SUSTAINING OUR PLANET

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But I feel it's too late in the twentieth century to be right. What we have to do now is find solutions that work. We have to be able to bring together disparate elements in our society in a constructive process that moves us ahead in terms of our interrelationship with nature.

MOTHER: When you say "right," do you mean we have to accept a certain level of compromise?

PH: No. I'm saying "right" in the sense that you make other people wrong. It's understandable that at the beginning of the environmental movement, many were outraged at what books they read foretold of our future. And people who care went around and said, "Hey, wake up. Don't you see what you're doing? You're destroying the place." And people who had not thought they were destroying anything all of a sudden felt wrong, like they had been accused, that they were bad people.

I'm not saying that everybody's good, or that they aren't bad people. I am saying that it's not a way to get the job done. It's not a way that's going to build consensus in our communities, schools, institutions, or businesses.

MOTHER: We think it's very confusing and discouraging for individuals who have felt good about sorting their plastic and aluminum cans and are now being told that it makes little difference. What should individuals do to help and to what extent?

PH: Well, to say that recycling can is not enough doesn't mean that it isn't good. But what we have to be careful about is that we don't confuse superficial changes with real change.

Take a popular fast food chain, for example, which has made the switch from polystyrene clamshells to paper clamshells. Well, it's true that it's silly to keep food warm for two minutes with a container that lasts for a thousand years. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that it's selling fried ruminants.

This chain's menu is both energy intensive and resource consumptive. Every pound of hamburger uses 2,500 gallons of water, some of which comes from the Ogallala aquifer, the largest underground body of fresh water in the world, which will be depleted in forty years. That's the problem-we shouldn't get confused and think that because of the switch to paper, it's okay to eat hamburgers every day.

MOTHER: You seem to have a bias toward smaller businesses both in your first book, Growing a Business (Simon & Schuster; 1988) and your current book. Would you agree with that statement?

PH: No, not necessarily, but I do think that small organizations are almost always more humane than large organizations, whether they're businesses, schools, churches, or anything else. Size itself is terribly dehumanizing.

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