Tweets,
I have read two things recently with a totally different outlook on the
dynamics of a rapidly changing world. The first was "The End of Work" by
Rifkin and yesterday I read "Do We Consume Too Much" by Mark Sagoff in the
June '97 issue of The Atlantic Monthly". Both were intellectually
challenging and I hope some thoughtful person or persons out there may have
read them or will read them and comment.
The most striking thing to me was Sagoff's contention that running out of
raw materials has ceased to be a general problem. Indeed that the US is
importing less and less due to substitutions and 'factory' production of the
originals or the substitute with consequent devastating problems for the
economies of developing nations. For example, "Before the Second World War
the United States bought 40 percent of its vegetable oils from developing
countries. After the war the United States protected its oilseed markets ---
for example, by establishing price supports for soybeans. Today the United
States is one of the world's leading exporters of oil and oilseeds, although
it still imports palm and coconut oils to obtain laurate, an ingredient in
soap, shampoo, and detergents. Even this form of "exploitation" will soon
cease. In 1994 farmers in Georgia planted the first commercial acreage of a
high-laurate canola, geneticllly engineered by Calgene, a biotechnology
firm." He quotes the World Resouces Institute as reporting "the United States
is largely self-sufficient in natural resouces." He goes on to say,
"Again,excepting petroleum, bauxite (from which aluminum is made), "[quoting
the World Resources Institute again - BN] and a few other industrial
minerals, its material flows are almost entirely internal.""
As a final teaser to convince you to read the article, I quote three
paragraphs about trees - striking thoughts where large numbers of logging
trucks roll by a quarter of a mile from my door and local timber employment
drops (mainly in my opinion to technolgy making more and more jobs
obsolescent).
"Natural reforestation is likly to continue as biotechnology makes areas
used for logging more productive. According to Roger Sedjo, a respected
forestry expert, advances in tree farming, if implemented widely, would
permit the world to meet its entire demand for industrial wood using just 200
million acres of plantation --- an area equal to only five percent of current
forest land. As less land is required for commercial tree production, more
natural forests may be protected ---as they should be, for aesthetic,
ethical, and spiritual reasons."
Often natural resources are so plentiful and therefore inexpensive that
they undercut the necessary transition to techological alternatives. If the
U.S. government did not protect wild forests from commercial exploitation,
the timber industry would have little incentive to invest in tree
plantations, where it can multiply yields by a factor of ten and take
advantage of the results of genetic researdch. Only by investing in
plantation silviculture can North American forestry fend off price
competition from rapidly developing tree plantations in the Southern
Hemisphere. Biotechnology-based silviculture can in the near future be
expected to underprice "extractive" forestry worldwide. In this decade China
will plant about 150 million acres of trees; India now plants four times the
area it harvests commercially.
The expansion of fish and tree farming confirms the belief held by Peter
Drucker and other management experts that our economy depends far more on the
progress of technology than on the exploitation of nature. Although raw
materials will always be necessary, knowledge has become the essential factor
in the production of goods and services. "Where there is effective
management," Drucker has written, "that is, application of knowledge to
knowledge, we can always obtain the other resources." If we assume, along
with Drucker and others, that resource scarcities do not exist or are easily
averted, it is hard to see how economic theory which after all concerns
scarcity, provides the conceptual basis for valuing the enviroment. The
reasons to preserve nature are ethical more often than they are economic."

I hope I have convinced some people to read the article.

Bob Norton
Joyce, WA
norton360 at aol.com