sustainability_liwen

Sustainability


Hawken, Lovins and Lovins’ article on Natural Capitalism is both a very informative and perhaps logical reading of what is to come in the face of a capital driven economy that is obsessed with results on a purely statistical level.

What is very successful about Hawken, Lovins and Lovins’ article is the way upon which the authors reinvent connotations of the word capitalism. When one thinks about capitalism, often negative images of giant ruthless yet efficient corporations come to mind, very reminiscent of Kwinter’s manifestation of Houston, Texas. However, as brought up in Natural Capitalism, the running out of natural recourses available has caused previously perceived evil multinational corporations to reconsider their futures when what is described as 'natural capital' becomes limited. Thus upon taking into account the opportunity costs imposed by the diminishing natural resources available, companies are now reassessing what was once the traditional means of making profit – as advertised by current worldwide trade policies. What companies are looking into now, besides capital gain through resource exploitation is the need to take what Hawken, Lovins and Lovins’ calls ‘natural and social capital’ into account.

However despite the innovative yet highly optimistic outlook the authors present (‘for the first time, employees’ activities at work are fully and directly aligned with what is best for their children and grandchildren at home’) which is plausible since the environment is finally taken into account with a certain degree of seriousness, both Hawken’s (and Lovins and Lovins’) and Gumuchdjian’s articles fail to take into account the informal sectors of work that is currently one of the most problematic paradigms of our time, as manifested by Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums . In our current Post-Fordist society, (Marx’s) alienation coupled with deliberately permeable borders between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries, namely the relations between the US and Mexico, mean that the labor force responsible for much of the extensive yet rapid productions for many formal sectors, such as the construction (i.e. day laborers) or fashion industries (i.e. sweatshops), is much attributed to that of the informal sector, workers that are not registered citizens and thus cannot enjoy the spoils of being in the group which Hawken considers as 'social capital'. When Hawken, Lovins and Lovins’ mentions great hopes in ‘rebuilding human capital and restoring natural capital’, one cannot stop but question what exactly this human capital embodies.