Appreciating Natural Gifts

Agriculture

Appreciating Agriculture

Food

Appreciating Food

Appreciating Energy

Appreciating Time

Government

Appreciating Government

Education

Appreciating Education

Religion

Appreciating Religion

Business

Appreciating Business

Chandler, Alfred Dupont.  The Visible Hand. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,  1977.  ISBN 0674940512, Page 14

Little institutional innovation occurred in American business before the 1840s.  Why was this so? As long as the processes of production and distribution depended on the traditional sources of energy—on man, animal, wind power— there was little pressure to innovate.  Such sources of energy simply could not generate a volume of output in production and number of transactions in distribution large enough to require the creation of a large managerial enterprise or to call for the development of new business forms and practices.  The low speed of production of the slow movement of goods through the economy meant that the maximum daily activity at each point of production and distribution could be easily handled by small personally owned and managed enterprises.

Grant, Neil.  The Industrial Revolution. United States of America:  1973.  ISBN 0531008088, Page 64

The astonishing expansion of U.S. manufacturing after the Civil War can most briefly be indicated by a few more figures.  In 1850 capital invested in manufacturing totaled $533 million; in 1880 it totaled $2,790 million.  In the same thirty years, the total value of products increased from $1,019 million to $5,370 million; the number of wage earners from less than one million to 2.7 million.  By 1913 the United States accounted for 35.8 percent of the world total of manufacturing production.  Germany, its nearest rival, had 15.7 percent; Britain (including Ireland), third largest, had 14 percent.

Slater, Robert,  Leadership -- Get Better Or Get Beaten, U.S.A.:  1994.  ISBN 078630256, Page 99

There is something about speed that transcends its obvious business benefits of greater cash flows, greater profitability, higher share due to greater customer responsiveness and more capacity from cycle time reductions.

Speed exhilarates and energizes ... This is particularly true in business, where speed tends to propel ideas and drive processes right through functional barriers, sweeping bureaucrats and their impediments aside in the rush to get to the marketplace.

Miller, Fred J. “Prevention of Wastes in Industry.” Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 43 (1921): 1097-1103.  Page 1097, cited in Knoedler, Janet T., “Veblen and technical efficiency.” Journal of Economic Issues, Dec97, Vol. 31 Issue 4, p1013, 16p

Those who would be supposed to have the greatest incentive for the prevention of industrial wastes are found to be responsible for the major portion of the wastes that occur.... they, the owners and directors of industries, are the ones and the only ones, who can adopt effective means to stop these wastes.

Elmar Altvater, The Future of the Market.  New York: Verso  1993.  ISBN  0860914259

Page 183

Market efficiency has been achieved by drawing upon nature’s reserves as if they were limitless, as if people did not have to be sparing with both inner and outer nature.  A ‘positive feedback mechanism’ may thus be set up between the economic system and nature.  Interest-rate signals force the production of a surplus through the overexploitation of natural resources.  The degraded natural basis of production and consumption then makes it more difficult to achieve profits commensurate with the rate of interest.  The debt crisis has negative ecological effects, while the degradation of nature intensifies the debt crisis.  If tight management of flows then leads to a reduction in stock levels, the traditional models break down and the transition to ‘positive feedback economics’ becomes unavoidable.

Economic behaviour is blind to its natural bases as long as these do not make themselves felt as economic limits—that is, as a cost burden within the economic system.  The social ties between human beings, mediated by commodities and money, involve the ‘nature-blindness’ of behaviour.  For the mirroring of human sociality as a natural property of the things people produce—that is, the ‘fetishism of the commodity’—also entails the screening out of the natural conditions of social behaviour.  The individual commodity (and qua commodity every thing is individual) does not make visible the conditions attending its production and consumption.  For example, advertising gives the details about a car’s horsepower, maximum speed, acceleration, comforts, optional extras, retail price, and so on; it attracts customers by playing on prestige or convenience value.  But it says nothing about the using up of the countryside for highway construction; it remains silent about the inevitable victims of road accidents, or the vast quantities of water and energy used in the process of production.  In the individual thing social relations are only imperfectly reflected, as in a magic mirror which blanks out the ‘celestial constraint’ of the thing’s production and consumption.  The commodity is narcissistic: it sees only itself reflected in gold.  In the first chapter we observed that reified socialization, stemming from the fetish character of commodities, has a disinhibiting effect which speeds up the evolution of society.  But now we need to discuss whether the very reification of social relations - whereby people relate to each other with money and commodities on the market - does not cause the natural constraints on production and consumption to disappear from the consciousness of society.  It would appear that nature again becomes relevant only when it imposes additional costs, or when its destruction lastingly disrupts the conditions of human life.  Then a flash of lightning makes it clear even to reified consciousness that economic compulsions - such as those brought to bear in the servicing of debt - interfere with the natural conditions of business activity.  But when the destruction of nature eventually ‘makes itself felt’ in economic categories (costs), it is often too late for any alternatives, especially since the processing of ecological problems into economic calculation does not move beyond the reification that resulted in the ‘forgetting of nature’.

Interferences between economy and ecology do not come into the field of vision so long as the former is seen in principle as a balanced system, and so long as time and space are not given explicit significance (as causal elements of transaction costs) within production and consumption, the exchange process and the sphere of distribution.  In an economy without spatial or temporal constraints, economic analysis can perfectly well dispense with the transformation of raw materials and energy, leaving this to other branches of science.  Once it is assumed, however, that all economic processes have a spatio-temporal location, the analyst’s attention turns not only to the instabilities of the market (which have been discussed in Part II above) but also to the explicit significance for economic theory of the transformation of materials and energy.

The question immediately arises how it is ever possible to do this, without spiriting away the initial problem that the transformations of materials and energy are defined as monetized processes in which their special natural quality is disguised.  For with the category of money, economics manages to banish time and space from its system, given that the future is ‘discounted’ in the present and spatial distance is levelled in arbitrage speculation.  The ‘resource economics’ approach, based on Hotelling’s classical rule, has not been lost for answers.  Solow, for example, compares (a) the currently discounted net proceeds from the exploitation of a resource over the period between today and some future date, with (b) the market rate of interest obtainable on money assets, and assumes that the value of the resource also increases over time.  But such a market-centered comparison contains a number of implication that make it rather questionable.  First, it presupposes that the market rate of interest defined the rate of exploitation of exhaustible resources and hence an optimal path of resource use.  As we have seen in the chapter on financial instabilities, however, the market rate of interest offers no guarantee of optimal allocation.  Second, it assumes that between present and future there will be economic growth of the same order as the rate of interest— and in any case that new resources will be used.  For growth could not take place if the level of exploitation of the one resource involved in decision-making were already fixed.  This suggests that resources are, in Hirsch’s words, essentially ‘positional goods’ whose individual use-value depends upon the use-value properties of other resources.  Yet if the Hotelling rules are applied in such a way as to take account of the interference between different resources, they are unable to yield any unambiguous results.  Third, the rules posit a (privately owned) isolation of resources, and hence a splitting of complex ecosystems which simplifies them into legally definable and economically tradeable property rights.  Fourth, if the decision-making calculus is built around the rate of interest, the forward vision of economic actors will become increasingly ‘short-sighted’ the higher the interest rises.  Fifth, it is necessary to act as if future markets and the preferences of future individuals were already known, so that the present generation lives ‘vicariously’ for those to come.  Here at the latest it becomes clear ‘that there is no way of escaping an ethical choice, sometimes hidden away in the assumptions of the model’.

Wheelwright, Steven. C.  ­Revolutionizing Product Development.­  New York:  1992.  ISBN 0029055156,  Pages 4 and 5

Rigorous international competition, the explosion of market segments and niches, and accelerating technological  change have created a set of competitive imperatives for the development of new products and processes in  industries as diverse as medical instruments and automobiles, textiles, and high-end disk drives.  Exhibit 1-1  identifies three of these imperatives -- speed, efficiency, and quality – and suggest some of their implications.  To succeed, firms must be responsive to changing customer demands and the moves of their competitors.  This means that they must be fast.  The ability to identify opportunities, mount the requisite development effort, and bring to market new products and processes quickly is critical to effective competition.  But firms also must bring new products and processes to market efficiently.  Because the number of new products and new process technologies has increased while model lives and life cycles have shrunk, firms must mount more development projects than has traditionally been the case utilizing substantially fewer resources per project.  In the U.S. automobile market, for example, the growth of models and market segments over the last twenty-five years has meant that an auto firm must mount close to four times as many development projects simply to maintain its market share position.  But smaller volumes per model and shorter design lives mean resource requirements must drop dramatically.   Effective competition requires highly efficient engineering, design, and development activities.

Being fast and efficient is essential but not enough.  The products and processes that a firm introduces must also meet demands in the market for value, reliability, and distinctive performance.  Demanding customers and capable competitors mean that the ante keeps going up –requirements of performance, reliability, ease of use, and total value increase with each product introduction.  When competition is intense firms must attract and satisfy customers in a very crowded market.  More and more this means offering a product that is distinctive; that not only satisfies, but also surprises and delights a customer.  Moreover, attention to the total product experience and thus to total product quality is critical.

Brian Tokar, Earth for Sale.  Boston: South End Press, 1997.  ISBN 0896085589

Page 195

“Market efficiency has been achieved by drawing upon nature’s reserves as if they were limitless,” Altvater argues, explaining that:

A “positive feedback mechanism” may thus be set up between the economic system and nature.  Interest-rate signals force the production of a surplus through the overexploitation of natural resources.  The degraded natural basis of production and consumption then makes it more difficult to achieve profits commensurate with the rate of interest.  The debt crisis has negative ecological effects, while the degradation of nature intensifies the debt crisis.

Page 255

47. Elmar Altvater, The Future of the Market (London and New York:  Verso, 1993) p. 183 ff. 

A California-based school of “socialist ecologists” has also demonstrated the anti-ecological nature of capitalist economics and capitalist society.  Under the theoretical leadership of political economist James O’Connor, they have shown that environmental pollution and resource depletion are necessary consequences of capitalist accumulation. 

Their Marxist political orientation, however, has restrained their full acceptance of an ecological

orientation that acknowledges the natural world as more than an “external factor of production,” or human

society as capable of being organized around anything but its economic activity.  See, for example, James

O’Connor, “Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, no. 1,

fall 1988, pp. 11-38

Katherine Barkley and Steve Weissman, “The Eco-Establishment,” Ramparts magazine, May 1970, vol. 8, no. 7,  50, 54

Like the original conservation movement it is emulating, today’s big business conservation is not interested in preserving the earth; it is rationally reorganizing for a more efficient rape of resources ... and the production of an ever grosser national product.

Welsh, Jack, General Electric’s CEO quoted in Janet Lowe’s Jack Welsh Speaks Wiley, New York, 1998 ISBN 0471242721, Page 108

 “Productivity is the belief that there is an infinite capacity to improve anything.”

Robert J. Samuelson, “Productivity’s False Facade,” Newsweek, March 24, 2003.  Page 46

It’s tempting to believe that productivity—especially improved technology—will rescue the economy.  The grounds for skepticism start with history.  In the Great Depression some industries experienced rapid productivity gains, as economic historian Michael A. Bernstein of the University of California, San Diego, has pointed out.  Food marketing was one.  Small grocery stores gave way to new supermarkets; there were 300 in 1935 and almost 5,000 by 1939.  Refrigerator sales boomed—from about 800,000 in 1930 to 2.3 million in 1937.  Electrification raised light-bulb sales sharply.  But these and other gains couldn’t overcome otherwise dismal economic conditions.

We also need to remember that economic statistics are just numbers.  Their significance depends on what causes them to move.  Productivity—the statistic—is simply a bit of arithmetic.  Total output is divided by the hours people work.  If output rises faster than work hours, productivity increases.  This is what usually happens and it suggests better technology, better management and better workers.  It’s a beneficial process that promotes economic expansion. 

With lower costs, companies can increase wages and profits. 

Higher incomes then drive higher spending.

But productivity—the statistic—also increases if work hours drop while output only sputters.  That’s what actually occurred in both 2001 and 2002.  Americans in private businesses (excluding government and nonprofit organizations) worked 187.61 billion hours in 2002, which was 2 percent less than in 2001.  In turn, employment hours in 2001 were 1.3 percent less than in 2000.  There was more unemployment; people with jobs worked slightly fewer hours.  Since 1947, there have been only 15 years when employment hours have dropped and only three other instances of consecutive annual-declines in 1957 to '58, 1970 to '71 and 1991 to '92).

Burroughs, Edgar Rice.  The Efficiency Experts. Missouri:  1966. Page 45

“What do you have to know to be an efficiency expert?” asked the girl.

“From what I saw of the bird I just mentioned the less one knows about anything the more successful he should be as an efficiency expert, for he certainly didn’t know anything.  And yet the results from kicking everybody in the plant out of his own particular rut eventually worked wonders for the organization. 

If the man had had any sense, tact or diplomacy nothing would have been accomplished.

From G.R.  Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: a Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899-1914, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971, Page139

Lord Roseberry was a most wonderful man,

He had every species of scheme on his shelf.

But ‘efficiency’ still formed the gist of his plan,

And ‘efficiency’ meant nothing else than himself.

Luther H. Gulick, M.D. The Efficient Life New York, 1907, Page 8

The conditions for efficiency in the case of the ordinary day labourer are not complex.  His work is that of a coarse machine, turning out, like a grain thresher, a great amount of production relatively low in grade.  His efficiency is but little disturbed by constant feeding upon indigestible victuals, by frequent carousals, by a dirty skin and bad air.  Low-grade production does not need a high-grade organism.

Tichi, Cecelia.  Shifting GearsTechnology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America.  University of North Carolina Press.  1987.  ISBN 0807841676, Page 9

For the intellectual center of Taylorism was not the worker, but the mastermind.  It was not the rank and file but the engineer whose formulations would prevail and endure.

Shuman, Michael.  Going Local.  New York: Free Press, 1998. ISBN 0684830124 Page 48

Efficiency, economists argue, requires specialization.  The narrower the range of tasks an individual performs, the better he or she becomes at it.  But, as any person who has sweated on an assembly lone knows, a job reduced to the turning of a screw does little to satisfy the soul or self-esteem.  Real people are not satisfied with the role of Chaplinesque automatons that economists have assigned them, and they look for more from a job than just a paycheck.  They seek a challenge, pride, and respect.  And, if given the choice, many people will gladly choose a more exciting job with less take-home pay....

Clifford Stoll,  Silicon Snake Oil, New York:  1995 ISBN 0385419937 Pages 74, 75

Past generations of millwrights, blacksmiths, and machinists are almost gone.  Theirs was a real workplace, of forges, lathes, and anvils.  Nothing virtual about a diesel engine or hydraulic press.  They built iron horses with muscles of steam, skyscrapers with brick and rivet and lime. We’re fast replacing their hard mechanical world with a gossamer network of fibers.  Our is one of artificial reality, software tools, and expert systems.  There’s nothing to touch; no inner workings to admire.  The pendulum clock from sixty years ago attracts more attention than today’s more accurate quartz watch.  Makes me wonder what history we’re leaving behind.  Footprints across an artificial reality are as evanescent as data on the Ethernet.

Today, gone is craft, replaced by career.  Instead of workers on our feet, we’ve become sedentary professionals, entering data into computers.  As the analog world of our parents gives way to the digital universe of our children, I compare the tools of these two environments.  Handwriting is replaced by word processing, mail by e-mail, accounting books by spreadsheets, rotary dials by Touch-Tones, drafting by CAD.  Efficient improvements, yes, but one thing saddens me.  I sense little love for this technology, and even less appreciation for the wonders of this digital age.  Once, kids read of Tom Swift’s adventures in electric cars and high-speed aeroplanes.  Today, there’s a blase acceptance of instant global communications and microelectronic wizardry.  These are impressive accomplishments, deserving of curiosity, awe, and praise.  For all my ambivalence about the barrenness of technoculture, I’m blown away by the devices themselves.  Once, you brought a six-transistor radio to the beach.  Now, there’s a half million transistors in every cellular phone. 

Johann Kepler needed six years to analyze the motion of Mars; my pocket calculator can do this in a minute.

Yet despite the footsore cliche of an information revolution, I rarely hear genuine esteem for the internal workings of today’s technologies.  Hardly anyone takes apart a computer just to admire the designers’ work.  Kids don’t disassemble VCRs to figure out how they work—I wish they would! There are no Heathkits to let you solder your own modem.  Indeed, it’s a rare hobbyist that wires his PC into an experiment.  I guess today’s experimenters build things in software, without ever touching a soldering iron.  The hocus-pocus is inside the program.  It’s cleaner this way—nothing to burn or zap, and you don’t need a voltmeter.

What happened to home-brewed and breadboarded circuitry? Where’s the joy of mechanics and electricity, the creation of real things?  Who are the tinkerers with a lust for electronics? We’ve become a nation of appliance operators, who take pride in what we own, rather than what we build.  Remind me, in an odd way of my fortune cookie from The Great Wall Chinese Restaurant: “Work to become, not to acquire.”

Stewart, Thomas A.  Intellectual Capital. New York: 1997.  ISBN 0385482280, Page 40

More and more people spend their working day in the realm of information and ideas.  Overall, according to calculations by Stephen R. Barley, professor of industrial engineering and industrial management at Stanford University, the share of the American labor force whose jobs primarily involve working with things (farmworkers, operators and laborers, craftspeople) or delivering nonprofessional services (hotel and restaurant workers, distribution workers, retail clerks, domestic servants, barbers and beauticians, health aides, etc.) will have fallen by more than half by the turn of the century, from 83 percent in 1900 to an estimated 41 percent; those who work chiefly with information (in sales, managerial and administrative, professional and technical, or clerical jobs), were 17 percent of the workforce in 1900 and will be 59 percent as the new century dawns.

Stephen L. Talbott,  The Future Does Not Compute:  Transcending The Machines In Our Midst; Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly and Associates;  1995  ISBN 1565920856,  Pages 5 and 50

Where freedom once required the fateful exercise of an enlightened, heart-warmed will, it is now enough to play with clickable choices on a screen.... All the talk about individual empowerment through electronically accessible information really has more to do with the differential advantage for a few players early in the game than it does with any fundamental social change.   It’s rather like the pyramid scheme:  those who are quickest off the mark win big; the rest must hope eventually to climb back to the break-even point in a game that is now speeded up and very likely more demanding than it was before....  Every new leap of technology simply cranks up the speed of the game another notch.  What improves my efficiency does the same for the millions of other players.

Shenk, David.  Data smog : Surviving the Information Glut. San Francisco: Harper; ISBN: 0062515519 1997. 

Page 23

I can vaguely recall a phone conversation with a college girlfriend shortly after graduation, which she complained about her office fax machine, yet another appliance sweeping the nation.  It wasn’t that her fax didn’t work, but rather that it was working too well.  Because it transmitted information across the country and world so quickly, she said, it had actually altered the expectations of work time, becoming a kind of taskmaster that insisted on faster and faster work.

Page 30-1

In 1971 the average American was targeted by at least 560 daily advertising messages.  Twenty years later, that number had risen sixfold, to 3,000 messages per day. In the office, an average of 60 percent of each person’s time is now spent processing documents. Paper consumption per capita in the United States tripled from 1940 to 1980 (from 200 to 600 pounds), and tripled again from 1980 to 1990 (to 1,800 pounds). In the 1980s, third-class mail (used to send publications) grew thirteen times faster than population growth. The typical business manager is said to read 1 million words per week. As of 1990, more than 30,000 telemarketing companies employed 18 million Americans, and generated $400 billion in annual sales.

Page 35

Today, the vultures still feed, occasioning a billion-dollar market for antacids like Tagamet and Pepcid AC.  For all of our abundance, ours is also an age of unprecedented stress, strain, headaches, and digestive problems—so much so, in fact, that tension has become one of our most vibrant industries.  Three out of four Americans complain of chronic stress.  Two out of every three visits to the family doctor are thought to be stress-related, and the three top-selling prescription drugs are for ulcers, depression, and hypertension. 

Stress is also partly to blame, psychologists say, for the startling 300 percent increase in depression over the course of this century.

Page 86

Millions of recently “downsized” Americans, rendered obsolete and jobless by technology, would not contest Seawick’s assessment.  Neither would U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who has made worker-retraining a personal crusade, warning that in today’s economy everyone can expect to change jobs an average of seven or eight times in their lifetime.  Job stability, Reich says, is a thing of the past.

There is also a social cost to upgrade mania that cannot be measured in dollars.  The blistering pace of life today, driven by technology and the business imperative to improve efficiency, is something to behold.  We often feel life going by much, much faster than we wish, as we are carried forward from meeting to meeting, call to call, errand to errand.  We have less time to ourselves, and are expected to improve our performance and output year after year after year.  If life were a cartoon, as it sometimes seems to be, we would be the breathless Wile E. Coyote, forever chasing the Road Runner but never concluding the chase (<beep beep>).

Page 94

(In this way, technology brings with it yet another internal contradiction:  As it speeds up our world in the name of efficiency and productivity, it also constricts rational thinking.)

Page 124

For the sake of this did everything else become indifferent to me...  This is our postmodern refrain.  Professional specialization and consumer nichification encroach upon our common culture.  Rather than a healthy swirl of communication among citizens of different backgrounds and perspectives, we are left with a hyper-efficient communications infrastructure that not only highlights social distinctions; it fortifies them.

Page 125

Specialization makes sleepwalkers of us all; the global village predicted by the seers of the 1960’s is being replaced by electronic cottages populated by isolated dreamers.  We do not know our neighbors.  If we are financial experts,  we are speechless in the presence of research chemists; if we are scholars, we cannot make out the grimaces of merchants.  We are a nation of lonely molecules.

From Earl Shorris, A Nation of Salesmen

The Paper Chase

The paperless office is still a distant dream. In the interim, we should be recycling more and developing alternatives to wood-based paper.

By Jim Motavalli

While many futurists predicted that we?d be enjoying the paperless office around this time, Americans are still at the epicenter of a paper blizzard. Were you under the impression that the electronic age would free us from all that? According to The Myth of the Paperless Office, a company?s use of e-mail causes an average 40 percent increase in paper consumption. The demand for ream after ream of white paper is putting a huge strain not only on America?s forests, but the world?s. And it?s forcing the environmental movement to consider the alternatives.

The U.S. currently gobbles up some 200 million tons of wood products annually, with consumption increasing by four percent every year. The pulp and paper industry is the biggest culprit. U.S. paper producers alone consume one billion trees?or 12,430 square miles of forests?every year, while producing 735 pounds of paper for every American.

The U.S. has less than five percent of the world?s population, but consumes 30 percent of the world?s paper. Only five percent of America?s virgin forests remain, while 70 percent of the fiber consumed by the pulp and paper industry continues to be generated from virgin wood.  While logging controversies most often center around the Pacific Northwest, most of the wood pulp used for paper in the U.S. actually comes from southern forests, currently home to some of the greatest biodiversity in the continental U.S. (see sidebar).

Worldwide, global consumption of wood products has risen 64 percent since 1961. The industry expects that demand will double by 2050, keeping pace with population growth. Recycling has helped, but has not yet made an appreciable difference. ?Recycling has yet to dent the world?s appetite for virgin-fiber pulp,? says the Worldwatch Institute.

In Indonesia, the pulp and paper industry is destroying rainforest so quickly that it will run out of wood by 2007, according to a report by Friends of the Earth. An area the size of Belgium is wiped out annually.  Only 10 percent of the trees cut down for paper in Indonesia are farmed, although the industry had supposedly committed to replanting its clear-cuts with fast-growing acacia trees.

Globally, pulp for paper and other uses is taking an increasing share of all wood production, from 40 percent in 1998 to nearly 60 percent over the next 50 years. In the same time span, easily accessible and inexpensive sources of wood are disappearing. Because of the rapid consumption of virgin forests in places as far apart as Canada and Southeast Asia, forest restoration has not been able to keep pace with the demand for wood products.

Toxic Pollution and Waste

Loss of forests isn?t the only issue. Deforestation has released an estimated 120 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), the major global warming gas, into the atmosphere. The pulp and paper industry is the third-largest industrial polluter in both Canada and the U.S., releasing more than 220 million pounds of toxic pollution into the air, ground and water each year.

Much of that pollution is the byproduct of the three million tons of chlorine used annually to bleach wood pulp white. Chlorine bleaching is a major source of the potent carcinogen dioxin, which is routinely discharged into rivers and streams with wastewater. As a result, dioxin is now ubiquitous in our environment, found throughout the world in air, water, soil and food. Every woman alive today carries some trace of dioxin in her breast milk. Dioxin is considered one of the most toxic substances ever produced, and has been known to cause cancer, liver failure, miscarriage, birth defects and genetic damage in laboratory animals.

The U.S. paper industry has been aware of the dioxin problem since at least 1985, but has been very slow to act on alternatives (see sidebar).  In Europe, chlorine bleaching is being phased out. That has only been proposed in the U.S., despite the fact that the American Public Health Association strongly supports a phase-out. In Sweden, pulp mills have to meet stringent standards, and were required to reduce chlorine content by 90 percent as early as 1993. When they have to, American companies such as Proctor and Gamble can go virtually chlorine-free: The Pampers exported to Sweden, for example, are made without a chlorine-bleaching process, unlike those wrapping U.S. babies.

Paper is also the dominant material in solid waste. And in the United States, paper-producing companies are the third-largest energy consumer, with a pace that keeps quickening.

It’s not surprising that, given all these environmental negatives, the paper industry would wrap itself in a green mantle. International Paper, for instance, issued a Sustainability Report in 2002 that cites its role as among the largest owners of sustainably managed private forestland in the world. Its raw material is trees, the report says, the world’s greatest renewable resource.? It participates in forest certification programs and voluntary partnerships and strictly adheres to environmental regulations. And according to the American Forest and Paper Association, U.S. papermakers recycle enough paper every day to fill a 15-mile-long train of boxcars. Since 1990, the recovered paper would fill 200 football stadiums to a height of 100 feet.

While some of this is undoubtedly greenwashing, Michael Klein, a spokesperson for the American Forest and Paper Association, asserts that the industry is currently using all the recycled paper it can get. ?I have a problem with activists who say we have to demand more recycled content,? Klein says. ?Instead, they should demand that people recycle more. One hundred percent of the paper and boxed fiberboard people put on the curb is used. Paper activists point out, however, that a significant amount of U.S.-generated recyclable paper is actually exported. Nearly a quarter of the recovered paper in the U.S. is shipped to Mexico, Canada, Asia and Europe rather than being recycled here, reports Conservatree.

Tree-Free Paper: Great Expectations

There is vast potential for a “green” paper industry, including recycled and natural fibers, that could not only spare trees but also produce paper with minimal environmental impact overall, but it needs an

infusion of both public interest and research funding. It is presently, at best, a $20 million sales niche in a $230 billion U.S. industry, asserts the San Francisco-based Fiber Futures, which lobbies for expanded use of agricultural residues and other tree-free materials for paper. A plan by the Natural Resources Defense Council to open a paper recycling plant in the Bronx, New York ended tragically because of labor

opposition and last-minute political maneuvering, which thwarted financing. Many small and medium-sized paper mills that handled tree-free papers have closed because of industry consolidation and the

economic downturn, sending many paper manufacturers overseas for sources

Dear EarthTalk: What happened to the "paperless office" that computers were supposed to create, and what is the environmental impact of our paper usage?

-- Michelle Barnes, Virginia Beach, VA

The paperless office does appear to still be a distant dream. A recent University of California-Berkeley study found that, worldwide, the amount of printed matter generated between 1999 and 2002 not only did not decrease--it grew by 36 percent. The quantity of information we now store electronically is growing in leaps and bounds. And while we're using less paper as a percentage of total data output, we're still using more paper. "Contrary to notions of paperless offices floated by futurists in the late 1980s and early 1990s," the report said, "the consumption of office paper has gone up substantially in recent years."

Not surprisingly, the United States is the biggest paper consumer, accounting for 33 percent of all printed material. U.S. paper producers alone consume one billion trees--or 12,430 square miles of forests--every year, while producing 735 pounds of paper for every American. Only five percent of America's virgin forests now remain, while 70 percent of the fiber consumed by the pulp and paper industry continues to be generated from virgin wood.

Besides consuming trees and habitat, processing paper generates tons of industrial pollutants. The pulp and paper industry is the third-largest industrial polluter in both Canada and the U.S., releasing more than 220 million pounds of toxic pollution--including dioxin, a cancer-causing byproduct of the chlorine-bleaching process--into the air, ground and water each year. Paper is also the dominant material in solid waste. And in the U.S., paper-producing companies are the third-largest energy consumer.

In recent years, advocates for ecologically sustainable paper, like the San Francisco-based Conservatree, have grown more vocal in support of both increasing the use of recycled paper and developing alternatives to wood-based paper. As a small step, they have succeeded in persuading large paper retailers like Staples, Kinko's and Office Depot to offer higher amounts of recycled content in the paper they sell.

Alternatives to tree-based paper include various kinds of agricultural wastes, like corn and rice husks, a plant called kenaf, and hemp. One agricultural waste paper is made from 100 percent bagasse fiber, left over from sugar cane production. Kimberly-Clark uses bagasse in some of its paper towels and tissues. But many consider kenaf, a relative of okra and cotton, and hemp, to be the most promising alternatives, especially for office papers. Kenaf, which originated in the East Indies and is now grown in the U.S., Thailand and China, is making inroads as a wood-based paper substitute. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has deemed kenaf "the best option for tree-free papermaking in the U.S."

Hemp is a very strong fiber, making it excellent for paper processing, and it is easily bleached without chlorine. Beginning in 1840, American-grown hemp was used to make manila paper. Hemp cultivation has been illegal in the U.S. since the end of World War II, because it is a relative of the plant grown for marijuana. But the strain of hemp grown for paper does not contain enough quantities of psychoactive chemicals for it to be used as a drug--and its cultivation is encouraged in 29 countries around the world.

CONTACTS: Conservatree, (415) 721-4230, http://www.conservatree.com; Kimberly-Clark, http://www.kimberly-clark.com; USDA Agricultural Research Center, (301) 504-5664, http://www.usda.gov.   From E-Magazine – week of 6/6/04

Tenner, Edward, Why Things Bite Back : Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences             New York: Vintage Books, 1996   ISBN 0679425632, Page 188

According to one study by the economist Stephen Roach, investment in advanced technology in the service sector grew by over 116 percent per worker between 1980 and 1989, while output increased by only 0.3 percent to 1985 and 2.2 percent to 1989.  Two other economists, Daniel E. Sichel of the Brookings Institution and Stephen D. Oliner of the Federal Reserve, have calculated the contribution of computers and peripherals as no more than 0.2 percent of real growth in business output between 1987 and 1993.

­Architecture Magazine­ December, 1999

Number of sheets of paper each U.S. worker uses per year:               5,400.

Percentage of “stuff” stored in workplaces never used or referred to:     30

Percentage of workers who say they are chronically angry on the job:   25.

Average number of people murdered in U.S. offices each week:            20

“Fax Inefficiency Plagues Corporate America” Facilities Design & Management, July 1994, Page 14

“Lack of awareness concerning fax telephone costs continues to plague most U.S businesses,” says Meredith Fischer, vice president marketing, Pitney Bowes Facsimile Systems.  “The majority of fax users don’t connect expanding department telephone costs with increased fax traffic.  Since they don’t get the bill, it doesn’t register.”  The study reports that more than 60% of fax transmissions are sent long distance; less than 5% of respondents send fax transmissions during the evening or night when it is most cost-efficient; 40% of the respondents do not bill back or do not know if they bill back charges to a client, their department, or themselves; and fewer than 30% of respondents have ever used time-saving fax features, such as multi-tasking, sequential broadcasting, and relay broadcasting.

Bottom line Insights

A 1993 Gallup study reports fax volume has jumped 44% at Fortune 500 companies in the last year.

J.D. McClatchy,  The Vintage Book Of Contemporary World Poetry  New York: 1996 ISBN 0679741151, Page 431, Translated from the Chinese by Carolyn Kitzer

“Assembly Line”

Yes, I’m numb to my own existence

As if, like the trees and stars

perhaps just out of habit

perhaps just out of sorrow,

I’m unable to show concern

For my own manufactured fate.

London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. Stylus Publishing. Chapter 17: Inefficiency,  ISBN 0745314155, Page 2

Without going further into the argument, this man on the Mile End Waste pointed the moral that when two men were after the one job wages were bound to fall.

When there are more men than there is work to be done, a sifting-out process must obtain.  In every branch of industry the less efficient are crowded out.   Being crowded out because of inefficiency, they cannot go up, but must descend, and continue to descend, until they reach their proper level, a place in the industrial fabric where they are efficient.  It follows, therefore, and it is inexorable, that the least efficient must descend to the very bottom, which is the shambles wherein they perish miserably.

A glance at the confirmed inefficients at the bottom demonstrates that they are, as a rule, mental, physical, and moral wrecks.  The exceptions to the rule are the late arrivals, who are merely very inefficient, and upon whom the wrecking process is just beginning to operate.  All the forces here, it must be remembered, are destructive.  The good body (which is there because its brain is not quick and capable) is speedily wrenched and twisted out of shape; the clean mind (which is there because of its weak body) is speedily fouled and contaminated.  The mortality is excessive, but, even then, they die far too lingering deaths.

Here, then, we have the construction of the Abyss and the shambles.  Throughout the whole industrial fabric a constant elimination is going on.  The inefficient are weeded out and flung downward.  Various things constitute inefficiency.  The engineer who is irregular or irresponsible will sink down until he finds his place, say as a casual laborer, an occupation irregular in its very nature and in which there is little or no responsibility.  Those who are slow and clumsy, who suffer from weakness of body or mind, or who lack nervous, mental, and physical stamina, must sink down, sometimes rapidly, sometimes step by step, to the bottom.  Accident, by disabling an efficient worker, will make him inefficient, and down he must go.  And the worker who becomes aged, with failing energy and numbing brain, must begin the frightful descent which knows no stopping-place short of the bottom and death.

Ritzer, George.  The McDonaldization of Society:  an Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life. 1990.  ISBN 0803990766, Page 123

Although the forces of McDonaldization trumpet their greater efficiency, they never tell us whom the system is more efficient for.  Most of the gains in efficiency go to those who push rationalization.  People need to ask: Efficient for whom?  Is it efficient for consumers to push their own food over the supermarket scanner and then bag it themselves?  Is it efficient for people to pump their own gasoline?  Is it efficient for them to push numerous combinations of telephone numbers before they speak to a human voice?  Most often, people will find that such systems are not efficient for them.

Similarly, rational systems impose a double standard on employees.  Those at the top of an organization impose rationalization on those who work at or near the bottom of the system—the assembly-line worker, the counterperson at McDonald’s.  The owners, franchisees, top managers, want to control subordinates through the imposition of rational systems.  However, they want their own positions to be as free of rational constraints—as non-rational— as possible.  They need to be free to be creative, but not their underlings. 

Subordinates are to follow blindly the rules, regulations, and other structures f the rational system.  Thus, the goal is to impose efficiency on subordinates hire those in charge remain as creative (and often as inefficient) as possible.

"Sociology Corner."  ­McDonaldization­ website www.sciology.net/mconald/efficiency.html.

With the salad bar, you are not limited by what the cook wants to put in the salad, and ATMs allow you to do your banking any time you want, unhindered by inefficient bank hours.  However, keep in mind, that both of these serve to reduce the level of human interaction.  Consumers are forced to deal with computers or salad bars and not people, training them to be better workers for the McDonaldized society.

Bob Black,  “The Abolition of Work”

As Adam Smith noted in Wealth of Nations, “The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”

Anonymous Swiss folk tale

Once, long ago, deep in the Black Forest, lived a monk.  He was a cobbler and it was his job to make and repair shoes for the neighboring monasteries.  He knew all the feet of all the monks in the land and sang all day long. Then one day it was decreed that he should count all his costs for each and every shoe.  He counted all the nails, all the pieces of leather, all the threads, and accounted for all his time.  His joy left him and he sang no more.

Dewey, John. Democracy and Education, Macmillan, 1916, Chapter Nine: “Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims”

Translated into specific aims, social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial competency. Persons cannot live without means of subsistence; the ways in which these means are employed and consumed have a profound influence upon all the relationships of persons to one another. If an individual is not able to earn his own living and that of the children dependent upon him, he is a drag or parasite upon the activities of others. He misses for himself one of the most educative experiences of life. If he is not trained in the right use of the products of industry, there is grave danger that he may deprave himself and injure others in his possession of wealth. No scheme of education can afford to neglect such basic considerations. Yet in the name of higher and more spiritual ideals, the arrangements for higher education have often not only neglected them, but looked at them with scorn as beneath the level of educative concern. With the change from an oligarchical to a democratic society, it is natural that the significance of an education which should have as a result ability to make one's way economically in the world, and to manage economic resources usefully instead of for mere display and luxury, should receive emphasis.

There is, however, grave danger that in insisting upon this end, existing economic conditions and standards will be accepted as final. A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of competency to choose and make its own career. This principle is violated when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents. As a matter of fact, industry at the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt changes through the evolution of new inventions. New industries spring up, and old ones are revolutionized. Consequently an attempt to train for too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose.

Winner, Langdon.  The Whale and the Reactor Reactor : A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology .  University of Chicago Press: 1988.   ISBN 0226902110, Page 116

The point of many applications of microelectronics, after all, is to eliminate social layers that were previously needed to get things done.  Computerized bank tellers, for example, have largely done away with small, local branch banks, which were not only ways of doing business, but places where people met, talked, and socialized.  The so-called electronic cottage industry similarly, operates very well without the kinds of human interactions that once  characterized office work.  Despite greater efficiency, productivity, and convenience, innovations of this kind do away with the reasons people formerly had for being together, working together, acting together.  Many practical  activities once crucial to even a minimal sense of community life are rendered obsolete.  One consequence of these developments is to pare away the kinds of face-to-face contact that once provided important buffers between individuals and organized power.  To an increasing extent, people will become even more susceptible to the influence of employers, news media, advertisers, and national political leaders.  Where will we find new institutions to balance and mediate such power?

Time July 27 1998, “Milestones,” Page 19

40  Years it took radio to gain 50 million domestic listeners.

13  Years it took television and cable to gain 50 million domestic viewers.

  4  Years it took the World Wide Web to get 50 million domestic users.

Doors of Perception Conference 4  - SPEED - Speaker Transcript  - Stephen Kern: “The Culture of Speed “   Updated 19-12-1996 www.doorsofperception.com/doors/revamped_frameset.html

But there were also critics. In English the word ‘phoney’ came from early descriptions of artificial sound of voice on the phone and by implication the artificiality of what was said without the enrichment of face-to-face encounters.

Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, Page 297

The electronic media have shown what a heavy price must be paid for even the simulation of multi-dimensioned intercourse.  In genuine communication every agent has its own role to play: the visible gesture, the direct spoken word, the written message, the painting, the printed book, the radio, the phonograph record, the tape recorder, television.  Instead of replacing these varied multi-media by television, radio and the computer alone, a mature and efficient technology would strive to keep them all in existence, each for the performance of its appropriate function in the chosen situation.  As with the transportation system, which cannot dispense with the free-moving and autonomous pedestrian without producing clotted urban congestion or equally baffling suburban dispersion, so with an efficient communications system.  What is needed is a technology so varied, so many-sided, so flexible, so responsive to human need, that it can serve every valid human purpose.  The only true multi-medium remains the human organism itself.

Collins, Jim.  “Talking To Your Hand, Or Is That Your Phone?”  US Airways Attache February 1998.Page 33-4

By the end of today, 30,000 new people will join the ranks of cellular phone owners; by this time next year, the American army of users alone will have grown by close to ten million.  No electronic product has ever been accepted more quickly or bought more eagerly:  not the fax machine, not the color TV, not the VCR.  In high-school hallways and on city sidewalks, at poolside and in airport restaurants, in commuter lanes and on remote mountain peaks, the cell phone has become the symbol of the ‘90s. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that the “cellular” technology was ready for prime time.  By then, the Federal Communications Commission had decided how the industry should be structured and regulated.  The FCC divided the country into 306 metropolitan and 428 rural “markets,” designated by counties, and issued licenses corresponding with frequencies.  In 1983, Washington, D.C., and Chicago became the first U.S. cities to offer cellular service.  Fifteen years after those original two systems, the FCC has licensed more than 1,500 systems.   Wireless phone service is now available to 75 percent of U.S. population, across 80 percent of the Lower 48 land mass.

“Study Predicts E-Commerce to Double by End of 1998.” Survey Monitor Page 6

According to a survey of 120,000 North American consumers conducted by Forrester Research, Inc., Cambridge, Mass., the number of households that shop and invest online—a high-income, technology-optimistic elite—will double from 5 percent to 10 percent by the end of 1998.  On-line connections and PC ownership will soon broaden to include low-income households, generating the next of e-commerce-ready consumers.  Data is drawn from Forrester’s Technographics ‘98 Field Study of North American consumers, conducted with NPD Group in the fall of 1997.

Noble, David F.  Forces of Production.  New York: Knopf  1984. ISBN 0394512626, Pages 231 and 342

Numerical control technology appeared to offer management several prospects.  First, it promised greater control over production, while reducing dependence upon the work force.  By making possible the separation of conception from execution, of programming from machine operation, Numerical Control appeared to allow for the complete removal of decision-making and judgment from the shop floor.  Such “mental” parts of the production process could now be monopolized by managers, engineers, and programmers, and concentrated in the office.  And once decisions had been made and performance and production standards had been set, detailed orders would be sent to the floor, not only to the people there, by means of planning sheets and the like, but also directly to the machines....

Of course, formal (written) justifications of capital expenditure may make elaborate comparisons of productivity, capital costs, payback periods, etc., between, for instance, alternative new machines.  These justifications were used frequently, according to most accounts, as the basis of decisions on choice of technology in many of the case study firms.  But it is probably safe to say that in no instance could it be demonstrated that in practice the new technology met the measured expectations of the production engineer practice the new technology met the measured expectations of the production engineer who ‘justified’ the technology, or of the machine supplier who advertised it.  Besides, measures of the actual economic returns of new processes were invariably in  the form of ‘two or three times more output per man’, or ‘it paid for itself in about two years’, rather than the pounds and pence, and hours and minutes, of the pre-implementation assessment.  In practice then, there was simply no accurate measure of

productivity gains or of comparative improvements in efficiency.

Cohen, Nevin.  "Designing for a Digital Economy." Architecture December 1999,  Page 119

Although e-commerce promises waste reduction, the truth is that, at least in the short term, surges in consumption of certain resources can be expected.  Ironically, one such side-effect of online shopping has been an increase in gasoline consumption.  The average American household makes more than 500 trips to the store by car each year.  As consumers do more shopping online, some trips may be avoided.  But if they insist on overnight delivery to replicate the instant gratification of in-person shopping, fuel consumption could actually skyrocket.  Patagonia, the outdoor-clothing company, found that if it sent a product via overnight mail, transportation alone accounted for over a quarter of the energy required to manufacture and deliver it.

Doors 4  - SPEED - Speaker Transcript  - Susan George: “When I was growing up...”  Updated 22-11-1996 www.doorsofperception.com/doors/revamped_frameset.html

Financial capital is pure speed and pure, immaterial profit.  It makes instantaneous judgments on the values of national policies.  If it doesn’t like what it sees, it leaves, at the speed of bytes, leaving catastrophic consequences in its wake.  In December 1994, billions of dollars were removed from Mexico in a matter of hours.  The peso collapsed, interest rates were put sky high, over a million small businesses failed, unemployment is rampant, widespread hunger and malnutrition have returned , crime rates are alarming and kidnappings routine.  It can happen in rich countries too.  George Soros made a billion dollars in a couple of days speculating against the British pound and in July 1993 the French Central Bank lost the totality of its reserves overnight in a desperate attempt to prop up the franc against the onslaught of speculative capital.  Like a supersonic fighter plane, financial capital can accelerate from zero to Mach three in a matter of seconds.

Shellenbarger, Sue.  “Work & Family.”  Wall Street Journal 23 September 1998. Page B1

Unscheduled absences rose 25% in the past year to seven-year highs, says CCH Inc., a Riverwoods, Ill., human-resource information concern, in a 401-company survey set for release today.  The increase is concentrated among the small and medium-size companies that employ about 70% of all payroll workers.  The findings echo an Aon Consulting survey of 1,800 employees showing an 11% rise since 1995 in time lost from work, including unscheduled absences for all reasons and time spent at work on personal matters.

The reasons would horrify the Organization Man of old. For the first time since the annual CCH survey began in 1991, “family issues” were cited as the No. 1 cause of unexpected absences, accounting for 26%, compared with 22% for personal illness.  Personal need, “entitlement mentality” and stress together accounted for 52%.  Stress and personal matter were also the fastest-growing causes of missed time in the Aon survey.

Maggie Jackson, Associated Press. “Be honest: Did you cheat at work yesterday?” The Philadelphia Daily News, Saturday, April 5, 1997

Study finds about half of employees confess to illegal, unethical acts. Nearly half of workers engaged in unethical or illegal acts, or both, in the last year, according to a survey to be released Monday.  The atmosphere at many workplaces may be to blame, according to the Ethics Officer Association and the American Society of Chartered Life Underwriters and Chartered Financial Consultants, which conducted the survey of 1,324 workers. Faced with the demands of overtime, balancing work and family and downsizing, workers said they felt more stress than five years ago, as well as more pressure to act unethically. “Daily pressures are extreme, and it’s those pressures that may be driving unethical practices,” said John Driskill, vice president of the society of underwriters and financial consultants.

Kuttner, Robert, Everything For Sale, New York, 1996:  ISBN 0394583922, Page 64

Market theory conceives of economic relationships as purely instrumental.  All transactions are at arm’s length, and there is no room for sentimentality.  The theory construes long-term commitments as implicit contracts, since the contract epitomizes the economic concept of a free, voluntary exchange by calculating, rational individuals,  where opportunism is convenient and worth its nominal cost, the theory commends opportunism.  In Law and Economics School theory, there is even a doctrine of “efficient breach.”  If it is cost-effective for one party to a contract to break it, that party should ignore the contract and pay the price.  However, society pays a heavier price if norms of commitment and trust are casually breached.  It saves incalculable time and money if we can assume that most people are trustworthy most of the time; that every transaction does not require endless haggling.

Marino, Sal.  “Straight Talk.”  Industry Week December 7, 1998, Page 22

The survey was conducted in June by the Lutheran Brotherhood, an organization that provides financial services, insurance, and various other programs for its more than 1 million Lutheran members.  The study was conducted among 1,000 working American adults.  The good news is that 76% of the respondents said they never had been asked (or ordered) to do anything they considered unethical pertaining to their work.  The bad news is that 24% confessed that they have been asked (or ordered) to do something they considered unethical. And the really bad news is that 41% of those asked actually did the dastardly deed that was requested o