Environmental Improvement Is Continuous. Is Economic Growth, Too?

I've just started reading Cool Companies by Joseph Romm (Island Press, 1999), a former deputy secretary at the Department of Energy. I'm only on page 12, but already the book rattles off an overwhelming number of both case and comprehensive studies. The point of the book is also very clear: to convince companies that it is to their financial benefit to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

One sentence struck me in particular: Environmental improvement is continuous. This observation comes from Dow Chemical's sustained and successful track record in pollution prevention over the past 20 years, as well as his experiences at the Department of Energy in the 1990s. As Romm writes,

You may believe that your company "did energy conservation" in the late 1970s or early 1980s, or that you've captured all the "low-hanging fruit", the "obvious" energy-saving investments with the quickest payback or highest rate of return... the entire notion that low-hanging fruit is easily exhausted turns out to be a myth.

I really like this observation for three reasons:

First, "low-hanging fruit" is a stupid and over-used term in business, and deserves to be eradicated.

Second, discussing environmental improvement as a continuous, ongoing, and non-terminal processes questions assumptions about growth and goals. Herman Daly wrote Towards a Steady-State Economy in 1973 ridiculing "growthmania". More recently, Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel Prize winner in economics, has argued persuasively for the expansion of human capability -- including basic political, environmental and social rights -- that both integrate with, and enhance, economic growth and development. What is the point of economic growth, if it does not enhance our lives? Though we in the developed world clearly benefit from economic growth, in terms of longevity, material possessions, and relative freedom from catastrophe, now what? What are we growing towards?

Third, continuous improvement is a fundamentally optimistic message, and gives technologically-minded environmentalists (including myself) a reason to get up in the morning. Environmentalists discuss often whether we have sufficiently large imaginations to envision catastrophic environmental failure -- Bill McKibben, as always, argues well for our need to envision global warming in its enormity here -- at the same time, I would argue that we lack imagination at the opposite end of the spectrum, as well. Though we can all visualize what a utopian, self-contained, agricultural community looks like, I would also settle for something short of that and closer to the reality in which we live: being able to imagine multinational companies like Dow Chemical adopting a mantra of continuous environmental improvement (who would've thunk it?).

Jonathan Rose, of the Rose Companies, refers to building livelihoods, rather than jobs. Similarly, I've never liked the term "sustainability", because it is implies a kind of static, frozen goal. Sustainability as a continuous activity, however, I can understand, or at least start doing something.