CHAPTER ONE The Next Industrial Revolution like to open my speeches, especially those that deal with the environment, by doing something I learned from my friend, the outstanding family therapist and popular speaker J. Zink. [like to have the audience stand and have each person pick out a couple of people standing nearby, preferably strangers, and give them a hug. It never fails to create a lighthearted bond between the audience and me, and it gives me the basis for making a strong, opening statement: “I hope the symbolism of that was not lost on you, fellow astronauts on Spaceship Earth, We have only one spaceship. Its in trouble. Were in this together and need each other” According to Dr. Zink, the hug also opens up access to the right hemispheres of peoples brains where he says feelings, including conscience, reside. Then [like to say that, despite the initial levity, my assignment (self-proclaimed) is to disturb, not amuse; to inform, not entertain; and to sensitize (or further sensitize) my audience to the crisis of our times and of all time to come. I invite my audience, if they find me radical and provocative, to be provoked to radical new thinking, and I suggest that all of us need to do more of that. ‘Ona Thursday in April 1996, Iwas in Boston on a panel speaking to five hundred people. The subject was “Planning for Tomorrow” and the panel ‘was about technology’ role and impact on the strategic decisions companies make. The discussion was sponsored by the International Interior Design. Association. ‘The audience was about one-third interior designers and two-thirds businesspeople, including some of my company’s competitors. While the subject of the discussion was technology, I think that the audience's understanding of the term probably had to do with the technol- ogy in the offices where most of them worked—information technology: office automation, computers, email, radio mail, laptops, word proces- sors, CADs, telephones, voice mail, videoconferencing, faxes, internet,6 Mid- Course Correction Revisited intranets, websites, and so on. There is an infinite variety of gadgets and networks and servers that helps us store information, manipulate infor mation, do arithmetic faster, retrieve information, transmit information, receive information, and examine information—in written form, spoken form, picture form, virtual reality form. Technology gives us faster, surer information when we want it and where we want it, in whatever form we ‘want it, Understanding the information and using it wisely, of course, is, then up to you and me. Technology does not do that for us. Were on our own in developing the wisdom and knowledge and understanding to make the information useful ‘Thats my mental map of what most people, especially people who work in offices, are thinking and meaning when they talk about technol- ogy. But I checked out the definition of technology in The American College Dictionary, and here itis: JA. The application of science, especially to industrial or commer- cial objectives 1B. The entire body of methods and materials used to achieve such industrial or commercial objectives. 2. The body of knowledge available to a civilization that is of use in fashioning implements, practicing manual arts and skills, and extracting [emphasis added] or collecting materials. So there's quite alot there that we don't find if we just look in the office technology that’s not electronic, that is not about storing, manipulating, sending, receiving, and examining information. There's chemical tech- nology; mechanical technology; electrical, civil, aeronautical, and space technologies: construction, metallurgical, textile, nuclear, agricultural, and automotive technologies; now biotechnology; and so forth Illustrated the point for my Boston audience with an example: I told them that I run a manufacturing company that produced and sold $802 million worth of carpets, textiles, chemicals, and architectural flooring in 1995—and would likely sell $1 billion worth in 1996—for commercial and institutional interiors. We, too, have offices chock-full of office technology: ‘mainframes, PCs, networks—you name it. And people who are hoteling and teaming, working anywhere, anytime. Information technology makes itall possible, hooking us up around the world.‘The Next Industrial Revolution 7 But we also operate factories that process raw materials into finished, ‘manufactured products that, happily, many members of my Boston audi ence routinely use and specify for others to use, and our raw material suppliers operate factories, And when we first examined the entire supply chain comprehensively, we found that in 1995 the technologies of our facto- ries and our suppliers, together, extracted from the Earth and processed 1.224 billion pounds of material so we could produce that $802 million ‘worth of products, That’ 1.224 billion pounds of materials from the Earths stored natural capital. I asked for that calculation and when the answer came back, I was staggered. I don't know how the number struck them in Boston, or howit strikes you reading this, but it made me want to throw up. Of the roughly 1.2 billion pounds, I learned that about 400 million pounds was relatively abundant inorganic materials, mostly mined from the Earthis lithosphere (its crust), and 800 million was petro-based, coming from either oil, coal, or natural gas. And here's the thing that gagged me the most: Roughly two-thirds of that 800 million pounds of irreplaceable, non-renewable, exhaustible, precious natural resource was burned up— ‘two-thirds!—to produce the energy to convert the other one-third, along with the 400 million pounds of inorganic material, into products—those products that my Boston friends, and others like them around the world, had specified for others to use or used in their own offices, hospitals, schools, airports, and other facilites, That fossil fuel, with its complex, precious, organic molecular structure, is gone forever—changed into carbon dioxide and other substances, many toxic, that were produced in the burning of it These, of course, were dumped into the atmosphere to accumulate, and to contribute to global warming, to melting polar ice caps, and someday in the not-too-distant future to flooding coastal plains, such as much of Florida and, in the longer term, maybe even the streets of Boston (and ‘New York, London, New Orleans, and other coastal cities), Meanwhile, we breathe what we burn to make our products and out livings Dont get me wrong. Ilet that Boston audience know that I appreciated their business! And that my company was committed to producing the best possible products to meet their specifications as efficiently as possible. But really, this cannot go on indefinitely, can it? Does anyone rationally think it can? My company's technologies and those of every other company I know of anywhere, in their present forms, are plundering the Earth. This cannot g0 on and on and on.