The Blue Economy

If you have seen the new title, The Blue Economy;  10 Years; 100 Innovations; 100 Million Jobs [0] , we have just announced on-site, you know that this book is a bit of a departure for us. Since 1983 when our first Paradigm Publications book reached print, with very few exceptions we have concentrated our publishing resources on two subjects, Japanese Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine. The practical way to make these ways of health promotion and disease remediation broadly available is for them to achieve a socially and economically viable role. With both subjects our bias has been that to successfully acculturate these arts as functioning parts of our own culture, we must understand them as whole systems. It is not enough to take just what appeals to us – what satisfies western minds for western reasons. We must have, as Zorba said “The whole catastrophe!”♦ This means being honest about East Asian medicines' histories and blemishes and having the courage to study and understand those aspects that are difficult and foreign.

Since we named ourselves after paradigms, models that serve as examples, I could make a case that a book on whole systems innovations based on ecosystem logic is a logical fit. It is a reasonable case. I am convinced that of the western people who will read The Blue Economy, it will be those who have studied Chinese medicine who will most quickly absorb Professor Pauli's idea of cascading nutrients and energy. If whole systems logic can cure people, why not economies?

The word “paradigm” is, of course, known to most because of philosopher of science Thomas Khun's 1962 text, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In fact, we, along with others, have been asking Khun's questions: What is to be observed? What questions should be asked? How should those questions be structured and interpreted? “Paradigm” also has rarely appreciated but appropriate connotations. Until Khun gave the word “paradigm” a new meaning, it was primarily used in grammar to describe an illustrative parable or fable. In linguistics it described a class of similar elements. Ironically, the later meaning presaged one of our most (surprisingly) controversial notions – that ideas related in the Chinese medical language should be related in the English language of Chinese medicine.

Back before our field was primarily composed of people who never faced a draft notice in the era of the Vietnam war, and particularly after the elevation of terrorism to a national security issue, we would get peoples' attention by saying that promoting whole system medicines was practicing “guerrilla warfare.” We don't say that anymore because the connotations have become so negative. However, it nonetheless remains true that people who are cured by medicines that assume we humans are intimately connected to the ecosystem, thus one another, learn with hearts that we cannot achieve health in isolation. If this is true for the individual – and I believe it is – how can it not be true for societies? The Blue Economy is medicine for the planet.

I think these ideas are worth thinking about. Each points to the importance of publication as a way toward change. However, the main reason we embraced the opportunity to publish Prof. Gunter Pauli's work is that it is the right thing to do. First, like the authors we have so frequently worked with, he is willing to go where it is not so safe to go, to accept personal risk for the good of the commons. He is challenging the Green Movement he has been so much a part of to do better, to do more. His effort has not been to acquire future technologies for personal gain. He is the entrepreneur who launched Ecover; those products are probably in many of your homes. He built the largest ecologically-sound factory in the world. His participation in the Club of Rome and the founding of Zero Emissions Research Institute (ZERI) has made an immense contribution to sustainability both in terms of research, public awareness and articulating a visionary direction. He has dedicated himself to teaching and the hands-on implementation of projects that have brought healthy environments, good nutrition, health care and jobs in sustainable commerce to a myriad of places in the world. What he is doing is right livelihood, right for the planet, and right for the millions of young people who are being left out of our corporate-think economies.

His model, like that of traditional medicine, is a whole systems model. Blue transcends green because it vibrates on a higher level. The point is not to chastise polluters but to eliminate pollution by absorbing waste the way ecosystems do -- using it as food for another species or as an input to another process. One of my favorite of Gunter's expressions is: “Ecosystems don't waste waste.” Another is: “There is no unemployment in ecosystems.” Until now, the green model has required spending more to save some, over time.

Blue transcends green because it does not depend on wealth, on the capital necessary to afford economic or ecological savings or on the personal wealth necessary to afford years-long payback schedules. It depends instead on ordering and relating processes to one another based on the wisdom of nature. It works in the first world; it works in the third world. It produces revenue rather than promises of something good downstream, someday, maybe. It produces jobs. Although green ideas have shown us how to begin this journey or the wonders nature can teach us, these ideas have had no appreciable effect on first world economies with capital, much less third world economies without.

Blue transcends green because it does not simply marvel at nature but follows nature's ways and considers the whole. In The Blue Economy sustainable efficiency is achieved by substituting what is not needed with what is functional and by combining several innovative technologies into an integrated whole just as habitats and ecosystems do. The book offers pragmatic means to achieve sustainability and high resource efficiency by examining many of the one hundred innovations in the book and how they can change industries with innovations in medicine, energy, mining and agriculture. The principles of The Blue Economy will work because they can, and have been adopted in commerce, large and small. What may never be accomplished by cheer-leading people to “do the right thing” or by incremental improvements in energy efficiency, will happen if it produces income, saves costs or improves marketability. The Blue Economy seeks sustainability by creating economic value. Giant companies can use Gunter's work to become more efficient, to provide jobs, and to earn income at the same time they reduce the risks and social detriments of pollution. Young entrepreneurs, the main focus of Gunter's efforts, can use innovations taught by nature's sensei (respected teachers) to develop not only their own sustainable enterprises but to offer meaningful work, valuable products and social equity.

I hope you will enjoy the book. It should be available in April and will be available world wide. Here at the Paradigm site we have opened a new section of our Internet Resources for The Blue Economy. As a start, I have added the report to the Club of Rome Gunter presented on October 27, 2009. The Blue Economy will be published as an official report of the Club of Rome, joining the ground-breaking publication The Limits to Growth as a seminal step on the way toward planetary sustainability. It has also been endorsed by UNIDO and UNEP.

♦  This is from Zorba the Greek, a novel written by the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis in 1946. It is the tale of a young Greek intellectual who ventures to escape his bookish life with the aid of the boisterous and mysterious Alexis Zorba. "The whole catastrophe" is Zorba's humorous description of life's fullness.