By: David Miron-Wapner

As the seasons change it is a time for looking back, not only at the hot summer gone, but a year of actions and commitments, a personal and social accounting. At one and the same moment, on the blasts of a Ram’s horn, it is also a chance to project towards a future of abundant life. Change appears gentle and rhythmic.

Celebrating the New Year, I am blessed to walk in the forest near my house and feel the fresh fall Mediterranean breeze at sunset. Here I touch the cycles of nature. Here I sense a “business-as-usual” I deeply appreciate, the business of nature where the falling leaves are the food for renewal and rebirth. Here I connect with the enduring loops where the purposeful energy of life pulses. I am so close and yet so far away… How do we bring our modern frantically connected selves in alignment with the sustaining natural environment which surrounds us.

Jewish tradition calls the New Year a day of remembrance, so as I walk in the paths of shepherds I reflect on transitions, seasonal and personal. I recall in this moment an ancient connection with the land, a land that has known abundance and famine, drought and flood; a land that nurtures the renewal of a people; a land whose cycles of fecundity we celebrate as holy days to express a basic gratitude for life.

All productive economic activity utilizes the resources of the natural environment, materials and energy. Over eons, the biosphere has evolved to support life in myriad forms, each filling unique and purposeful niches. Climate has been stable, hospitable for human development and civilization for the past 10,000 years. Yet only in this modern period have we become so separate from, and massively abusive to the ecological life-promoting systems of the earth.

As one who is researching the connection between economy, business and ecology, I just completed an inspiring new book, Earth, Inc. Gregory Unruh posits five fundamental rules of the biosphere, applying them elegantly to business to achieve such a synergy that once followed, sustainability is simply embedded in the culture and operations of a company. Value chains with each end open are reconfigured into ecology-mimicking value cycles with continual feedback, use and re-use. Powerfully innovation is unleashed around and back again, from producer to consumer to decomposer. Knowledge and information are accumulated at each stage of the cyclical processes.

Biosphere rules – nature-inspired principles modeled after the cyclical character of the biosphere… makes the corporation part of, not separate from the ecology of the world from which it taps resources, makes, transports and sells products, and reclaims the parts and components to renew the cycle.

Earth, Inc. provides a road map for companies, real for-profit industrial and commercial enterprises, to follow on the journey to being full participants, even leaders in creating a sustainable global economy that will be resilient enough to withstand the great disruptions we are sure to face in the next ten to twenty years as the impacts of climate change really bite.

Unruh gracefully weaves a story of how each biosphere rule works in nature and how the business equivalent can function effectively and efficiently in the real world with case studies of top global companies. It is as if one were to be asked to design industrial enterprise from the ground up, with nature as template.  How do we proceed?

Here are the five biosphere rules from Earth, Inc.

• Materials parsimony
• Power autonomy
• Value cycling
• Sustainable product platforms
• Function over form

As we were pondering earlier at our connection with seasonal cycles, let’s look a little closer at value cycling which Unruh states as “recover and reincarnate materials from end-of-use goods into new value-added products.”

Unfortunately this is a necessity since the biosphere has no processes for breaking down the majority of synthetic chemicals, nor is there any longer an “away” to hide our waste (there is no waste in the atomic level recycling of the biosphere we inhabit), our industrial economy requires that we create possibilities for value cycling at two important junctions: at the component level where parts are recovered and restored, and used again in their original configuration in what is termed “Shallow Loop Recycling”; or at the basic materials level where products and components are decomposed into their original constituent materials, reintegrated into the production process and emerge as new, different and, ideally, superior products, in what is termed “Deep Loop Recycling.”

The modern business corporation faces tough challenges in the converging ecological and economic disruptions. Creativity and innovation are demanded, where acceptable historical operations can no longer be justified in terms of either cost or risk. Looking to nature for inspiration and guidance offers a pathway proven in its life producing and sustaining cycles and systems.