In the 18th century the city of Edo (now Tokyo) adopted a policy of no waste. Almost everything was recycled, and the city was home to more than a thousand businesses that specialised in transforming waste into useful products. What started as a response to an acute shortage of wood led to the development of a truly regenerative economy…which transformed the country into a green archipelago’
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This hopeful example – cited by John Mitchinson in July’s Byline Times – comes from ‘History for Tomorrow’ by the philosopher Roman Krznaric. It made me want to read the book.
My week had started with another reason for hope. I was the guest of Giles Hutchins at Springwood Farm, his woodland retreat. I was with a party of people from companies brought together to learn what nature can teach business. It was co-hosted by Ashley Pollock of Vivo Barefoot who spoke about what that company had learned from nature in its quest to become a truly regenerative organisation - one that gives back more than it takes.
Giles is an executive coach with decades of sustainability experience and a formidable record of consulting, teaching and writing. His special gift is his ability to draw out for business people what nature teaches us. After depositing mobile phones we were following him into the woods.
Soon I felt I was seeing in three dimensions a picture I had previously only seen in two. We stopped in front of a 200 year-old tree, which Giles reminded us would have been well aware of our arrival before we could see it. Giles picked up a handful of soil. Did we realise that in it there were more living beings working together than there are human beings on the entire planet? And were we familiar with what has come to known as the Wood Wide Web, the extraordinary network of fungi which nourish and connect trees and which in turn take nourishment from those trees?
‘Nature works’ he said. Here in the woods, he continued, we were standing in the midst of a three billion year-old Research and Development lab, which could serve human beings well if only we respected it and learned from it.
I have always argued that business must accept that it only exists courtesy of society, and that we need to see its entrepreneurial and profit-seeking activity contributing positively to the society that gave it life. This visit reminded me of a further truth: the economy and society can only flourish if nature is allowed to flourish.
Listening to Giles all that seems obvious. Yet back in everyday discourse these truths are at best ignored and at worst denied.
Our meeting that day came a few days after the General Election which had been peppered with claims by different parties that would boost economic growth. Yet many of the ingredients of this conventional and much debated ‘growth’ recipe are destructive of true growth.
We all know what’s wrong with the economic measure by which governments are judged. It includes car accidents and addictive activities and products which poison people and make them obese. It ignores – or treats as costs - many activities which improve health and wellbeing and reduce pressure on public services. We need to pursue those kinds of growth which are productive, and cut out those which destroy value.
As the day continued someone asked ‘How do we change these conventional assumptions?
This question struck a chord. That very morning I had been reading the words of Richard Rohr,
'The transformed mind lets us see how we process reality. It allows us to step back from our own personal processor so we can be more honest about what is really happening. Transformation isn’t merely a change of morals, group affiliation, or belief system—although it might lead to that—but a change at the very heart of the way we receive and pass on each moment. Do we use the moment to strengthen our own ego position, or do we use the moment to enter into a much broader seeing and connecting?'
Connected thinking. That is what the trees and the ‘wood-wide-web’ point us to. That is what Giles Hutchins helps us see. And – if more companies followed the example of Vivo Barefoot – it is a vital ingredient in the kind of economic growth we need to reach for.
Mark Goyder is Founder of Tomorrow’s Company and with Ong Boon Hwee, author of Entrusted – Stewardship for Responsible Wealth Creation. He is Senior Advisor to the Board Intelligence Think Tank.