Ellen Macarthur Foundation. Rethink the future

A correspondent writes…

• by Ken Webster
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• 19 Sep 2011
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Blue, circular, C2C, closed loop, biomimetic, ‘positive development’?

There seems to be a surfeit of terms competing to be the dominant descriptor for the shape of the economy to come at the end of cheap oil and materials. That’s if it is to be the economy to come of course. No one knows… Only it’s not really a competition is it? Poetically a number of seeds are growing on the same soil, and that is good ol’ diversity in action. Some will grow, some fade, some just hang on in there hoping for better days.

Gunter Pauli and Adam Werbach are in favour of ‘Blue’ though not quite the same thing at all. See Pauli on the ‘Blue Economy’, (no, really… and if you want other colours there is the purple economy dreamed up by the UN)(1, 2) and Adam on ‘BLUE’ a consumer movement (3) the Chinese, the Foundation and others (so Google tells us) talk about a ‘circular economy’, while ‘cradle to cradle’ is popular in Holland, parts of mainland Europe and the USA. ‘Biomimicry’ has a wide reach. You can also find terms like a ‘performance economy’ if you look up Walter Stahel (4) and, if dues were being paid in full, there’d be permaculture and Holmgren in there too (5). And so it goes…

Optimising systems – a journey illustrated by the USDA

Back to my correspondent… She’s writing at the end of a stimulating airing of many of these ideas. She’s asking for a get together to sort these terms out in the name of clarity – well, the short answer is you can if you want but I really don’t want to. Apart from the diversity argument (above) the basics are simple to state: living systems give us useful insights e.g. on how energy and material flows are effected so that life continues, or on how systems built on feedback work. Drawing a parallel with these systems, when modelling a future economy at the end of the era of cheap resources and degraded ecosystems, looks fruitful in a metaphorical and literal sense. Restoring social, natural and economic capital gives us the chance to create a positive cycle of development. In the ideal: energy cascading through, materials cycling with no toxicity, and a sense of how this understanding can be made deeper and deeper as we really get to know how to learn from life itself. That’s the promise, and if that’s common to these labels, the rest is like flavours on an ice cream stall, you follow your appetite and enjoy the discussion about whether rum and raisin is the supreme.

Well, OK, it will never be quite that simple, these different ‘colours’ and approaches have substantive differences in emphasis but if design is a sign of human intention, and if we intend the positive and build it, we can go our way at the scale and with the emphasis we feel is right: ‘do well by doing good’ as the cliché has it. What has been overcome is the idea that there are no routes through to what Janis Birkeland describes as “that which makes everyone better off and expands future options.”