with the Tasmanian Inland Fisheries Department, I began to protest against the political and industrial systems that I saw were killing us and the world around us. But I soon decided that it was no good persisting with opposition that in the end achieved nothing. I withdrew from society for two years; I did not want to oppose anything ever again and waste my time. I wanted to come back only with something very positive, something that would allow us all to exist without the wholesale collapse of biological systems.
By 1984 it had become clear that many of the systems we had proposed a decade earlier did, in fact, constitute a sustainable earth-care system. Almost all that we had proposed was tested and tried, and where the skills and capital existed, people could make a living from products derived from stable landscapes—although this is not a primary aim of permaculture, which seeks first to stabilize and care for land, then to serve household, regional, and local needs, and only thereafter to produce a surplus for sale or exchange.
The world has changed and will continue to do so. We have two choices with how to move forward: we can sit, curled up in a little ball, rocking back and forth while hoping it will fix itself, or we can get out there (age being no barrier as I’m eighty-two years old) and do something about it.
All of us would acknowledge our own work as modest; it is the totality of such modest work that is impressive. There is so much to do, and there will never be enough people to do it. We must all try to increase our skills, to model trials, and to pass on the results. If a job is not being done, we can form a small group and do it. (When we criticize others, we usually point the finger at ourselves!) It doesn’t matter if the work we do carries the “permaculture” label, just that we