IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

necessities—food, clothing, shelter, mobility—to us, not to mention the
cultural systems that shape our attitudes and expectations. 25
So systems are important. The trouble is that because it’s seldom obvious
who should look after them, nobody does. One way to persuade society to
value, and therefore look after, its systems is to reframe them as forms of
capital. Jonathon Porritt, director of Britain’s Forum for the Future, tells
policymakers, industrialists, and educators that five types of capital enable
us to deliver goods and services we need to sustain and improve the
quality of our lives: natural, human, social, manufactured, and financial
capital. 26
Big capitalist companies already follow a whole-systems approach. They
tend naturally to think in terms of product life cycles, not of discrete
objects, and some are enthusiastic users of resource efficiency measurement
tools and techniques. They routinely measure costs of products from
the extraction of the materials used to produce the products through to
their ultimate disposal. Most large organizations are well aware that in a
whole-systems context, design is important because it can change the processes
behind products and services, as well as the resources used to make
them, use them, and dispose of them. Resource efficiency brings not only
ecological, but also economic, benefit to an enterprise, 27 and many companies
have been won over to the proposition that because avoidable waste is
avoidable cost, improved resource productivity increases profit. 28 It’s because
a product or service redesigned to use less matter or energy costs less
to deliver that ‘‘market-based environmentalism’’ has caught the business
imagination. 29 John Elkington, a British advisor to many international
companies, says the evolution of sustainable corporations is ‘‘not further
along than aviation was when Wilbur and Orville were still running their
cycle shop’’—but he nonetheless anticipates ‘‘explosive’’ growth in sustainability
experimentation in the coming years. 30
Big Picture, Small Steps
Lightness 17
The sustainability challenge is a design issue. Eighty percent of a product,
service, or system’s environmental impact is determined at the design
stage. 31 If it is true that we are using the Earth’s resources faster than we replace
them, then design can help reverse this trend by changing the processes
behind products, as well as the resources used to make them and