Zen and the Art of Blue - Balipara Foundation · broadband internet conference on December 5, 1995 linking Nelson Mandela from his home in Pretoria, Shimon Peres from his office in

Zen

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Art o

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eGUNTER PAULI

Zenand the Art of Blue

How to connect the quality of your life to the Blue Planet Earth

About the AuthorGunter Pauli (1956) graduated as an economist and has established over a dozen companies. He never had a job as an employee, always working as an independent entrepreneur. Inspired by Aurelio Peccei, the founder of the Club of Rome, he set out to pioneer and be the change he wanted to see happen in the world. His endeavors cover business, culture, science and education. He co-authored with Fritjof Capra the first book ever presented on the Internet in a broadband videocast on April 6, 1995. He organized the first ever global broadband internet conference on December 5, 1995 linking Nelson Mandela from his home in Pretoria, Shimon Peres from his office in Jerusalem, Jimmy Carter from a hotel in Atlanta and a gathering of Nobel Laureates chaired by Elie Wiesel in Hiroshima.

He travels extensively, navigating with great ease between cultures and conti-nents. He is a global citizen, or perhaps better a modern day nomad, fluent in seven languages, having resided in Sweden, France, Japan, Colombia, South Africa, the USA and Belgium. After retiring from business in 1994 he has dedicated all his energy to the design and the implementation of projects that demonstrate the viability of a new business model. He believes it is not only feasible, but it is a normal way of progression in society to permit innovation and creativity in order to identify possible paths toward a better future. He calls this way of thinking the Blue Economy.

He has spent ten years on the design of innovative learning methods which have been tested with over 300,000 children and 8,000 teachers, the large majority of them in Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Japan, Germany and South Africa. His first fable “The Giving Tree” has been translated in over 100 languages. He is visiting professor at the Politecnico di Torino and dreams about the creation of a new schooling system. He is married to Katherina Bach, has four sons Carl-Olaf, Laurenz-Frederik, Philipp-Emmanuel and Louis-Hadrien. He adopted Chido and she is (for the time being) his only daughter.

He has written dozens of books, including a series of children stories which seek to bring science and emotional intelligence to the young at an early age.

GUNTER PAULI

ZEN and the Art of BlueHow to connect the quality of your life to the Blue Planet Earth

How to reflect on a life that responds to our basic needs for water, food, health, housing, energy, learning and ethics while creating a new blue economy An introduction to the rapid changes you can make happen

copyright © 2010 by Gunter Pauli

Published by Konvergenta Publishing UG (haftungsbeschränkt)

first edition, 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permis-sion except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Konvergenta Publishing, Rungestrasse 19, 10179 Berlin, Germany.

Printed in Germany

Published simultaneously in paperback and as ebook by Konvergenta Publishing

ISBN-13: 978-3-942276-01-6 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-3-942276-03-0 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-3-942276-04-7 (Kindle)

ISBN-13: 978-3-942276-05-4 (iBook)

This book is dedicated to my mother

Françoise Martin

Who never imposed any limit nor reality checks on my dreams. She encouraged me to go for my dreams

and so many dreams have become reality ever since. Fortunately, a few trials and tribulations kept my feet on the ground.

“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project,

All your thoughts break their bonds, your mind transcends limitations, Your consciousness expands in every direction,

And you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover

yourself To be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.“

Patanjali - approximately 200 BC Known as the Father of Yoga

table of Contents

Preface by Paolo Lugari 11Introduction 15

PArt I - the theoryHow Earth and Nature Evolve 25

PArt II - the opportunityConnections in Life 49Imagine and Inspire 57Real Examples 61Connecting the Dots 71

PArt III - our Connected body and MindWhat Did You Eat for Breakfast Today? 87Sugar and Fat 95Building Design based on Flows 103The Five Intelligences 11721 Virtues 137

PArt IV - the Future is in our handsLearning versus Teaching 153The Blue Economy 165

the 12 Principles of the blue economy 169

ePILoGue 195

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Zen and the Art of Blue

11

Preface

Preface

“in everything there is a portion of everything” Democritus of Abdera

Thinking back, 40 years ago we had only put into practice five percent of what we originally planned at the Las Gaviotas project. The reason being that we have been at all times on a path of co-evolution, constantly searching for temporary truth and finding new connections, experiences and knowledge. Change is something permanent and a daily experience in Gaviotas. The only fixed idea is tropical sustainability in close and productive harmony with nature.

This makes Las Gaviotas unalignable and impossible to squeeze in pre-esta-blished mental schemes. This ability to step outside the box is what kept us from collapsing. Las Gaviotas is a new renaissance in the tropics, a project of human advancement shared by people of different disciplines, some even without one; artists (any worker is an artist), engineers and inventors, all thinking and working at the same time and believing that maturity means making dreams come true. It emerged spontaneously, passed from chaos to cosmos, always relying on freedom as the only virtue which, apart from respect for the dignity of people, gives free reign to imagination. The human race has its origins within the tropics, and it is in the tropical zone where another homo sapien must emerge if extinction is to be avoided. This homo sapien must cherish life, be in love with life itself and able to craft a brighter future. Indeed, we must move from utopia to tangible issues, from dreams to reality, leading lives filled with enthusiasm and delight. My father said: “an enthusiastic person is worth more than a depressed Nobel Laureate.”

Las Gaviotas is a community in which trust replaces flow charts, where crisis generates the framework for self-organization. In its microcosm, the individual is connected with the community. This is why we have no mayor, no priest and no police. Religion is left to the conscience of every individual.

We live with each other and respect our differences. Our work is very intense, but we do not make use of planning because it blocks imagination, ingenuity

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and creativity – our most valuable assets. Las Gaviotas will never aspire to be a model because this would amount to a concept that has ceased to evolve, is straight, inflexible and provides no space for innovation.

We want to inspire, to orientate, keeping in mind the circumstances of every region, rather than replicate. We do not agree with standardized curricula which overlook the environment and how different each student is. Traditional education instructs in bits and pieces without creating a synthesis afterwards. In Las Gaviotas we are all students.

Every day new challenges appear regarding the use of energy, water, architec-ture, health, forests, food and other items. Analyzing, designing and finding solutions on a horizontal level is a communal activity. The results are glocal, they work for Las Gaviotas as well as the tropical zones of the world; the massive production that results generates a large part of Las Gaviotas’ economic income. Our research and development is thorough and expensive and produces simple solutions. It is the difficult art of simplicity. In our way of work, intuition is not less important than rationalism. First we build several prototypes, we test them and modify them along the way, by trial and error, and then we record them in small documents. This is our artistic form of research and development. In this context and pertinent to the whole of Las Gaviotas (diversity in the universalistic-unity) we can highlight some achievements like the auto-sufficient rural hospital that utilizes various renewable energy tech-nologies. The systems of ventilation and the extraction of humidity in under-ground conducts are inspired by Moorish architecture. This is an independent architecture in proportion to the landscape, like a spaceship which has landed in the savannah of the Orinoco. Afterwards its transformable design allowed its conversion into a bottling factory for pure tropical water. An ex-director of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said: “The level of health of a community cannot be measured by beds in hospitals, but by the number of drinking water faucets.”

In Las Gaviotas we believe in cooperation more than in competition. For instance, if there had not been a symbiosis of something as small as a tropical mushroom with the root of the Caribbean Pine, we would not have anything as

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Preface

splendid as the biodiversity in the tropical rainforest of Las Gaviotas, encom-passing some 8,000 acres, producing excretions or resins which we process in our biofactory. We then produce colophon, turpentine and biodiesel (B100) without any chemicals, without transesterification or waste. We then operate all our machines and power plants using the biodiesel. The most important aspect of biodiesel production is that it forces us to plant forests, to cover barren, diminished soil with a mixture of plants of other edible forest species, i.e., generate a large-scale biodiversity to recover the skin of the earth. The forest of Las Gaviotas, radiates with beauty. It has been planted with the economic surplus generated by the installation of thousands of solar thermal installations fabricated by the Centre of Las Gaviotas in the Colombian cities, proving that science and technology here must be tropical; we have to be aware of living in the equatorial belt of the planet, which means in the tropic of the Tropics, where in spite of the largest primary, biological productivity, we have always been affected by poverty. Ironically we say that we live the miracle of poverty, because we are poor where it is impossible to be poor.

Our education does not allow us to see the obvious, the substance. In response to this shortcoming, Las Gaviotas has always taken its inspiration from nature, which the human species belongs to, observing its connections, behaviors and metabolism, its way of regeneration and where new forms of life emerge again and again. This is the moment to highlight the highest priority, which is to recover the skin of the earth by replanting it. The biological function of the earth’s biomass depends on the current composition, behavior and organiza-tion of the atmosphere which still sustains life, especially human life as we know it. Conservation of the atmospheric architecture goes beyond simple global warming. At Las Gaviotas we say that a text without a context is a pretext. This task of renewing the infrastructure of vegetation, of reviving Earth has to be declared a world security issue, something that goes beyond Nations.

There is nothing more unjust and absurd than applying the same solutions to different problems and circumstances. This is why it is so important for experience to be part of education - an education which teaches us to deal with uncertainty as something which is always present. The cultural level of

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a community is measured basically by its capacity to overcome crises, to see alternatives where others do not see them.

With this book, The Art of Zen of the Blue Economy, Professor Gunter Pauli helps us, using his mental architecture, to visualize the things that nature does not immediately reveal to us. Let me close with a thought by Leonardo Da Vinci, who agrees with Democritus and says “Everything comes from everything, everything is made of everything and everything comes back to everything”.

Gaviotas, Orinoco Region, Colombia, September 2010

Paolo Lugari General Director

Centro Las Gaviotas Foundation

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Introduction

Introduction

The Blue Earth is magical. Nature is wonderful. Life is fascinating. As soon as we lift the veil and discover the inner workings of its incredible ecosystems it is nearly impossible to remain indifferent. Like so many others, I have been taken in by it. When the details of the interplay between animals, plants, fungi, algae and bacteria are explained one cannot be but impressed. This Blue Earth emerged out of chaos, taking more than five billion years to evolve into the complex, diverse, beautiful, yet highly efficient and productive system we have today. I feel humbled in front of the millions of critters who have mastered the use of physics to their advantage, have learned how to adjust chemistry to their needs and build on biology to become truly unique. As humanity, we clearly have a long way to go.

However, the most striking feature of all this before me is the sheer amount of connections and alliances each species uses to carve out their particular niche. Each flirt with physics, each chemical reaction, each biological process, and the combination of it all results in a magical web of life around one living species. In that niche, everyone is at their best. It seems that the past five billion years have been devoted to the discovery and the stabilization of best possible relati-onships amongst the most diverse species and their inanimate world. Somehow everything emerged out of single cell bacteria which had the strength to create whatever was needed to solidify their role in this unique niche. Some needed oxygen, others survived on sulfur, a few developed wings, defying gravity at will and yet others started to run on four feet. Everyone evolved, or better co-evolved into this magnificent system of interconnections where you can get from anywhere to anywhere and everything is there for some reason. The flapping of the butterfly’s wings in Rio de Janeiro can create a storm in Maine that washes up onto the beach succulent seaweed that provides the iodine to feed our brain with creative thoughts!

While we have long attempted to grasp the facts and the logic behind the chemistry of protein, the memory of our being and the building blocks of all matter, we seldom seem to appreciate the vast set of connections and relations that this Blue Earth has forged over billions of years. It is magical how a

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Namibian desert bug and the Welwitschia mirabilis, the oldest living plant on Earth, extract water from the air in a desert where no rain has fallen for years. It is amazing how lichens extract all the trace minerals from the rocks in the desert and make them available for the plants, the most notable mineral being magnesium which is a building block for chlorophyll.

It is miraculous how mangrove trees cleanse the salty water of its salt and how they survive in marsh land where half of the time the roots and branches are submerged in an anaerobic world, that is to say under water where there is little or no oxygen. Still, this is a place where parasitic plants and flowers thrive and the mangroves not only offer more nutrients for bees, these busy workers compensate the mangroves by producing over 100 pounds of honey per beehive each year. In addition, the crossroads between saltwater and fres-hwater on one hand and the world of oxygen and the one without provide fertile ground for micro-algae to thrive … and this is what shrimp most like to eat. Unlike the shrimp you eat, which are fed on slaughterhouse waste and their own waste (!), the shrimp from the mangroves eat what they have eaten for millions of years. Mangroves also used to act as a shield against tsunamis … until human beings cut them down to build shrimp farms and five-star luxury hotels.

These connections are all part of this huge open system, a system that receives abundant energy from the sun and enjoys the gravity of the planets the Blue Earth shares this Universe with. When these age-old connections are destroyed mainly out of human ignorance, we set into action a spiral of disintegration of all the amazing relationships that were forged over the millennia. Inspired by the work of Fritjof Capra, who taught me to think in networks, systems, pattern recognition and disturbances, I set out to understand how natural systems over time co-evolved from chaos to complexity, weaving connections untold and unseen to the human eye. This is the Zen and the Art of our Blue Earth.

In the first section and first chapter of this book I will attempt to explain how natural systems, which are by definition open systems, harness energy while matter remains more or less a constant. The breakthrough of Einstein’s Rela-tivity Theory was the observation that matter and energy are the same. Until

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Introduction

1905 matter and Energy were considered to be part of two completely separate worlds. So, now that we have gotten accustomed to thinking matter and energy are ultimately the same, what happened over the billions of years with all the energy that was and continues to be bestowed upon the Earth? That energy has not been converted into more matter … with a few exceptions that will confirm the rule. It is my hypothesis that all this energy has been converted into the building up of massive amounts of finely tuned relationships in a never-ending process of trial and error.

Once I have sufficiently covered the theoretical question of how energy is converted into relationships and connections, let us (author and reader) move on to the second section of the book. Here we realize that today we are at a crossroads in modern society. On the one hand we have this desire to have quick solutions for complex problems, we are hooked on instant gratification, and more often than not we revert to force and violent interventions to achieve our immediate goals. Such dramatic action is taken under the premise that these “harsh” means are justified by the “noble” objectives. On the other hand, our communications have reverted to simple answers to complex problems. Frequently we remain dormant and do not dig to the deeper reality that is destined to remain obscure unless we see the connections. “Keep it simple, stupid” is the message. That is not limited to the media. Our business leaders pursue oversimplified core business strategies based on their core competences, as if a human being only has one competence. Our governments pursue simple policy goals summarized in catchy slogans like “Leave no child behind”. It comes as no surprise that CNN says the education system has created a “lost generation”. Keep it simple has been the mantra for far too long. More often than we like this over simplification left many of us in the dark, or should we say left us in a world of ignorance. That is the Zen of this book.

In the second section of the book I attempt to broaden the horizon by providing some insights into what the world would be like if we behaved the same way the natural systems around us have for millennia, if we sought out connections. Since this book is written on the basis of personal experiences, in all four corners of the world, I would first like to take the time to share what problems and solutions look like when I set out to look for the connections. It

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is surprisingly easy to find the hidden connections and it is tremendously satis-fying to follow the logic that supports the choices that have been made over billions of years. I encourage all of you to do the same from this day forward: look for the hidden connections. This is how we will create new business models based on innovations that will shape the Blue Economy. This economy does not rely on subsidies and willing consumers to pay higher prices to save the world. This economy embraces innovations, stimulates entrepreneurs, builds social capital and meets our basic needs with what we have.

However, knowing how difficult it is for so many of us who have only lived in a world characterized by the one dimensional human being who has been conditioned to concentrate all efforts on one single subject at a time, I would like to share new insights into the positive energy that emerges from disco-vering connections within the individual. Before we go about changing the economy and the world, what about understanding our own body and mind so that we can make the changes that appear relevant once we understand the connections? What could be more intriguing than our health in general and our breakfast in particular? Inspired by the work of Dr. Thomas Rau, the medical doctor who demonstrated at the Paracelsus Clinic in Switzerland how unco-vering the links in our body permits us to regain control over our health, I will guide the reader through the weaving of connections simply by having a closer look at breakfast.

In the third section of the book I move you from the micro-scopy of body, mind and nutrition to the macro-scopy of the universe and the creation of this wealth of biodiversity over billions of years to the houses we are living in. The underlying theme is that everything looks so different once we are prepared to look for the connections in everything. If we are inspired by the creation of health and wealth, resilience and perseverance, embracing life moving from scarcity to abundance, then we can rethink the way we design and live in the homes, offices and schools where we spend an extraordinary portion of our life time. As we investigate how food impacts our health, we will be looking for the links between chemistry, physics and biology as expressed in pH, tempe-rature and sweeteners. I will navigate us from our morning breakfast and our bedroom and living quarters to the planet we dwell upon.

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Introduction

This takes us to the fourth and last section of the book: the future. It is imprac-tical to write and reflect, or sit and read only to finally turn over the last page and conclude that there is little we can do. On the contrary, there is so much you and I can do. The reflections on the evolution of connections in the first chapter, the projects that demonstrate paving the way forward as described in the second section as well as the study of our health in the third section are all based on personal experiences. This fourth and final section is based on my commitment to education and dedication to finding inroads to making a difference by impacting the next generation. I believe that a special effort has to be made to reach out to the next generation, the youngest in our society, who I have always called the present generation. This is the zest of Zen and the Art of Blue.

It is obvious that the Cartesian approach our business, policy, academic and media leaders follow by focusing and isolating one subject or issue has made it impossible to make a real difference as the interconnected world remains hidden. Over the past decades, we have protested and boycotted, we have voted in favor of and voted against, but the time has come to realize that more is needed to make certain future generations are enabled to do much more to provide for the basic needs of everyone on our Blue Earth while remaining in harmony with the ecosystem on which we so strongly depend. Now I am not even limiting myself to the human species. We have to make an effort to “reach the unreached” and think through the system using innovative science and balanced emotional intelligence. We have to think about how to make a difference during our lifetime.

I am so grateful to the former mayor of Curitiba, Casio Taniguchi, later elected as senator of Brazil, who offered me the chance to share my insights in “systems learning” based on the fables I had written with 120,000 elementary school children and 6,000 teachers. It was a mighty undertaking. I learned so much during the three year long exercise (2000-2003). Fortunately, friends in Bhutan, Japan, Colombia, Egypt, South Africa, Fiji, Ecuador, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy and Kenya have repeatedly given me the benefit of the doubt and created additional opportunities to interface with teachers and children from all walks of life for the past two decades.

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I never thought I’d ever become a pedagogue, somehow I stumbled into this without ever pretending to be a professional. I rather approached the world of learning and education as a committed parent who wishes to see innovations in education … Now! Indeed, changes in the education system should be made now. If we want to build the Blue Economy today, we have to engage the next generation of entrepreneurs now. Can we afford to subject another generation of children to the mechanic approach of standardized education that we now understand really missed the mark? When my son was among the half of the class that flunked the infamous math exam, I wondered who was to blame: was it the students’ fault for not studying seriously enough or were the teachers to blame for not being able to explain the subject matter clearly enough. Of course the teacher felt that his professionalism was being questioned. Of course as a parent I knew that my son was taking extra evening classes simply in order to understand what was written on the blackboard without much explanation, and tested in exams that demonstrated the intelligence of the teacher rather than the power of a great educator. If this were not the year 2007 at one of the most prestigious boarding schools in Belgium, I would have thought this was a flashback in time. Unfortunately, it was not.

A multitude of professional and personal experiences over the last three decades has permitted me to fine tune my insights on how to “reach the unreached”, how to introduce children who are supposedly only old enough to learn how to read and write to thousands of scientific subjects without using scientific jargon . The children I worked with around the world and the neurophysicist Dr. Roberto Llinas from Columbia University gave me plenty of validation so that I have no compunction about not subscribing to the limited perception that children need a year to learn how to read and write, and that mathema-tics has to be given piecemeal in order to avoid mental indigestion. This logic unfortunately has become a dogma. Children can do so much better than we ever could, so much better than we ever could imagine. Children, when given the chance, can learn so much more than we ever could. That is why the onus is on us to create the space to let them outperform us, to dramatically outperform their parents, and with nothing less than their parents’ blessings. This is how we can stimulate the entrepreneurs of tomorrow who will be able to build the Blue Economy we need today.

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Introduction

I don’t think I would be applying my own insights into education and learning if I were to limit myself to the mere design of a curriculum. With the help of the pioneering work on school designs performed by Anders Nyquist, the revolutionary architect from Northern Sweden who has lived in obscurity and modesty for decades, I saw a whole learning system emerge. This system ties coursework, the structure and the functioning of the school buildings as well as the community around the schools into a web of tightly intertwined connections. This motivated me to think beyond whatever I had learned in the previous fifty years of my life.

In 2006 the Italian Minister of Higher Education, at the proposal of the Faculty of Architecture of the Politecnico di Torino, awarded me a state doctoral degree in systems design. Now I find it virtually impossible to exclude archi-tecture from the design of a learning system. It seems that medical doctors and architects are perhaps the only two professions that are more inclined to thinking and working in systems with a lot of connections. Despite the fact that cause and effect has encouraged doctors to prescribe medication that treats symptoms without dealing with the root problems, and even when modern Cad/Cam software programs encourage architects to draw with straight lines only, I have found great support from both professions in my quest to imagine a world that is capable of responding to people’s needs using the resources we have at our disposal. Unless we think through the eye of the child, we could never ever imagine better than our current green ideals. The time has come to go beyond the obvious green. I know that if we do, we will create a better world than we could have ever dreamed of. It will be a world as beautiful and magni-ficently colorful as the planet is when we admire it from outer space: Blue!

Enroute from Tokyo to Houston July 24, 2010

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Mangrove tree, © Fotolia

PArt I

The Theory

25

Chapter One

how earth and Nature evolve

how dId LIFe eMerGe oN eArth?The core question to ask is how life emerged on Earth? And once it emerged, how did it evolve and how does life continue to evolve today? These are simple questions. The answers are more difficult. We have attempted to grasp the evolution of our spaceship Earth, how it was created out of nothing, how it shaped itself, and how life appeared. We clearly have today access today to more scientific knowledge than ever before. However, we have discovered the more we know, the more we realize how much we do not know and cannot explain. Are we at the dawn of a third millennium of modern civilization that we could label modern times?

Our knowledge and understanding about space, the solar system, the Earth and life has evolved erratically. The way we looked at life only a couple hundred years ago appears simply ridiculous now. We once believed the Earth was flat and that man’s sperm placed a complete baby into the womb of a woman. The more we learn and become overwhelmed with the insights we gain the less we seem to question science. We seem to have a hard time keeping up with the uncovering and assimilation of ever more data and information, whether it is relevant to our life as a happy being or not. All too often we simply reaffirm the scientific logic of today, accept it as the truth, even though we (as citizens or as scientists) very well know that what we hold to be true is solely dependent on the artificial construct of the hypotheses and contexts that we create ourselves. Changing only one hypothesis or shifting the context would mean altering the foundations on which we build our logic. As a result the overall construct would change and the logic we have collapses.

The law of gravity, which explains the famous apple that fell on Newton’s head, relies on the hypothesis that the apple (or the feather) descends in a vacuum. We know that in the real world where life thrives there is no vacuum. Actually, no apple could ever grow on a tree in a vacuum. Still we embrace the theory of gravity since it is the best mathematical reconstruct that we know that comes close to explaining why water flows downriver and fruit drops from a tree. This, however, is an imperfect approach that focuses on one aspect of reality only.

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Why? Well, who asks how the apple got up in the tree in the first place? Or, how was it possible that water burst out of a well at the top of the mountain, and not at the bottom of the hill? Can we simply look at reality in a vacuum, i.e. (1) impose a hypothesis which is not a reflection of reality, and (2) refuse to look at the whole system? This is akin to forgetting to ask how water and the contents of the apple defied the law of gravity in the first place before it could even subject itself to the law.

The tremendous flow of information, data and the wealth of research that is being and has been accumulated over the past decades should urge us to revisit some of the theories that have dominated modern times. We are obliged to search for progress since the theoretical constructs we use remain an incomplete reflection of reality. Worse, several of the theories and mathematical formulas simply do not fit together and only survive in a world of their own. There is no overarching unity in the theory that combines quantum and nuclear physics with the law of gravity construed in the world of Isaac Newton. The Relativity Theory first formulated by Albert Einstein in 1905 and then perfected in 1915 offers a framework that is an improvement on all previous understanding, but not a final and definite explanation of life on Earth that offers us an overar-ching integration of the theories that have emerged over time. Unfortunately, the mindset of present day scientists seems on the whole to thwart any attempt to bring forth a new theory. Innovative insights are quickly discarded as invalid. Worse, deviations from the present thinking are more often than not ridiculed. Science starts sounding like a dogma, some even classify science as a basis for religion.

reFLeCtIoNs oN PhysICs by AN eCoNoMIstPerhaps it is no surprise that many of the recent fundamental breakthroughs in the sciences were forwarded by people who never studied the discipline in which they unleashed their creativity in the first place. That is why these people are labeled as “undisciplined” scientists. This goes for the double helix1, the pacemaker2, the personal computer3 and so many more. Naturally one can also point out many “well-disciplined” scientists like Albert Einstein who propelled tremendous breakthroughs in science and society, building on previous expertise and benefiting from their formal education. This The unpretentious

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Chapter One

contribution to the thinking in the world of physics you will find here is clearly one from an undisciplined individual: I was trained as an economist and have an master in business administration (MBA).

After having studied micro and macro economics, it became clear that my back-ground in statistics and mathematics enables me to observe interrelationships beyond the sheer phenomena. An economist is trained to see the link between savings and investments, government deficits and export surplus, interest rates and inflation, just to mention a few. Of course, economists are trained to see the connections amongst all of the above, how they are interrelated, and much more. As students pursuing an MBA, future managers get trained in transla-ting corporate strategies into discounted cash flow analyses, net present values, consolidated balance sheets, unique selling propositions, supply chain manage-ment and outsourcing. And when things go wrong it is time for cost-cutting and downsizing and focusing on the core business, disregarding everything else that makes the business tick. In the process of looking for this logical construct based on cash, these managers are only able to look at one business with one core business model at a time, and dissect it.

Economics offer a logical construct that allows us to explain what happened in the past and to steer economies through changes in consumer behavior, govern-ment policies and corporate strategies. However the driving force in the market is something as intangible as “expectations”. The only people endeavoring to place value into “expectations” are entrepreneurs who deliberately refuse to look at hard facts and proven trends. After all if you copy what everyone else is doing you are certain to lose market share and produce lower margins. The entrepreneur is the kind of person who gets information like “no one wears shoes in Central Africa” and, based on exactly the same information, comes to completely different conclusions. One businessman decides that it is not worth entering the African market since no one is wearing shoes. Another, an entre-preneur, is so enthusiastic about the potential market that he builds a manuf-acturing plant. One will argue that there is no money to buy the shoes and the other one believes that wealth will be created through the value adding process of manufacturing which will generate the income needed to buy the locally produced footwear. The spirit of the latter case can be found at Bata shoes, one

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of the most successful entrepreneurial cases in the developing world. Thomas Bata4 was a refugee from the Czech Republic who had to survive with little after the war. This is precisely what made such an idea possible. People who contend with stressful situations regularly detect more opportunities of this nature than people who are living in pampered circumstances.

AttrACted to QuestIoNs we CANNot ANswerAfter three decades of navigating the academic world and being exposed to thousands of scientists who have each contributed so much to the advance-ment of society, physics - considered the mother of all sciences - has caught my attention more than any of the other sciences. However, what attracts me most is the interfaces between physics and biology as well as between physics and chemistry. These are fascinating areas for reflection and research. How is it possible that the trout’s face is shaped like and egg, permitting it to propel itself forward when danger is sensed merely by opening its gills and using the force of the vortices swirling around in the turbulent water. The connection between the physical construct of cells that form a shape and the formation of whirls which permit the forward propulsion of the fish is a stunning example of how trial and error and the establishment of new and predictable relations has come to perfect an interplay where the original force is gravity (the water rushes downstream as a result of gravity and naturally generates vortices).

How is it possible that the zebra has developed a hide with black and white stripes that cools the air with micro gusts of wind generated by the difference of air pressure arising from the higher temperature of the black surface? How could the intelligence of creating your own surface ventilation, one of the most efficient means of cooling ever, be translated in such an ingenious design of its hide? How could the pain of heat be diminished by the design of a special layer of fat directly underneath the black stripes? How is it possible that the peacock can display such magnificent colors without color pigments by mastering the art of light refraction? Birds are the masters of optics for color production. How is it possible that termites maintain the temperature inside their nest at a constant 87 degrees (26 Celsius) by constructing chimneys which automatically regulate both temperature and humidity in a display of masterful understanding of micro-meteorology and the skilful application of non-linear mathematics?

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How did mosquitoes figure out that if they want to suck blood undetected its proboscis must have a conical and not a cylindrical shape? Why did we have to endure painful needles for decades until Terumo finally introduced conical ones to market? These needles became an overnight success and were especially popular among diabetic patients.

When one notes the marvels behind these perfect exploitations of energy and matter, the conspicuous construct of forms, the appropriate selection of materials, and the self-building of components one cannot but be impressed with the high level of intelligence embedded in natural systems that make up the living cover of the Blue Earth. These critters have the capacity to extract the best out of physics, chemistry and biology and turn the relationships to their advantage. Each one of the examples mentioned here demonstrates that they discovered the connections between disparate phenomena (air pressure and cooling or geometry and propulsion). How come human beings act in such a disconnected manner? How come humans do not even take the time to discover the connections? Worse, how come we seem to make every (uninten-tional) effort possible to disconnect the marvels around us. This first chapter will investigate some additional questions about physics as an interface between evolution, energy, matter and life with the aim of stimulating fresh insights into how life emerged, how it evolved over billions of years and continues to co-evolve and how we can apply what we have learned from Einstein’s relativity theory in real living conditions. This should motivate us to embark on more innovation, rethink our world, design new business models, imagine a healthier society and connect our hearts and souls. These newly gained insights empower us to design a life that makes use of all the opportunities before us, provided we recognize the connections.

ForCes oN eArth: suN, GrAVItAtIoN ANd MAGNetIsMThe generally accepted theory is that the Universe emerged some 10 to 20 billion years ago from a Big Bang. This theory will never be proven, nor does it offer definite answers on how matter as we know it today emerged and how the Earth really came into being in this huge open space known as the Universe. The Earth maintains a dynamic and rather predictable relation with other planets and moons in our solar system. This Earth, just like any of the bodies

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in the solar system, has been subjected to two major outside forces for billions of years: first heat radiation from the sun as hydrogen burns, and second the gravitational forces amongst planets and moons which we call interplanetary magnetism5. It is interesting that we typically only consider one energy source, the heat from the sun, when we think about renewable power, and neglect the second one, this pulling force that puts the Earth in a path around the sun, spins it around its own axis and carries with it a moon, which exerts another strong gravitational force that causes the oceans to rise twice a day, and so much more. The interplanetary magnetism and the gravitational attraction between the sun, planets and moon are strong and predictable forces. These are always present, everywhere on Earth. The sun only shines half of the day on approxi-mately half of the Earth, whereas the interplanetary gravitational force is never ending and in force all the time, day and night and applies everywhere, without exception.

The magnetism of planets and the gravitational forces amongst them are only recent discoveries6. However, the forces that keep the moon in orbit around the Earth determine the lunar calendar. This 29 day cycle7 influences our lives in a wide variety of ways from the fertility cycle of women, to the amount of water in the coconuts on Caribbean beaches, , to the right timing to harvest bamboo in the Colombian highlands or letting the Dogon tribal members in Mali determine the right moment to plant their seeds. The orbit of the moon around the Earth explains the relentless flow of ebb and tide of the seas more or less twice a day. Solar energy on the other hand determines the seasons. The annual change of tilt of the Earth towards the sun leads to shifts in temperature and pressure, thus creating the basis for our solar calendar. The energy forces we experience have clearly shaped the various calendars by which we have come to live. Perhaps the time has arrived to use an innovative approach to look for inspiration in how we can better design our lives, how we can better prepare our children for the future.

eArth As PArt oF AN oPeN systeMThe Earth is part of an open system as witnessed by being subjected to massive flows of energy (solar and magnetism) from the outside. Physics examines the traditional four fundamental forces in Nature: (1) gravity, (2) electromagnetism,

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(3) strong nuclear and (4) weak nuclear force. The laws of physics are based on hypotheses that study closed systems in a vacuum. Hence the fundamental critique of scientists such as Fritjof Capra8 that there is a need to look at reality, and not just at an approximation of reality. The study of phenomena entertai-ning the hypothesis that we are observing a closed system does not mean that these theoretical constructs are useless, it should only urge us to search for frameworks and theories that come closer to the reality in which we live. The law of gravity only works in a vacuum.

It is interesting to note we learned from Einstein that energy and matter can be converted back and forth on the basis of his legendary formula9. How are we to convert particles into energy as is done with the detonation of an atom bomb? How are we to convert pure energy into matter as is done using a particle accelerator? We know that the amount of matter on Earth is limited. We do not make or destroy anything, we only transform, right? We are showered with energy from outside our Earth’s atmosphere, yet it does not seem that we have been creating a lot more additional mass. Only last century did we established the bit of wisdom that dictates matter and energy are basically the same. If matter and energy are interchangeable, and mass on Earth seems a constant, then we have to ask ourselves what has happened to all the energy our Earth has received? How much energy was consumed in these transformation cycles? It seems that little was consumed. So once more, where has this massive flow of energy from the outside been accumulated over three or four billion years?

Whereas humanity has not yet understood how to harvest the solar and gravi-tational forces amongst planets, moons and the sun, this energy continues to flow from the Universe, arriving in predictable volumes from the Universe. Is coal, petroleum and natural gas the only form of energy that has been carefully guarded under the Earth’s crust, or are there other forms of energy storage that we have not yet understood? Or, are these forces only understood by scientists and have these simply not been translated into energy we could use right away?.

FroM ChAos to struCtured reLAtIoNshIPsThe Old Testament maintains the Earth was created out of chaos. This is wisdom we cannot ignore. It is quite obvious that the conversion of unstructured mass

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into forests, mountains, or even sand dunes requires a lot of energy. However, as any architect knows, the mere union of matter does not provide structure and form. Somewhere there is the intention to achieve something, the desire to transform unstructured matter and reliable sources of energy into a self-sustai-ning living system. Somehow there is a symbiotic relationship that emerges when a few elements are combined to form the basis of patterns, which we then recognize in the form of structures. The most abundant structure is the very basic structure that we depend on most: a cluster of simple molecules known as H2O, or simply called water.

Though we do not exactly know how life emerged on Earth, it is obvious to everyone that water is a key component in the emergence and the sustaining of life. It is beyond doubt that if there is no water then there is no life, at least not life as we know it today. Now water would not be here had it not been for a very finely defined set of relationships between two distinct atoms, positioned in a particular angle. It is the creation of that specific set of relationships that defines how we live and continue living. The connection between hydrogen and oxygen forms the basis for the most precious molecule on Earth.

The second force that determines so much of our life is the positive and negative charge which characterizes any atom, and for that sake any molecule or matter. Even a minute form of charges creates electromagnetism, which is the force behind many characteristics that determine life, such as pH which expresses the number of free hydrogen atoms., This, in turn, which in turn determines the acidity or the alkalinity, or the difference in pH that creates the currents that make cells perform osmosis efficiently. It is this relentless charge of positive and negative on miniscule extremities that are minute distances apart that are crucial for creation and the development of life. These utterly complex rela-tionships have become very transparent and predictable. The building blocks were created from simple atoms, and evolved into complex systems like our body, the skeleton of a lobster, the trunk of a sequoia tree and the shell of a diatom.

Water is only water thanks to the negative and positive poles of each element. Any change in this charge requires some form of energy. The hydrophobic and

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hydrophilic characteristics of materials, the functioning of our heart and the process of pumping through capillary vessels all depend on these transforma-tions of energy at the smallest possible level. We somehow only see that large-scale generation of energy through coal fired power plants or nuclear power stations. Natural systems do not engage in the production of grand systems, natural systems embark on the creation of minute amounts of highly fine-tuned small networks that make it all work together.

Since we have been blessed with an abundance of energy either in the form of light from the sun or in the form of gravitational forces from the planets, moons and the sun with which we share this Universe, we should really attempt to respond to the question: “What happened to the massive amount of energy that the Earth and its inert and living systems has received for the past five billion of years and continue to receive?” Knowing the efficiency with which natural systems operate, we can conclude that this abundance of energy showered on life and its non-animate surroundings certainly has not been wasted. The present theoretical framework of physics does not seem to offer us the logic to respond to this question. So let us think creatively beyond our present insights.

About wAste, reLAtIoNshIPs ANd CoNNeCtIoNsWe have to take a leap in our thinking and enter the world of biology. Nature does not create any waste. Whatever is waste for one is food for another in a different kingdom. Biologists provided us with a tool for understanding these dynamics when they conveniently agreed on subdividing all life in five realms: bacteria (monera), algae (protista), fungi, plants and animals10. This ingenious system reuses everything by cascading from one energy and matter seeking species to another, switching kingdoms at a rate we had never imagined. At each interface of production and consumption the functionality of the matter and its energy changes, but the value improves for the one that considers this a worthy input. Whatever is waste for one species, is a nutrient or energy for another species … belonging to another kingdom. Each time matter cascades, different chemical reactions, different exploitations of pressure, size, tempera-ture and mechanics permit different results, unparalleled in efficiency at that time and place, using whatever resources are at hand.

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It seems that natural systems are only increasing the number of relationships and the existing ones are more refined, more efficient, capable of doing more with less, all the time moving towards improvements by expanding the number of relations. Each of these realms or kingdoms has very specific roles and responsibilities, and each species within a specific kingdom has carved out its highly specialized niche with an exceptional command of physics, chemistry and biology. However these niches are not stand-alone, but rather meticulously designed interrelationships based on connections that make sense to everyone involved. How did all these relationships come into existence? And who disco-vered the connections between phenomena that are at first sight completely unrelated?

These clusters of species are individually perfectly intertwined and have evolved into sets of natural systems that transform chaos and inert matter into structure, life, value and self-sufficiency. In some cases these systems benefited from such an excessive supply of energy and matter and became so efficient in converting it to sustain themselves that one can conclude every living species lives at least in sufficiency, and many even in clear abundance. This transforma-tion process does indeed require energy, but the amount that reaches us from space is so abundant and whatever each species needs for its own survival is so small that we must conclude more energy is available than needed, particularly with such high levels of efficiency. Any excess energy seems to fuel the search for more relationships. Remember how the zebra cools, the termite air-condi-tions and the trout escapes. So if we accept the hypothesis that natural systems like the one that evolved on Earth will not waste the energy arriving from outer space then we should ask again “What happened and continues to happen with it?” It seems quite logical that the flow of energy that arrives and does not get used in the transformation process of matter into life, and the maintenance of self-sustaining life somehow gets utilized. Somehow the tremendous flow of energy is absorbed, accumulated and stored. Geologists help us understand the tremendous amount of energy that was needed to shape mountains and valleys that continue to erode and emerge. The mere emergence of these high peaks, the movement of tectonic plates that shape complete continents and creation of deep oceans must have required massive amounts of energy. Is this obser-vation enough to put our thinking on track?

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We cannot but guesstimate the amount of energy that we have received from the Universe since its creation some 10-20 billion years ago. As we note how much energy must have been invested in the creation of the world as it is today, creating such structures out of chaos, and how it continues to co-evolve to more specialization and more efficiency, we wonder how that surplus amount of energy got transformed into something. The logic that we have been made to understand is that this energy was transformed into matter and that the amount of matter has been transformed into more structured matter. Simple atoms connected with other atoms and formed complex molecules. Salt (NaCl) is a much simpler molecule than a protein, which could be built up of a long chain of atoms. At the same time, the arrival of more energy allows for taking structures apart and rebuilding them as useful components for others on Earth.

eNerGy Is reLAtIoNshIPsHowever, the sequence of that logic is not satisfactory. It is time to move beyond the energy-matter equation that Professor Einstein proposed. The hypothesis is that in an open system, the flow of energy received by inert and living systems on Earth is converted into ever more complex relationships. Energy is transformed into relationships between matter, organic and inorganic, living and inanimate. Somehow the energy that is bestowed on us nurtures the discovery of new connections that are in turn translated into continuous relationships, adaptive and co-evolving. Once these relationships have proven themselves over time, they remain active and assume a permanent pattern. With time all the atoms on the periodic table have discovered the most convenient connections of unsurpassed excellence, engendering impressively stable and highly efficient sets of relationships which shape life as we know it today. The ever increasing level of sophisticated sets of connections is a reflection of the massive amounts of energy that have showered the Earth and accumulated and will continue to do so for approximately five billion more years. We generally expect that by then (five billion years down the road) the sun will have exhausted all its hydrogen, resulting into the demise of the solar system as we know it today. The forces of gravity may remain intact for another billion years.

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It is impossible to understand our Earth, the solar system and Universe without studying relationships and the patterns that emerge and evolve. Doing so will put us on an everlasting quest to uncover the best possible connections - first amongst simple molecules, then amongst complex molecules and further amongst networks of networks of systems. It is impossible to ponder life in the forest without seeing the relationships between plants, animals, fungi, micro-algae and bacteria. The shape and body of crustaceans can only be understood by considering the linkage between carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen. It is impossible to understand chlorophyll without noting the interaction between lichens, rocks, organically bound magnesium and the sun. While our scientific research over the past centuries has focused on understanding more of each of the individual components, natural systems and the Earth’s crust have been busy nurturing evolution of species toward a much more complex set of inter-relationships. The total, known as Mother Earth or Gaia, is a repository of relationships that are growing exponentially in a tireless search for connections amongst the unknown. As long as energy continues to arrive, we are bound to discover more connections, which will enhance those relationships. We are bound to evolve toward more biodiversity which is always perfecting the ways and means of converting energy and matter in life in ways that require less and less energy; these new relationships permit us to cascade it all on a never-ending path of co-evolution. This goes way beyond the Cradle to Cradle principle. This is the product of meditation and the Art of Blue.

Diversity increases on Earth at an astonishing pace. And yes, our planet is undoubtedly blue, with a blue sky and blue oceans, making it so unmistakably blue when we admire it from above. It started with a few single cell bacteria, with other species emerging over time: first the anaerobes, then the aerobes. That was only the beginning. The increase in complexity is stunning, the diver-sification and adaptation to new and unknown conditions is beyond imagina-tion. The perfection of performance has been relentless and marvelous. Every living creature has created its niche and at the same time elaborated its connec-tions with others. In these interconnected niches each one learned to adapt to the laws of physics, designing a portfolio of recipes for chemical reactions reproductive biological systems that makes the whole as well as each individual unique. However, the real uniqueness is not any species on its own, but the

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relationships that it has forged and the network of the networks that undulate life with pulses like light and sound, providing the drumbeats that appear to drive and inspire co-evolution. We have no idea how many relationships could be about to unravel before our eyes because we are so focused on nanotech-nologies and genomes. Here we submit that the number of relationships is increasing at the speed of light as we unlock the incredible potential in new and untried connections.

the reLAtIoNshIPs oF the sPIder webThe spider has been admired for its capacity to produce a fiber that is stronger than nylon and is biodegradable or even biocompatible. Biocompatible simply means in this case that it can be recycled into protein. A spider will always produce exactly the same fiber for its web regardless of what food it has been able to take in (whether a blood-sucking mosquito or a plant-devouring insect). The capacity to come up with the same result out of “anything”, to produce the same result (food and building elements for the web) out of randomness, is made possible by a complex web of connections that include fungi and bacteria. Spiders have developed symbiotic relationships with fungus and bacteria in the intestinal track. Without these partners, the spider web cannot be created. First we note the interaction amongst living species in the intestinal track but soon we unravel a complex but predictable series of chemical reactions (thousands at the cell level). These are dependent on physical conditions with the only change being in parameter pressure and moisture levels which triggers a predictable biological process (DNA) that uses only a few elements out of a diverse mix. This level of sophistication produces highly efficient results, yet we have only recently made this amazing discovery.

The thesis we therefore present is that a great deal of the energy that we receive on Earth is used to create, support, evolve and drive innumerable relation-ships that elevate transformations to ever more efficient and complex levels, establishing more relationships as the value of the connections comes to bear. As more relationships emerge, efficiency increases, and the system needs less and less energy to sustain itself. In ecological terms, the carbon footprint of the system evolves toward zero. Better even, the footprint becomes positive, since the “by-product” that is released gives rise to more abundant energy and

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matter for others. This in turn will turn this excess flow of energy into more relationships via a sophisticated trial and error process that prospects for the best connections. Thus emerges a self-evolving system that attains higher levels of complexity with ever lower energy needs. Once a certain level of optimized efficiency has been achieved it gets registered into the DNA.

What we must realize is that the unique capacity of the spider to produce its web is intricately woven into the micro-ecosystems of plants and animals. Each one of them is making the best use of the laws of physics, exploiting distinct chemical processes, operating at ambient temperature and ambient pressure all the while contributing to the creation of a unique DNA. Thus the ecosystem, bathing in an abundance of never ending flows of energy creates these relati-onships and evolves these into symbiotic and completely interlinked portfolios. Patterns for converting matter and energy emerge in which components are disassembled into sub-systems using a very limited subset of atoms from the periodic table of elements. It is quite obvious that living systems relate to each other at the same time living systems relate to inert matter, and vice versa. This interaction is not limited to an exchange of energy and nutrients amongst the living systems; its most important role is to give an account of the organic and inorganic spheres with skill, art, beauty and of course functionality, meaning this interaction is converted into ever more complex relationships. However, the key is the conversion; discovery leads to action and more action leads to changes in DNA so that higher forms of efficiency find their way into the DNA and are then replaced when even better connections are discovered and species mutate.

The raw energy that arrives in the form of solar heat and gravitational force is converted into a remarkably small and soft force. Every pulse of power is basically undulating and minute influxes of energy drive everything. The pulse that powers a human heart is only 0.03V. Our body knows how to take in potassium, calcium and sodium and combine these in the fluids around the heart to produce a continuous flow of minor electric current that keep the muscles contracting and our heart pumping. Our veins and arteries are lined with a biological material which dramatically reduces friction and carefully maintains its pH at 7.38 so that our blood flows swiftly and frictionlessly through the

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thousands of miles of our circular blood system. The most efficient form of storing and transforming energy seems to be brought to wherever it is needed through this soft pulsation that brings billions of billions of nano-sized energy units to wherever they need to go. These energy units get everywhere without fail because of this web of relationships. Life is connected.

It Is More thAN eNerGy, It Is ALso beAutIFuLThe time has come to take a macro view, just like the economist who examines consumer behavior on a day–by-day basis now needs to look at the way the global economy is evolving. The first thing we notice is that the atmosphere is really the result of all chemical reactions on Earth. These chemical reactions are occurring in the Earth’s Crust, this thin layer where all life is found. All the species living and interacting on this outer layer of Earth are able to satisfy their basic needs for water, food, shelter, health, and energy. As soon as sufficiency is converted into abundance, procreation increases and diversity flourishes. Nature never simply keeps on making more of the same stuff forever; nature is constantly evolving into more complex forms of life. On top of that, each member of these intricate webs of life is somehow related to another. Optimal results are attained by using just a few often simple molecules and a very limited number of the elements in Dmitry Mendeleyev’s11 periodic table. This smart and efficient way forward that life forms take is simplified by DNA codes which only change once a new optimal level of perfection has been achieved in the tireless search for improvement. Bacteria offer us the great exception to the rule since they continue mutating as local conditions require, enabling them to adjust to the most minor changes in the environment and survive the most dramatic upheavals. In other words, we live in a network of networks of networks of yet more networks where everything is connected to everything. What we realize is that we are nothing on our own; we are who we are because of the network we belong to. There are food chains, energy chains, mineral chains, and chains of relationships whose sole apparent purpose is to provide beauty and pleasure. This is delightful!

As Earth has received and continues to receive these billions of units of energy each day from the outside, living systems can and will interrelate more and more with their physical environment. Life on Earth was made possible and

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remains possible because the continuous flow of energy combined with a sufficient supply of elements secures nutrients and energy. A symbiosis has thus emerged between the organic and the inorganic world. This is the key to our life, and that is the wisdom that provided the basis for the previous classi-fication of kingdoms: animals, plants and minerals. This simplistic classifica-tion has been revised as a result of the pioneering work performed by Dr. Lynn Margulis which encourages us to conclude that life only appears at the interface of energy, matter and relations.

Once we realize and accept that relationships are embedded energy and incre-asing relationships is only possible with a continuous flow of energy, then we can begin living up to the level of sophistication that the Five Kingdoms of Nature model offers us. Bacteria and algae, especially the lichens (symbiosis with fungus), are able to perform a sort of mining on rocks, making inorganic magnesium available for the production of chlorophyll. Plants have succeeded in creating the remarkable molecule chlorophyll that uses sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into energy, structure and food. Plants, as a kingdom, are purportedly the latest arrival on Earth. That shouldn’t come as a surprise since the design, the construction and the fine-tuning of a system that allows you to make your own food provided there is sufficient sunlight is perhaps the most sophisticated configuration to celebrate life on Earth.

The capacity to procreate as a plant is also exceptional. We have instances where seeds that have experienced duress can wait over a millennium before germinating into a new generation of life. This is in itself a celebration of life. Even with all the patience that accompanies this process, the fungus will ulti-mately ensure chlorophyll - in the form of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin - is disassembled, releasing magnesium once again as an inorganic element. The amount of time is of no consequence, it’s the cycle that counts. It seems that the lichen has an easier job; instead of extracting the magnesium out of the rocks deep below, it uses the much more readily available core building block chlorophyll. This system requires less energy to perform the same job. The building of relationships and their dissolution operates so effectively that the cycle can continue endlessly.

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The energy needed to extract magnesium out of the rocks is considerable and lichens demonstrate a tremendous feat with their capacity to penetrate solid boulders at a rate of one mile every two days. Once the magnesium has been mined, it will simply circulate through the system with less energy input. Where it initially seems brute force would be needed again and again, thereafter the mere unleashing of undulating pulses suffices to provide the energy flows that allow life to enjoy its presence on Earth. That means that as the number of such relationships increases, less energy is required to get the same job done. Moreover, any surplus energy was not wasted or left unused. We suggest that it was simply accumulated and stored in the form of ever more complex relation-ships. And, this increased number of relationships rendered the whole system more energy efficient, which unleashed more energy for creating even more relationships. The driving force behind the creation of ever more life through enriched biodiversity is clear. After all, only living things are able to continue creating new links amongst inert elements and create more than could ever have been imagined by humanity.

Chlorophyll is an interesting case, especially when we study this in conjunction with the analysis of hemoglobins. They are literally the same, but one little shift, the substitution of one magnesium atom for one iron atom creates the building block of animal life as opposed to the building block of plant life. It must have taken a tremendous process of trial and error in order to get this right. It was a stroke of genius to make this adaptation from converting solar energy using magnesium to converting energy using iron. Iron assists in transporting oxygen throughout the body. The delicate shape of patterns that work so well (chlo-rophyll for plants and hemoglobin for warm-blooded animals) actually calls attention to the things that did not work well, which must have been phased out long ago Whatever worked has been subjected to a relentless drive towards improvement. “Whatever did not work”, as Amory Lovins12 says “… has long been recalled by the manufacturer”.

The capacity to evolve from anaerobic bacteria to aerobic bacteria and convert a toxin called oxygen as a precondition for life is a masterstroke. However, we have to realize that this adaptation to a more complex form of life required an estimated 500 million years. If we delve into the science of relationships, we

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realize that behind this key piece of evolution of life on earth lie (1) chains of parallel and dynamic chemical reactions, the meticulous use of the minerals and metals available in minute amounts, (2) a smart harvesting of transforma-tion as well as the transportation of energy and matter using pH and tempe-rature differences, pressure on membranes, water surface tension and most importantly a smart mix of positive and negative charges, enabling an ever more efficient use of energy and matter, and (3) an extremely efficient procrea-tive system that multiplies whatever has been proven to work. However, the true accomplishment above and beyond the marvels of biology, physics and chemistry is the creation of billions of relationships in a seemingly endless and dynamic process of restructuring and destructuring. These relationships have become quite predictable.

If we come to think of it all, the abundant flux of gravitational and solar energy from outer space to our Earth has been and continues to be translated into relationships. It is this increase in complexity that permitted us to evolve from chaos to order. This increase in complexity is thus not only the result of an exposure to and a consumption of energy, it is particularly interesting since it seems to permanently store energy. Better even, as we store more energy we augment the web of relationships. And as the web of relationships increases from one system to the other and matter cascades from one to the other, value is added to whatever seems to be without value. The need for energy decreases, paving the way for further co-evolution to ever more efficient and energy-abundant living systems. Since the amount of energy that flows to the Earth from the solar system in the form of light and gravitational forces is considered constant over time, the more efficient use of energy by all living systems paves the way for more and increasingly complex relationships. Since there is a limit to how much matter can be converted to energy and vice versa, the conclusion we must draw is that it is possible to convert energy into an increased number of relationships. The increase of biodiversity over time is a demonstration of how natural systems are able to convert energy into increasing the number of highly-defined relationships. The destruction of biodiversity by modern society is a demonstration of our deep ignorance of the web of life and the impor-tance of relationships that provide the very foundation of life and beauty.

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suMMAryThe inflow of energy to the Earth is considered to remain more or less constant and the amount of available matter on Earth is also fixed. The continuous flow of energy and its more efficient use by systems of production and consump-tion that are becoming more and more interconnected, integrating and separa-ting matter using less and less energy ultimately improves upon the way life is maintained, diversifies and co-evolves. Since matter and energy increase their efficiency, the only way to keep the dynamic balance is by increasing the number of relationships exponentially. The number of relationships amongst species and inorganic matter must therefore increase exponentially.

At the same time, as the amount of embedded energy in relationships accumu-lates, it is easier to create new relationships which make evolution an unstopp-able process toward ever higher levels of diversity. Diversity, and the co-evolu-tion of natural systems toward ever more diversity is therefore a function of a dramatic change and increase in relationships. When we realize that biodiversity increases, we are basically saying that the number of relationships increases. As biodiversity increases so do relationships and these relationships are more efficient and therefore able to create new portfolios of biological, chemical and physics-based recipes, which in the end are expressions of relationships. As the number of new relationships skyrockets the amount of energy needed to create, to sustain and to grow them is reduced. This inverse relationship allows us to see how the amount of diversity increases, the amount of energy accumu-lated increases and it becomes clear how Earth has embarked on a never-ending cycle of co-evolution.

Now what is human activity doing in our modern times? We are having adverse effects on biodiversity while we exhaust the supply of minerals, inert gases and the like. We are not simply depleting resources. We are reducing the number of relationships. We are slowly but surely consuming the massive reserves of energy that have been accumulating and are stored in the ecosystems. Its recovery - if it is ever to recover - is therefore a very long term process that will require millions of years. That is at the heart of the drama we are witnessing today: we are dramatically reducing the relationships and the dwindling number of species is actually a superficial reflection of the massive destruction of

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relations that took billions of energy units to create … and only a few decades of ignorance to destroy.

The line of thinking developed here is an attempt to open the mind, to search for new avenues and just like Alice in Wonderland, when all these exciting opportu-nities open up before us, we should allow ourselves to enjoy the rush of ideas, the wealth of opportunities and the positive framework that emerges. This does not imply that all is fact and science;, however, it is our chance to explore this world and navigate opportunities, imagining a society better than anything we have experienced before where there is always room for improvement.

The way forward on our quest to create a happy and healthy world, inspired by imagination and creativity and based on science, depends on our better under-standing of relationships, how the connections were established and how we can pro-actively start relating to all life around us. We can recreate communities by designing a lifestyle and a living system that thrives on the discovery of the sorts of relationships that we have lost over the course of “civilization”. This is the opportunity we have before us. This is the moment to reverse the trend. This is the Zen and the Art of Blue. Some are not waiting for this to happen. Some are making it happen already. And you can be part of it, starting with your own body, home and community. That is really what the next chapters are all about.

Microcosm, © Fotolia

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1 Francis Crick from Britain still had no Ph.D. at 35. The American James Watson, 12 years Crick’s junior, had graduated from the University of Chicago at 19 and received his doctorate at 22. In 1953 Francis Crick had migrated from physics into chemistry and biology, fascinated by the line “between the living and the non-living.” James Watson had studied ornithology, then forsook birds for viruses, and then, doing postdoctoral work in Europe, took another sharp career turn.

2 Dr. Jorge Reynolds studied electric engineering at Cambridge University when he designed the first pacemaker with an external battery in 1953; the pacemaker is now on display in the British Science Museum in London. He never even obtained a medical degree. However, he is member of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

3 Michael Dell, founder of the largest personal computer company in 2005 never studied at any university, and Bill Gates even dropped out of Harvard in order to focus on his software venture Microsoft. Steve Jobs worked diligently as a salesman out of Steve Wozniak’s garage to get started with Apple.

4 For more information please consult: http://www.bata.com/about_bata/history.htm

5 The history of geomagnetism began around the year 1,000 with the discovery in China of the magnetic compass. Methodical studies of the Earth’s field started in 1600 with William Gilbert’s “De Magnete” and continued with the work of (among others) Halley, Coulomb, Gauss and Sabine. The discovery of elec-tromagnetism by Oersted and Ampére led Faraday to the notion of fluid dynamos, and the observation of sunspot magnetism by Hale led Larmor in 1919 to the idea that such dynamos could sustain themselves naturally in convecting conducting fluids. From that came the modern dynamo theory, of both the solar and terrestrial magnetic fields. Paleomagnetic studies revealed that the Earth’s dipole had undergone reversals in the distant past, and these became the critical evidence in establishing plate tectonics. Finally, the recent availability of scientific spacecraft has demonstrated the intricacy of the Earth’s distant magnetic field, as well as the existence of magnetic fields associated with other planets and with satellites in our solar system. From Reviews of Geophysics, 40(3), p.1-1 to 1-30, Sept 2002 by David P. Stern, Laboratory for Extraterrestrial Physics, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA.

6 For more information on the discoveries consult the official website of NASA at: http://istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthmag/planetmg.htm

7 To be correct it is a 29.53 day cycle

8 see his book “The Tao of Physics”

9 E=mc² (energy equals mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light)

10 See the lifework of Dr. Lynn Margulis and her colleagues on The Five Kingdoms of Nature. For more information please consult: http://marlin.bio.umass.edu/faculty/biog/margulis.html

11 Born in the Siberian town of Tobolsk on Feb. 8, 1834, Mendeleyev made his most important contribution to chemistry - the discovery of the periodicity of the chemical properties of the elements - in 1869, when he was 35 and an instructor of chemistry at St. Petersburg University. He spent the next 20 years developing a periodic table of elements based on his discovery. He presented his idea of organizing elements on the basis of their properties to Western European scientists in June 1889 in a lecture to the London Chemical Society, and it has been a cornerstone in teaching chemistry and in predicting the chemical properties of elements ever since.

12 For more information about the pioneering work of Dr. Amory Lovins, please have a look at the website: http://www.rmi.org/

PArt II

The Opportunity

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Chapter Two

Connections in Life

In the first chapter I introduced some new ideas about how life on earth has used abundant energy for the creation of new connections into a web of life that is both efficient and beautiful. This first chapter offered us a bit of theory on a macroscopic scale with a look at the world and the universe over a period extending billions of years. Now I would like to take you to our world, talk about what we do not know in life, and what is obvious, what should be known right here and right now by everyone. It is about the opportunities that are before us, and somehow we do not notice. In this book I wish to use basic daily activities like eating breakfast to demonstrate to you how you can change everything for the better in your life and in the life of all your fellow citizens on this planet once you see the connections. This is not about dogma or belief systems, it is simply based on over 1,000 scientific concepts and insights which are well understood and documented, but which somehow never made us better understand our lives and relationships.

This book is about opening minds to a new way of thinking which I like to call “The Art of Blue”. When I say blue I am referring to the Earth and emphasi-zing the dominant blue color of our planet when looked at from the Universe. This fresh look at how everything works through the prism of relationships and networks will give us a platform that will allow us to avail ourselves of all the intelligence we possess. This will empower us to be our best. It will empower us to respond to everyone’s needs using only what we have at our disposal. The following chapters will also give you a few tools to look conscien-tiously at whether or not you and your community are navigating successfully through this fast-changing and uncertain world. If we continue to think and behave as our parents taught us while everything around us is rapidly evolving we are guaranteed to slam into a brick wall. And, many of us do hit the brick wall much too early in life. Some of us never hit the brick wall because we have dozed off in front of a television offering us soap operas and reality shows, or look mesmerized at our Gameboy as we beat another personal record.

Exactly what opportunities should you be able to discover by analyzing your daily breakfast routine? What is scientific about a cup of coffee or corn flakes

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with fat free milk? What is so special about drinking water with ice cubes instead of water at room temperature? We will find breakfast – and not only breakfast – is closely tied to our bodies, our health, local farmers and seasonal harvesting. If you have seen the movie “Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore you understand that we may even link breakfast to the biosphere and climate change, which brings us quickly to biochemistry and physics to name a few.

We are capable of understanding thousands of scientific concepts and assi-milating them into our baseline knowledge. We also tend to assume everyone must learn to read or compute numbers as well as have some form of advanced education to be qualified as a professional. Imagine how you would look at the world if you had an intuitive grasp of hundreds of scientific concepts right there at your fingertips! I am not proposing that you return to university to pursue rigorous study of biology, physics, chemistry and math. On the contrary, I am proposing that you build on your inherent capabilities and understanding that all of us have to make the connections we have never made before that will allow us to see things differently and, most importantly, see things positively. Even when at first there seems to be nothing but bad news, you will find the good news follows quickly.

Why should it be important to “leverage” our innate intelligence while recogni-zing the connections amongst so many phenomena we had no idea were even related? There may even be two phenomena that are not related, but our mind can wander and explore: What if ? Many of us are fully aware of the fact that we need to discover what makes us unique, something that will give us a competi-tive edge and a purpose in life. In addition to that we must recognize that each and every one of us is capable of much more than many of our peers give us credit for. We should all attempt to discover what we really enjoy. Instead of feeling like we have to choose rationally, we should simply try it all. Why not? Additionally, and most importantly, the world has too many hungry people, too many man-made natural disasters and our way of producing and consuming is quickly becoming totally unsustainable. It is up to us and our children to find the mindset and intelligence to solve the ever-expanding global problems we face while not losing sight of the local issues that require our urgent attention as well. Not to mention that if the world is not able to provide the basic needs

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of everyone in fifty years, what good will getting into Harvard be? Ever thought who will feed the Indians and the Chinese?

Our parents brought us in a wonderful world. It seems that never before have so many people lived in prosperity. We all have multiple abilities, our own perso-nalities and our own DNA, but the rest – philosophy, language, education – is a tabula raza when we are born. We were then introduced into our communi-ties where we were exposed to experiences that are special to each. Still, don’t most of us have the uncomfortable feeling that our innate intelligence remains underchallenged, underestimated and underutilized? Do we not have the uncomfortable suspicion that too little of the content taught in schools bears any relevance to the lives we lead? How much do most people remember from high school? How much of it has been useful to the average adult’s life? Perhaps what we have is the best that was ever available, but don’t you agree there is still a lot of room for improvement? Life is about improvement, evolution and change for the better.

At this point in history humans seem to be running into a mental wall. Yes, we want our world to be better., Yyes, we want our children to outperform us. But look at all the nasty stuff going on seemingly unchecked! Infectious diseases run rampant, viruses are immune to antibiotics, hunger affects millions (even in America); there are water shortages even in California and bad water quality all over the globe. We have acid rain, the ozone protection cap is evaporating and ecosystems are being wiped out despite nearly 500 international treaties. We have wars and we have terrorism. We are confident yet defiant and uncertain about what the future has in store. The list goes on and on. How depressing are these overwhelming problems? They are too big - what can one individual possibly do? We are being told that this is the 11th hour; but is it not better to thoroughly enjoy the next sixty minutes in lieu of switching into panic mode? Often we turn a blind eye hoping somehow for the best while we strive to enjoy what we can... today – not thinking about the day our children will be our age.

These challenges are just a few that we face and our children will face. We are passing on to our children, through parenting and through education, most of the same problem-solving tools our parents learned when we were their age.

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Our own parents most likely had the same dreams about the world that we have now … they wanted better for us than they ever thought was possible for them. The learning tools, the philosophical mindset and the knowledge passed on to us have not been enough to swing the world’s sustainability pendulum in the opposite direction. Do you remember the famous Chinese proverb: If you give a man a fish, he will not be hungry for the day. If you teach him how to fish … he will OVERFISH. You were tempted to finish the proverb with what we all have been taught … he will not be hungry anymore. However, with millions of people wanting fish, the oceans are over-fished beyond recovery, virtually to the point of complete depletion. Wisdom used in the past does not always help us into the future. There is a need to create a new wisdom based on the realities as we perceive them today and as they will be in a few generations.

Perhaps more people belong to the middle class than ever before. However, with all the wealth and knowledge that the world has, there are still over a billion people trying to survive on less than a dollar a day. We know another billion will try to do exactly the same over the course of the next decade. If they do not succeed in securing access to food and water, rampant poverty, violence and massive migration will result. Even the richest countries in the world have levels of poverty that are not called for. Have you ever realized just how many homeless there are? How many have a house, but not a home? Isn’t a cozy home with a network of friends and family close by the most important thing you can imagine?

The time has come for us to acquire the tools to ask the right questions to which there are no immediate answers. We must find the finest creative and innovative solutions for converting the world into a sustainable place; we must implement creative solutions and turn this into a much healthier and much happier world. We must create the space to imagine things that we have never imagined before. Isn’t this how innovation and change takes place? If we limit ourselves to what our parents taught us, we will never improve upon what they have done and never fulfill their dreams. Worse, we will be unable to unleash the innate capacity within each of us to be a change agent or a social entrepreneur.

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What kind of space are we talking about? How can we shift how we think and how we act from focusing on one isolated problem at a time to the capacity to see how so much is interrelated so that when we see all the connections we can design solutions that tackle multiple problems at the same time, simultaneously offering multiple solutions? Sound impossible? Perhaps, but let’s do it for the sake of arguing “How does this thinking in connections work?” As adults, the image of space we paint of the reality before us includes the mental space of facts and figures, along with emotional space, artistic space, physical space, creative space and the space to act and make things happen. These intercon-nected “spaces” define this complex approach we label “thinking in systems”, which is the ability to see the whole interdependent picture by “going wide.”

A systems thinker solves problems not by taking into consideration cause and effect – i.e., A + B = C. A systems thinker has no problem anticipating other possible outcomes and solutions in any given situation. Here is one simple example to illustrate systems thinking: In Curitíba, Brazil there was a problem with trash in the favelas (slums). There was also a huge problem with people who lived in the slums finding and keeping jobs because they did not have enough money to take the bus to where workers were needed. What if both the problem of trash and the problem of mobility could be solved at the same time?

How would it be possible to tackle such seemingly unrelated problems in one go? Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitíba at the time, came up with the solution. He envisaged a system where poor people could separate garbage and deliver refuse plastic, aluminum cans, food waste etc. to a local drop off point and receive bus tickets for free in return. What happened was that the trash got cleaned up. The refuse was separated so meticulously that recycling became commercially viable and the people then had transportation to get to a job or to look for a job. Since this program has been in place 92% of the population has begun using public transportation, which in turn justified investing in more buses to provide transportation to far-flung corners of the growing megalo-polis. The favelas are clean, amazingly clean. And, who told us that the poor cannot separate waste or do not have the discipline to do it? The total cost of the bus ticket provided by the city is lower than the annual clean-up costs and

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this solution has the added advantage of the dramatic health benefits living in a hygienic environment brings. This practical system solves two problems in one fell swoop and creates additional benefits for health that were not even thought of at the outset of the program.

Now Curitíba is one of the cleanest cities in South America; even the shanty-towns are clean. Its public transportation system is a model for the rest of the world and led to major consulting business opportunities for the city’s transpor-tation engineers. The cities of Bogotá (8 million) and Sao Paolo (20 million) are replicating the model. Who do you think is advising them? Now the public use of buses in this growing city of over three million and international demand for this type of solution is so intense that major bus manufacturers have set up assembly plants there. Who would have had the vision that by cleaning up the favelas through a nearly perfect separation of garbage would promote economic development and attract foreign investment? We typically do not see the links, but once disclosed they become obvious. Thirty years down the road the concept is still running strong. Why? Because Curitíba designed a new business model that responded to people’s needs while creating an environ-ment that welcomes innovation and entrepreneurship, allowing economic and social development to surpass anything that has been achieved elsewhere in Brazil. And guess what … the environment has benefited from this as well. There was no need to impose taxes, no need to debate an increase in the bus fare; actually most people can use the bus for free!

More examples of solving problems with the systems approach will be given in later chapters. The point is that we as the stewards of our society and the Earth can and must develop this type of interconnected thinking. It is not a matter of saving the world in desperation in the 11th hour, it is a matter of making use of the enormous opportunities before us. Why would we waste any more time doing anything but converting all these opportunities into ways to create health, wealth and happiness? We have the capacity to think and act in a way that produces such a positive outcome. What could hold us back from doing so?

Humans, the newcomers to Earth, are the only species that create waste. Waste that is now piling up in landfills. No one else in nature pumps toxins into the

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ocean, creates plastic islands in the Pacific Ocean, or fills the air with poisonous gases to the point that it changes the whole ecosystem on which we all depend. If we are so intelligent, why do we make things nobody wants? Who wants nuclear waste in their backyard? Who wants to live on land contaminated with heavy metals? We humans are the only living creatures that use more resources than we regenerate and give back to those we depend on so greatly. In nature a tree drops leaves which are converted by earthworms, mushrooms and bacteria back into new food for the tree. The cycle can go on and on. It is sustainable and it is driven by the sun with the law of gravity providing all the checks and balances. Humans extract everything possible from the Earth using a lot of heat and force and do not give anything back to the environment. When you are only a few in numbers you can permit a few excesses. However, if you are nearly seven billion and soon ten, then this system is obviously not sustainable.

I propose we take a little extra time to link science to the arts and our emotions so our whole being will be leveraged. This way we can build on what we already have and advance the potential we need to discover. A little Zen and meditation on who we are and what we are capable of would be so welcome. Then we would be able to produce great results for our individual lives, for our family, society and for the life of our planet. Sounds like a dream? It is about to become reality. Just think Zen and the Art of Blue, just think how many connections you could make personally - to make this happen. This is about us, it is about realizing our real potential in every way and about giving first you, and then your children and peers, the ideas and vision that will make the world better. This is both about the individual and about the entire world based on my belief in our common potential.

This is an ambitious premise because we are dreamers, visionaries and are always open to the better: We want better schools, better health, better learning, better creative opportunities, a better environment, a better world, and better future for our kids and jobs - and we want to be happy. Why settle for less? Jointly, we possess a whole host of solutions, ideas, insight and experience around the world. We believe we can do all of this, and so much more. It is possible. We know that there is no stronger force than an empowered individual who

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is ready to fulfill his dreams and go beyond everything we have imagined for ourselves, our community and the world.

Bus, © Fotolia

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Chapter Three

Imagine and Inspire

With the assistance of Dr. Jacqueline Olivier

The ideas, concepts and experiences in this book are tools for the future. Of course, since thinking in a connected way means some (un)learning, it is learning you can start no matter how old you are or where you live. Please take the time re-evaluate your own biases and assumptions so you can truly make informed decisions about how you will move forward in life.

Adults are forever overlooking things. Adults hardly ever have time for anything that is not important to them right at that moment. Adults become conditioned to noticing little as they forge ahead from point A to point B, gazing at the road and missing the beauty of the scenery. Look closely at the world through the eyes of a child, perhaps your child or when you were a child. Have you ever squatted down and watched ants? Look at them again! How amazing is it that ants never get in traffic jams? How do they do it? Could we learn something from those ants to help freeway traffic jams? How do Andean salamanders at 15,000 feet freeze every night and come back to life every morning? Could we learn something from those salamanders to relieve or eliminate frostbite? How do bees know exactly where to go without GPS (Global Position System) and why have they never ever had a virus attack them? Could we learn something from those bees to help us find our way home or learn something about our health now that antibiotics do not work so well anymore? How does a pelican’s beak expand to hold all that water? Could we learn something from those birds to have packaging that can adjust like that so it never needs to be thrown away?

Think out of the box. It takes energy and commitment to look for answers to the eternal “Why and how?” questions. Yet, how easy is it in this day and age to find the answers to “Why?” It just takes a little extra effort to go on the internet, find some answers and connect the dots so that the knowledge gained is there forever, not saved as short-term “pass-the-test” facts driven by multiple choice questions, but as solid, conceptual knowledge that does not require routine or repetition to learn by rot.

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We have to develop the natural desire to “connect the dots.” Imagine that we respond to questions with questions of our own, and then yet more questions. Remember Socrates? He could not read or write but the continuous questio-ning of his students’ knowledge secured his fame even to this day. If you are the one questioning, you are the one getting all the answers. The dialogue that ensues when we answer questions with questions brings us to ever-deeper levels of understanding which could never be had with the instant gratification of finding a quick answer on the internet. Instead, let’s ask “What are my tennis shoes made out of?” What would you answer? Would you say that they are made out of shoelaces, soles and material? Or, would you say leather, rubber and synthetics? Or, would you look at the entire package of the shoe, including the shoebox, tissue paper; and what are synthetics anyway? Ethylene and vinyl acetate are both toxic if they get into your food. It might interest you to know that those must-have athletic shoes are made by workers who would have to pay more than a month’s salary to buy the shoes in an American discount store!

There are many answers to that probing question “What are my tennis shoes made out of?” Though many might not be interested in synthetics, shifting the answer to include the country of origin is how those larger connections are made, and how more questions are generated. We should pine for patterns of knowledge, relationships and context to create mental models – the same mental models that move us forward into the future. That is the future we dream of.

Yet, we often do not give ourselves the chance to create these frameworks and our innate facility for making connections can easily be atrophied by funneling thinking into an accepted set of linear categories and behaviors reduced to cause and effect. Going back to the shoe question we note how easy it is to gloss over the question, usually because we don’t know the answer ourselves. If the answer is always, “Oh, rubber and stuff like that” eventually we all might stop being inquisitive, never delving into things.

Educators who have performed hundreds of early childhood assessments anec-dotally comment that two and three year olds are given tremendous creative freedom and encouragement to show their individuality. However, the same

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joy that parents have when their two and three year olds act silly, (dis)assemble toys, make up crazy stories and act like weird creatures turns into an uptight, shocked reaction when these same behaviors are seen in a child ready to enter the big leagues of kindergarten or elementary school. When their children are at kindergarten age many parents are mistakenly focused on helping their children excel in a standard set of academic skills: reading, spelling and basic math skills because these are what are stressed these days as successful indica-tors of so-called intelligence. And, we continue like that for the rest of our lives.

The focus on measurable skills happens from school age on. The American school system has moved toward the “end-all” which translates into academic achievement from the university Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) system on down to standardized testing in kindergarten. When we are adults, we compare our pay scales and the salaries we bring home. Because of the importance placed on certain subjects and testing and the measurement of wealth, we neglect the rest of the world of knowledge: How do the sciences relate to our life, how do social systems shape us? How does emotional intelligence teach us about ourselves and about others? How do the arts form expression and aid comprehension of phenomena that cannot easily be explained with words? How does technology extend access to knowledge and motivate learning? How do languages broaden our horizons and connect us to different cultures? And, most importantly, how do they all link together? Busy people with personal schedules often forego “downtime” which is when we unwind, transform our fantasies into reality and our visions into concrete plans. Don’t you miss making the connections?

We are selling ourselves very short by funneling our energies into what the traditional perception is of academic and monetary success. Not only are we selling ourselves short, our society reinforces the myth that doing well on stan-dardized tests and making money means you are gifted. Most likely, all of us are gifted. Why is that brain being wasted on preparing to fill in a bunch of bubbles about plural nouns, irregular verbs, topic sentences and memorized facts and then earn lots of money to buy a house and own cars and go on vacation three times a year without seeing any relation to the world we live in today or will inhabit tomorrow?

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OK – you may be thinking that this is what it takes in modern society to get ahead, to get accepted into a certain field. Fair enough. That may have been the way it actually worked out for some people, but do not neglect the notion that you may be absolutely brilliant but just don’t seem to be able to fill in the right bubbles and pursue the career you are dreaming of! Does it feel right to you to think you cannot contribute to the solutions your community needs, the world requires … now? Or, do you have the solutions and wonder why everyone else doesn’t see them that clearly?

Ask yourself what subjects you loved at school, what things do you remember about school, what were you passionate about, what was different about your favorite teacher? How does this compare and contrast with your professional life and experience? Should anything be changed? And, do you realize how much of that change relies on you wanting to make it happen?

Running shoes, © SXC

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real examples

What is the connection between us, our community, global problems (like climate change) and nature? These next chapters address this question starting from a micro level and continuing to a macro level, starting with real examples of complex challenges so many people have to face in life in different parts of the world. Scientists and entrepreneurs have solved one of these challenges after the other by looking for all the possible connections and indications toward a common solution. These solutions take a systems approach - linking the prio-rities of the local community to the available resources which are perceived as scarce and dwindling, searching for the economic side of things so that everyone can make ends meet, ensuring the natural system maintains its resili-ence and perhaps even improves, taking local politics into account and making sure everyone’s health remains a top priority. The shift in problem solving I propose encourages us to always start from a positive mindset as demonstrated in these examples. This is the most important shift I encourage you to make in your everyday thinking; after all, people average 60,000 thoughts per day – let’s not let those thoughts escape while we are zoning out in front of the television watching a reality show.

how to MItIGAte the rIsk oF Forest FIres IN New MexICo?Americans, especially in the Southwest United States, know how devastating and frightening fires can be to communities and families. Most people are aware of various opinions for fire control. For example, environmentalists believe that wildfires are natural and necessary for forests to regenerate and should be allowed to burn unchecked – at least where there are no communities. In rural areas, fire departments urge homeowners to clear dry brush and firebreaks are made. Firefighters pitch in by doing a commendable job of minimizing damage as much as they can. Others believe forests should be thinned to reduce fires, though some disagree with this strategy stating that just as many fires actually occur in managed forests.

Just as connections were made with trash and transportation in the Brazilian favelas, connections were made in New Mexico in the beginning of 2000.

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Forest fires are one of the major issues dominating the policy agenda. Soil erosion caused by excessive grazing is another example. The main culprits for the destruction of the fragile prairie is thought to be the sheep, which arrived in New Mexico over 450 years ago and have remained part of the Hispanic culture ever since. Sheep herding has been one of the main ways to earn a living for those who settled New Mexico even before the United States of America existed. Environmentalists oppose the use of the mostly public land for grazing and have begun pressing lawsuits arguing it causes soil erosion. At the same time, the government wants to reduce the number of forest fires and put public land to good use. To sum up, three constituents were at odds – the government, the environmentalists (many of them considered rich and newly arrived) and the sheep herders (the poor who consider themselves the custo-dians of the land).

How could a solution to one of these challenges resolve the other? Systems thinking strives to cluster solutions for different challenges, permitting everyone at the negotiation table to achieve their goals. We know very well that nobody pursues their big dreams half-heartedly. We go for our dream, nothing less. What wound up emerging as a possible win-win solution was to thin parts of forests around each community by cutting out the smaller trees. Part of the wood would be used to make charcoal, a traditional fuel, and the softer part would be used to cultivate mushrooms that grow on the soft wood debris and, after harvesting, make a great feed for sheep or even bison herd which have been recently reintroduced to the area. Without the breakdown of fibers and the added amino acids from mushrooms, wood debris is not a viable feed. In this interconnected set of solutions the sheep can be partly fed on feed without stressing the prairies, the community is safer from fires, the tradition of raising sheep remained intact and additional fuel is generated from available resources. This is a set of solutions that required no compromise from anyone! It only required people to think out of the box. Who ever thought that a sheep’s appetite could help reduce the risk of forest fires? The implementation takes time and managing a buy-in from everyone at once is difficult. The Picuris Pueblo, the community that has most to gain, has embarked on a long term program with the support of Lynda Taylor and Robert Haspel. The agenda

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includes the thinning of the forest, the production of charcoal, the farming of mushrooms and the feeding of bison with what is left over.

small wood removal

mushrooms

animal feed

organic wool

yarn

alfalfa substitution

women cooperative

much more than sweaters!

reduced fire risk

reduced grazing maintain traditions

social development

preservation of culturenatural dyes(cochineal + indigo)

From wood to sweaters (photo © Fotolia)

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whAt do CeMeNt kILNs hAVe IN CoMMoN wIth LANdFILLs?Here is something that we all think about: the waste that cities generate called solid municipal waste (SMW). What does a city do with all of that trash? A city can haul it all off to the dump, or burn it, and hopefully some of it (or a lot of it) is recycled. In some areas land is cheap and trash is hauled far away. However, in many places around the world, like in land-locked Japan, there is no room for more landfills. A great alternative to dumping emerged in Sweden and was later adopted in Japan. This alternative uses waste as a resource, effec-tively solving multiple problems in one go.

As in the previous case, three unlikely partners joined forces: a local cement plant, the city and the forestry industry. The Swedish cement plant was converted into a waste-processing center where metals, glass and plastics were removed, leaving back organic matter to be composted. In turns out, however, there was so much compost that the only industry that could even come close to a potential demand for 300 tons per day could be found in forest manage-ment. Indeed, some forest management companies agreed to take the compost for free (paying the cost of transportation). They even agreed to pass on to the former cement plant part of the profits they made from what they grew since the compost was found to produce better fibers faster. Anders Bystrom steered the company through the initial idea phase to a full-fledged operation. The city’s waste was reduced by 55% which extended the life of the landfill. The forest industry gained a competitive advantage because it could grow more wood faster and the cement plant returned to profitability without polluting the air. Some workers who had lost their jobs in the closure of the factory were even given new employment opportunities. In a situation where each individual party at the table would have had a difficult time solving their own particular problem, three unlikely partners united to hammer out a new and financially viable business model.

The Japanese observed this innovative way of turning a profit with the creative use an old cement factory. Since 2002 Hidaka City just outside Tokyo became the first municipality in Japan not to phase out the use of landfills and incine-rators. In its cement plant, the local cement group Taiheiyo Cement transforms

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all the solid municipal waste into a high-quality fuel by enhancing the waste in a fermentation process using a defunct kiln. The re-use of one kiln to feed calorific waste into the cement kiln without additional transportation eliminates the need for 20 tons of coal per day and reduces destructive methane gases that otherwise would have been released from the landfill into the environment. This business model saves the citizens of Hidaka tax expenditures, generates new income for the cement factory and generates additional revenue from the emission rights the Japanese and Europeans are prepared to pay to mitigate climate change. The portfolio of technologies turned out to be so interesting that a private investor from Ireland (Oyster Technologies) bought the whole business from the majority shareholder (Skandia) and privatized the company (Bedminster). Who ever thought that an old and filthy cement plant could contribute to cleaning up cities? It is a model that could easily be replicated with some minor modifications in many parts of the world.

how CAN NoN-NAtIVe INVAsIVe PLANts ProVIde hIV orPhANs wIth jobs?In Zimbabwe there is a big problem with water hyacinth, a very invasive non-native plant once imported by the colonizers as an ornamental flower. An even bigger problem in Zimbabwe was, and still is, feeding orphans. In many cases their parents have fallen victim to AIDS. There are more than one million orphans in Southern Africa alone. Children survive without parents, even when there are no orphanages. Untold numbers of children surviving their parents are HIV positive and many never experience childhood as they become head of the family the moment their parents die. Poverty is rampant. How could anyone imagine stamping out poverty with so many hungry, unfed children?

The other issue, the water hyacinth, creates huge problems by clogging rivers so that boats cannot pass, making fishing extremely difficult. There is the real danger of the dams generating hydroelectricity collapsing under the weight of this aquatic plant. The solution in this case is to remove the water hyacinth from the water bodies and use its fibrous biomass that does not even appeal to the zebra or the elephant to farm mushrooms that have been identified locally as easily cultivatable in Zimbabwe’s climate. Experimental farming started after testing which mushrooms provided the best option. The fresh harvest was

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taken to local villages where Margaret Tagwira and her team cooked a good meal. The villagers who are interested in farming their own food – and as you can imagine many are more than simply interested – were taught how to include mushrooms into their native dishes. Mushrooms are full of nutrients that are indispensable for children. The community seized the opportunity to grow the mushrooms and make them part of their diets, just as it was some two gene-rations ago before the colonizers started dictating their diets to the indigenous population.

Chido Govero, one of the orphans to be trained in 1997, now assists local communities in their battle against malnutrition by converting any biomass waste into a substrate for mushrooms. Many communities have moved from hunger to sufficiency and within a few years mushrooms can regain their status as a staple food as it was before the colonial period. Individuals can now earn money to send their siblings to school. Again, we have two unlikely partners and two amazing solutions. Who ever thought that orphans could provide for their own food while freeing up the rivers from an invasive plant and recovering agricultural waste from the fields where it was left to rot?

Water hyacinths will be popping up in rivers and dams as long as there is soil erosion and non-water soluble fertilizer that is used excessively accumulates in the sludge. Since the germination period of water hyacinths lasts up to seven years, any biological or chemical control must be implemented for that period of time to be certain to eradicate the weed. This is why it is better to make use of this invasive species that is recovering the excess energy in form of nutrients from fertilizers or deposits from soil erosion in the water bodies and use it to produce food instead of spending money on controlling it, to earn money by eradicating a nuisance and laying the foundation for stamping out malnutri-tion at the same time. Who would have ever thought that an invasive species can provide jobs for orphans, transforming them into entrepreneurs whose prospects for a positive future in their communities have increased significantly?

rAINForests ANd stoMACh AChesOne of the most successful and fabulous projects involving interconnected systems thinking is the regeneration of a tropical rainforest within a savannah.

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In this region – twice the size of Switzerland – a huge number of people suffered from gastro-intestinal diseases. Generally, when a community is beset by chronic gastro-intestinal problems antibiotics are widely prescribed and wells are dug to get safe water locally or water is delivered from other places. However, in very poor and remote areas these conventional solutions are inef-fective. Antibiotics require refrigeration and wells require maintenance. Neither is available.

In the region called El Vichada, a team of social entrepreneurs headed by Paolo Lugari recreated a tropical rainforest at the Las Gaviotas Center as a way to boost economic and social development. The regenerated forest naturally triggered additional rainfall. Rainfall filters through the soil because of an inversion of the temperature difference between soil and rain. If the soil is without cover it warms up so much that it becomes warmer than the rain. When cooler rain hits the ground it simply cannot penetrate the surface and will wash off. The forest cover makes the soil cooler than the rain and quality drinking water becomes available to the local population. In this way a reliable water supply is provided. In fact, there was so much water that the surplus is sold outside the rainforest community at a premium price. The systems loop closed when the additional revenue from the water began financing further regeneration of the rainforest. The regeneration of forests mobilizes voluntary carbon credits from people who wish to offset their personal carbon emissions with voluntary carbon credit schemes. Since the project began in this region in Colombia there has been no combat, no kidnapping, and no violation of human rights. This solution created an ecosystem capable of supporting the local community’s basic needs. This case has been the subject of numerous articles, TV coverage and a book. Who ever thought that we could regenerate a rainforest and offer the local population additional financing through our voluntary carbon credit schemes?

the CAse oF CoFFeeThis example is especially interesting for coffee drinkers (and the same logic applies to tea drinkers). Reading this book, sitting with a cup of coffee, you might ask, “How did that coffee get in my cup?” When coffee is grown, only 0.2 percent of the coffee plant ends up being consumed as an actual coffee;

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and farmers do not make very much money on that 0.2%. Each cup contains only 3 grams of the biomass that was farmed and is worth less than a tenth of a cent to the farmer. What happens to the rest of that coffee plant? The rest of the coffee plant is unused biomass - actually 99.8 percent of the plant. You may figure (correctly) that the biomass is probably being burned or maybe recycled as compost. You know all too well that no one makes money on that. Well, what to do with the waste? It’s not particularly good for animals because of the caffeine. If a cow were to eat it, it would get stressed out and not give milk. Yet, looking at what does grow well on hardwood waste (coffee is a hardwood), it turns out that mushrooms, and even really expensive ones like shiitake, grow on this type of waste. So now the poor farmer who has to do all this work for 0.1 of a cent per cup of coffee can make some extra money growing shiitake mushrooms?

But how can we do even better than this already great solution? Well, it turns out that after the coffee waste has been used for growing mushrooms the biomass waste it produces becomes much richer with amino acids. Chickens and pigs love it. Pigs cannot eat the waste of coffee plants because the caffeine is not good for them; mushrooms, for their part, love caffeine and they grow much faster on coffee biomass. The Chinese, who are busy logging oak forests to supply the vegetarians of this world with food that does no harm to animals, need nine months to harvest the first flush of shiitake on a log of oak. The coffee farmers earn money on the sale of these tropical mushrooms about three months after seeding the coffee waste. It does not take an economist to figure out that this is a competitive business model.

Next, if a farmer wants to grow coffee organically he will need herbs to keep the bugs away. So, if the farmer grows coffee he may also choose to grow herbal tea that he can sell as well. On his farm he would need to protect coffee from the sun, and bamboo could be grown to create shade. Bamboo then could be used for building fences and even houses. In this model, several components have been added to the farmer’s livelihood. What’s more, this process is designed with everything that is locally available in the coffee growing areas of South America. This is not recycling – this is “upcycling” – making everything that is available generates income! This goes beyond cradle to cradle; this is designing

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a never-ending system that embarks on an evolutionary path to generate a Blue Economy. Systems such as this generate jobs and income. This keeps the system going, and it finances itself. Who would have imagined that you could increase productivity at a coffee farm while generating jobs? This is the clarity that we get in life when we practice some Zen and the Art of Blue. Traditional economics prescribe that when you want higher levels of productivity you must eliminate jobs. What happened?

bacteria

animals& humans

algae(protoctista)

plants

fungifood

nutritients (food)

food + air

man

ure

(food

)

CO2

food

manure

(substance)

slurry

(food

)

The Zeri Coffee System

The same way we think about coffee is the way we must think about all chal-lenges. Everything is connected. If a problem exists, the important thing is to not try to solve just one problem, but to find at least two other problems and solve them all at once. That is the marvel about discovering all these connections.

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These examples provide a beacon for where we believe our societies need to be in terms of interconnected thinking and problem-solving. It is not difficult to think positive. It is quite obvious that we can find solutions which somehow have never been conceived of before, but are self-evident for those who can see the links between phenomena that previously went unseen. Imagining ways to convert problems into opportunities can be a source of wonderful surprises and great joy. This is why I created the ZERI foundation in 1996 with the sole objective of gaining insights into science. I wanted to test and try what emerges as the best possible set of solutions and to expose people to the opportunities that abound. And when some 50 projects convinced me beyond any doubt that not one of them was an exception or the result of luck, I put all these experi-ences together and envisaged a Blue Economy - going way beyond green.

How do we get there and where do we start? The next chapters provide a springboard to open up our minds and those of our peers exponentially. Anyone, at any age, has the creativity and the sense of responsibility to imagine and implement these win-win solutions. Who wouldn’t feel like doing that?

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Connecting the dots

How do the projects outlined in the previous chapter relate to our lives? What are some of the “connecting-the-dots” ideas we can follow in order to design a better future for ourselves and everyone we share this planet with? What are we expected to do in support of the idea that all subjects, all species, basically everything is interconnected?

There seems to be very little overlap when we think of how the world and our local communities work in terms of systems being linked and what we do every day. A cursory investigation of how science is taught in schools reveals how few natural cycles are covered. The water cycle and the cycle in the human digestive system for deriving energy from food are standard, but that is about all. In junior high school environmental education and linkages between disease, politics, population growth, etc. are taught, and luckily many schools are adding environmental sustainability to the curriculum. Why do schools wait until the age of thirteen to begin the exploration of these connections when children from ages three on naturally seek mental models to connect their understan-ding of the world? Why do so many not even take the time and effort to cover this? Instead it seems we think our brains are just waiting to be filled with knowledge and information, rather than be provided with concepts that would allow our intelligence to establish these connections, discover the links and give our brains a chance to say, “Aha! “

Furthermore, the cycles mentioned above are usually not taught in connec-tion with other systems. When we study trees, why don’t we learn about the soil, worms, micro-algae, bacteria, food, sugars, buildings, and architecture in conjunction with the tree? Everyone who passed high school is well versed in the apple falling down out of the tree. But do you remember how the apple got up in the tree in the first place? After all before the apple can subject itself to the law of gravity it has to defy the law! What is the opposite force of gravity? Do you know? Do your children learn this in school? Wouldn’t it make sense to learn the other side of the story when we investigate the law of gravity? If we are not even exposed to such self-evident cycles of life how can we ever connect the dots when we are adults confronted with real challenges? These

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challenges are bound to become problems because we never learned to under-stand that web of life where everything is interconnected. Instead, problems are left to the experts. These experts naturally take control of the situation and prescribe the path to follow. All too often they only deal with the issue on a short-term basis, postponing any long-term considerations indefinitely.

• To start connecting the dots all anyone needs is a subtle shift in how they look at reality in their everyday world – a new pair of glasses to look at the reality we encounter when we go for a walk with the kids. When passing a creek we notice bubbles on the water. The foam that is created when mom uses washing powder. And strangely enough there are no water striders walking on the water. So we ask how can a water strider walk on the water?

• Why are there no water striders here?• What do detergents do to water? • How come we can clean dirty clothes by simply adding “foam”? • How long does the foam last? • What is the raw material for soaps and detergents? • Is this made from petroleum like everything else in our modern day and

age?• How do frogs and fish feel when they are being bathed all day, or even all

week?• Who decides how long the cleansing activity lasts once the detergent has

left our washing machine?• Are there soaps that disintegrate faster and do not wash the fish to death? • How did the Romans wash themselves? • The advertising says soap is made from coconuts, what part of the coconut

is used? • How can a vegetable oil become a detergent? What chemicals are used? • Why do the soap and detergent manufacturers spend the most on

advertising?• Is there so much money to be made?• And, coming back to the water strider, why are there none in the lakes

around the city where the water is polluted?

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These reflections about water, soap and detergents give us food for thought about how we wash ourselves and how we keep ourselves clean by pushing dirt onto the whole natural system, pretending that the process actually keeps us feeling clean. The fragrance we wear is 99% of the time synthetic and the natural wax we have removed from our skin and scalp needs to be replenished by some expensive cosmetics, at least when we want to have a natural product and not the synthetic product that once again is based on a (different) fragrance derived from petroleum. Then we realize that we are one of the few cultures ever in history to clean our bodies “chemically”. As a result our industrialized society has more skin rash amongst children (and adults) and more teenagers suffer from acne than ever before in history. Water, soaps, cosmetics, biode-gradability and skin problems somehow start being connected. And, before we know it, we are entertaining solutions in our mind as the unraveling of the challenges brings forth some innovative solutions.

So what about recycling? How often do we teach our children the whole process, the entire system? Yes, put your paper in that container. Has this changed our lives? Of course recycling is a great habit, but while we are teaching engineers to put things together, no one knows how to take them apart. Recycling won’t become of lifelong importance until many more connections are made:

• What is that paper made of? • A pine tree produces a sticky resin. What can you do with that? • Why does a eucalyptus tree use so much water that it leaves the soil dry? • What is an endemic tree?• Which is the best tree to plant in Canada, which one is the best in Florida?• How much water do we need to make paper? • Do we have enough water to drink, to irrigate and make the paper? Can we

drink the water that has been used at a paper mill?• Why do the Indians use bamboo to make paper?• How did the Chinese make paper? And the Egyptians?• Where does that paper go after we put it into the recycling bin? • Where does the dirty ink go after it has been removed from the paper?• How long is it before that paper is reused?• How much of all the paper we buy is recycled?

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• Why can’t we just recycle and remake our own paper?

And, now, let’s get back to the core challenges regarding the cutting down of trees for paper. Do you know that sugar cane has the best fibers but we burn the residue known as bagasse instead of using it for paper? Did you know that trees have sugar that does not cause cavities in your teeth and we chemi-cally burn these natural sweeteners in the process of making paper? So who designed this industrial system that uses the worst of nature and destroys the best through incineration? Why don’t we make use of both sweeteners and the fibers from each natural and renewable source so that we can produce more from less? Is that not the type of resource efficiency that makes sense in this world that will soon have nine billion consumers? Is that not the way to reduce humanity’s temptation to level more forests to plant more fast growing gene-tically modified and non-native trees? Do we realize that these trees provide less fiber than the sugar cane? Does it make sense to plant non-native pine trees in tropical regions where sugar cane and bamboo could provide ten times more fiber per acre per year than the fastest growing tree ever could? Do you accept the explanation (excuse) that the fibers from bamboo and cane are not of the right quality to make good paper? Or should we believe that those who own production patents on paper from fibers extracted from eucalyptus and pine trees are simply reluctant to switch to a process they have no intellectual property rights to?

You could go on and on asking such questions depending on your areas of interest and how much you want to know about them. You might not ask your neighbor to do a life cycle analysis (LCA) or a comparative cost analysis of recycled vs. non-recycled paper, of paper from sugar cane or bamboo vs. paper from a genetically modified tree, but who knows - you may challenge yourself to do so and come up with a few surprises. Whatever made sense in this industrialized world somehow does not make economic sense to anyone once the right questions are asked and a minimum of data is collected straight from the internet. The difference is that it is you who made those connections yourself and it is you who can now form a definite opinion. Better even, you can then imagine clusters of activities that do not require the earth to produce more. You will not urge biologists to invent new super species that perform

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so much better in just one output factor like the production of fiber. You will have now convinced yourself that we can do much more with the fibers and the sugars that the earth produces, provided we understand the connections amongst the best that is available and that has emerged after billions of years of evolution. You will have become an enlightened consumer who can share these insights and become more than an informed customer; you will be able to start imagining clustered production systems as described before by yourself.

Since we are talking about recycling and LCA let us take on the well-known debate between the proponents of plastics bottles and the recyclers of glass bottles. We know that plastics are invading our life and the only exception may be aluminum cans and aseptic packaging. Let us focus now on the debate between glass and plastics. The logic goes that plastic is lighter, thus requires less energy for transportation, and permits the packing of more weight on a truck. The verdict is out. So let us ask a few additional questions:

• How long is the life cycle of a PET bottle?• How long is the life cycle of a PP cap?• How do we reconcile the idea that the PET will be around for 600 years

and the PP perhaps for 2,000 years while the content is consumed in a matter of days or weeks?

• How do we separate the plastic or PVC covered paper label?• What is the difference between recyclable and recycled?• Would you like to expose your skin to chemicals that cause a rash?• What is the cost of separating all the components of the bottle?• What is the real value of glass?• Can glass ever be destroyed after it has been processed?• Would a tree reattach the leaves in the spring it had dropped in the fall?• -what a stupid question was that?

Well indeed nature has some very simple and clear principles and leaves are never recycled into leaves. Leaves are processed as described before and thanks to this cascading of nutrients and energy, and thanks to these positive and symbiotic relations of all the members of the Five Kingdoms of Nature, the tree gets the nutrients it needs to become a strong tree - with leaves. It is time

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for society to realize that even if one day we were to succeed in reattaching the leaves back on the tree, it would be very difficult, require a lot of science and is likely to be very expensive. Would the government ever be prepared to pay for such research? I hope not. On the other hand, we find it perfectly normal that bottles of glass are reprocessed into bottles of glass and paper is recycled into paper. While this used to make sense, we do realize that unless the government taxes the sales of bottles, imposes a deposit, the glass is lost. And the producers of glass bottles know that making glass bottles from glass bottles is a compli-cated endeavor since you have to carefully separate white, green and brown glass and window shields from cars (another major source of glass) and you must first have polycarbonate plastics removed before the glass can be reused.

If on the other hand we apply a different logic, based on a technique already invented in the 1930s, and we shred all glass containers, put this glass dust into an oven and heat it up with the methane gas generated by the organic waste in the local landfill, finally injecting CO2 that we can obtain from the methane gas which is 30 percent carbon dioxide, we produce glass foam using only a minute amount of the catalyst. This is a building material that has been approved by the European Union and was first used as an insulation material in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao designed by Frank Gehry. It is now an exceptional construction material that replaces paint, insulation material, water repellants and even controls pests and moulds. Now the glass bottle which weighed a little more is being reused for its embedded energy replacing the need for building four different materials and capturing CO2 at the same time. Now that is what I call making connections beyond the obvious. This generates income, creates jobs and increases material efficiency and renders our society much more energy efficient. The plastic bottle that ends up in landfills and increasingly forms artificial islands in the Pacific Ocean now pales in compa-rison in this new sort of analysis - a systems analysis indeed. It seems like we have arrived at the end of the LCA.

These are three examples just off the top of my head; however, this can be done with just about any activity or subject we encounter in life. You should enjoy looking at what you have as a challenge before you and search for the parts that offer you a whole picture. If we respond to questions by asking

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other questions, we can jointly weave logic together and the brain’s wiring will improve. If we respond to a question like a quick and superficial quiz answering machine where you are either right or wrong, or if we are cramming our head with all the facts and offer the quick and dirty solution to every problem, then we have created pockets of knowledge that are unrelated to anything else. The question then becomes, how can we ever become true innovative problem solvers? How can we design these clusters of interconnected solutions?

We classify this as “big picture, little picture” – detail people look at the “little picture” and bosses, CEOs are thought to look at the “big picture.” People who can simultaneously look at the big picture and the little picture, who have a vision and know how to get there, who visualize a plan and see the obstacles and possibilities right away are the entrepreneurs. Visionaries are often the wealthiest and most respected individuals around; sometimes they are happy to create the vision and let others run with the ideas. Each and every one of us can be both.

We as concerned citizens, committed to make a difference in life, can take virtually any theme and let it unfold, allowing everyone around us to take the lead – and motivate them to see the big and little pictures. For example, one topic to address might be health and antibiotics. We can go in a million direc-tions with this. One scenario might be:

• Why do we get sick? • What is the most important thing you must do to stay healthy? Eat healthy?• How much has the human diet changed over the past century? • Why do we drink milk that was made for calves that have four stomachs?

How many stomachs do we have? • What if we did not have teeth? • If our immune system takes care of things most of the time without us

knowing, are then only the biggest problems visible to us? • How can we improve our health early warning system? • Is healthy food about controlling fat, carbs and cholesterol? • What is the use of seasonal food for our health? • Why do we prefer to treat the symptoms instead of the root cause?

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• Can stress and an unhappy life create cancer?• Can happiness and a positive mindset cure me? • Do traditional medicines really work? • How have the Indians been using ayurvedic medicine effectively over the

past 5,000 years?• Why are antibiotics losing their curative power?• How do viruses become resistant to antibiotics?• Are there other ways to control viruses than killing them?• What is the pH of a healthy body?

Another scenario:

• Can a small farmer make a living? • Who buys the produce from the local farm? • Is organic food really better? • Why do Europeans object to genetically modified food? • Are we prepared to pay more for fresh, locally produced veggies? • Shall we go to the farmer’s market? • Where does the supermarket buy its food from? • Is it worth buying organic when it has flown around the world in a plane? • What if the mushrooms are farmed on oak trees, do I still want to remain

a vegetarian? • How did the Native Americans survive off the land, especially at high

altitudes in New Mexico where it is very dry? • What is added to our food that we should know about? • What does organic mean? • Is it better to buy organic or local?

What is being illustrated in these examples is how open-ended mental maps work. Our mind can take so many directions. Why is it then that we rely so often on the experts to tell us where to go and what to do while we have the collective capacity to imagine a pathway and then we can involve the experts to fill in the gaps? All these questions loop back and forth, are intertwined, call upon all our innate intelligences and acquired disciplines. Our policy makers do

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not need to provide the answers to all of these questions either - who cares if they don’t know the answers – we can figure them out!

When we start realizing how everything is interconnected, then we start to make links that lead to creative solutions. It does not take long to figure that one out. We already went through the example of shiitake being grown on coffee waste. Many Americans seem to have an inordinate fear of mushrooms unless they are on the menu in a three star restaurant. In our minds, mushrooms are poisonous and children should stay away from them. Have we ever bothered to classify the types of mushrooms in our yards, on the walk to school, in our communities and cities? Wouldn’t it be more helpful to know how to differen-tiate between safe, hallucinogenic and unsafe mushrooms? After all there are only 10 deadly mushrooms in the world and some 5,000 highly nutritious ones that are a mainstay of local culture and diet. Instead, we just write them all off completely. Or if we buy them they are likely to come from China at a high (environmental) price. We tend to write off a lot of good things like algae and seaweed. Wouldn’t it also eliminate the fear so many have of spiders and insects if they were taught which ones were safe and how beneficial all of them are? We should know which ones we could eat, as part of a survival course just in case the worst would happen.

What about seaweed? Let’s open our eyes and look at seaweed. Yes, you could probably make shampoo out of it. And how interesting is that when we are at the beach in San Diego and we see a machine coming by every morning to gather the seaweed since it is considered a nuisance and even smells bad when it decomposes. What are they doing with the seaweed? Of course, if we guessed it ends up in a landfill we’d probably be right. Ask yourself - why would you put seaweed in a landfill? What could we do with it instead? It’s interesting that on one hand we take too much of a particular thing out of the ocean, like fish, and then we turn around and ignore a gift the sea is giving us. What are the possible uses for seaweed? If you live near a beach you have a great platform for launching some positive thinking that could engender some life-changing and innovative projects. Did you know many types of seaweed have a high pH and absorb humidity so efficiently that they can keep your cellar dry and

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moulds away? What do you use now to control the moulds in your basement? You probably won’t care as long as the problem is dealt with once and for all.

In all of these examples there are cross-disciplinary connections going on between various sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, etc.) in addition to economic value and sustainability. Don’t we all want the right exposure to scientific concepts that integrate solutions? Wouldn’t we like to have the ability to create solutions such as the ones inspired by the pelican and the termite to tackle the problems of packaging and heat which are choking our cities? Whatever the area of expertise each one of us may have, together we can come up with some powerful options for a better future on the condition we simply start connecting. Then we only have to call upon the entrepreneurs to translate them into action.

It is also important for us to recognize that sometimes we actually have a negative impact when we think we are doing something “good”. Let’s look at examples in which the good was right before our eyes, examples in which nature has offered a solution. Soaps and detergents, which are “good” because we want our clothes and bodies to be clean, can be very harmful to the envi-ronment. Detergents get out those stains by reducing the “tension” in water - essentially making water wetter.

How is this hurting the environment? Here is an example. In Florida they found frogs were beset by heavy metals which were causing some deformities. Many scientists (not looking from a systems approach) conducted an analysis of the frogs and pinpointed the heavy metals as the problem. End of story. However, a systems view would ask whether the heavy metal is really the problem. For millions of years frogs have been swimming in many different environments, and heavy metals are part of nature. As long as the frog’s skin can keep the heavy metals out, there is no problem with metal toxicity. However, once that natural protection is destroyed due to the reduction of the water tension caused by the soaps we use to be clean, the metals were able penetrate the skin of the frog. Have you connected the dots? Detergents and other pollutants that lower water surface tension allow heavy metals to penetrate the skin of the frog.

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So what about the skin of humans? We already do a lot of damage by over-soaping ourselves. Too much soap will remove the protective layer of skin we have and dries us out. Of course then we put on a bunch of lotion. It is better to use less soap, or none at all, then you do not need any lotion. Did you know that the only species living on Earth that cleans itself with soap is the human being? Did it ever occur to you that the forest smells fresh without using deodorant?

Talking about heavy metals; most of us use sunscreen. After all we want to reduce the risk of skin cancer. Most sunscreens are filled with metals such as zinc and titanium oxide. We first soap up and get rid of our protective layer of the skin, then we apply metals to it? After that we go out in the sun and don’t get burned so we feel pretty confident that we won’t get cancer. But there are all those metals penetrating our skin. This is an example of doing something “good” without realizing all the “bad” parts. Is this proven to be bad? Not until there is a link made between the heavy metals and skin cancer. We do know that there is a connection between heavy metals and the incidence of cancer so why increase your exposure and increase your risk when you can actually take steps to decrease the risks? Or are you prepared to just resign by saying you only live once? I would leave that observation to James Bond.

This flow of information will enable us to avoid the pitfalls associated with quick and easy solutions and instead think of solutions that take the whole system into account. Some Zen would do us good - think and reflect with the blue water and the blue sky as a backdrop. Most likely, when we get a glimpse of the bigger picture, we will certainly do things differently. What would the solutions be in this case? How about investigating different detergents, suns-creens and soaps? Did you know we could actually make our own shampoos and soaps out of plants? Kids in schools in Chinchiná, Colombia, started their own business making and selling shampoos to the local community. The tracker at the Kruger Park in South Africa, knows exactly which plants, seeds and flowers cleanse your hands. They figured out something that the natives of all ancient cultures have known for centuries: some plants have saponification (to convert a fat into soap by treating with an alkali ) agents. You rub the leaves in your hand, add some water and bubbles form. When you rinse the green

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stuff off, your hands are clean and even smell fresh. So the children harvest the leaves and use these as raw material for their shampoos. Their little business in Chinchiná is now spreading throughout the country. Just about every region around the equator is blessed with these plants rich in saponins. Africa and Asia know the same.

Here is another wonderful example of something green and -probably to most of us- disgusting that we can learn from. This time from Africa in the 1960s. In this period Republic of Chad gained its independence and the Swedish govern-ment decided to fund a health-monitoring program. Of course they required some statistics so they sent out a team to gather data on child mortality rates. The data the Swedish scientists gathered indicated that the child mortality rates around Lake Chad were the same as those in Sweden. How could that be? African mortality rates the same as in Sweden? What do you think their reaction was? Of course they thought that their statistics were wrong; how could the child mortality rate on a lake in Chad be the same as in Sweden? They sent out another team to gather more data – and the statistics were the same. While they were there they observed an interesting phenomenon. They saw that mothers-to-be, as soon as they were pregnant, started collecting a film off this lake in Chad. They would wash themselves with the film and they would even eat it. When the child was born the mother would wash the child in these micro-algae and the mother would eat the dried powder from the film. This film is called spirulina, and is now very popular all around the world as a health food. The pH of spirulina is 9.7; it has all the micronutrients humans need – a veritable bomb of protein! In addition, such high pH levels ward off much of the harmful bacteria. This film provides preventive medicine and basic nutrition. No wonder the mortality rate in this part of Africa is as low as in Sweden. Everything was alright and the local population prospered until some agrono-mists started irrigating the land and pumped the whole lake dry - eliminating the micro-algae with it!

There is more good news about spirulina and child nutrition around the world. In many electricity generation plants water is simply too warm to return to the rivers and is left to cool off in basins. Now, just as coffee waste was used to farm mushrooms, the warm water left over from these plants is used to farm

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spirulina. This is done in places like Brazil. And guess what, the coal fired power stations there produce plenty of carbon dioxide which can be pumped into the water for spirulina to convert the CO2 into nutrients. In the atmosphere carbon dioxide can be found in a concentration of 0.03% while in smokestacks it can easily reach 13%. Algae flourish in these conditions. Once you know there are opportunities like this you keep on looking and before you know it you are discovering new hidden gold mines. Rice farms produce tremendous amounts of waste water and some are now farming spirulina in that water. How great is that – pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere – did you ever think global warming could bring such good news? Is it possible to replicate this elsewhere? The team around Prof. Lucio Brusch and Dr. Jorge Alberto Vieira Costa that initiated the project in Brazil is now passing that knowledge to South Africa, a country that also suffers from malnutrition and that powers all its electricity plants with coal.

The power of seeing all things connected puts you in a position to predict results like no one else before. Malnutrition can be stamped out by electric companies tending to their CO2 emissions and recovering the heat embedded in their cooling water. And once there is no more hunger, we can start producing biodiesel from the same algae. And once we have pressed out all the lipids (oils), we are left with esters that are ideal for cosmetics. Do you think it still makes sense – after being exposed to all these opportunities – to tolerate hunger in the world, especially when there are coal fired power stations all around?

Are there a few coal fire power stations in the United States? Does China not build a new one every week - or was it every month? Do they emit a little bit of CO2, a little bit of sulfuric acid and so on? Do you know people who could take advantage of their wastewater? (By the way, a little squirt of spirulina in your orange juice increases the pH level and enhances the amount of nutrients!). And the oil and gas fields in New Mexico and Colorado that pump up millions of gallons of brackish water … Well, actually some types of algae (300 have been identified in the USA) love to grow in this slightly salty water and can generate a lot of biodiesel. What? We can generate biodiesel in the waste water from petroleum pumping stations? Why would you ever want to make biofuels from corn or soy or sunflowers when you can actually make it out of waste

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water? This way there is no competition between food and fuel. There is some good news to spread. But you have to know how to connect the dots.

In writing this chapter I have done deliberately what I stress all of us must do – give yourself the opportunity to connect the dots and ask the questions in a way that permits arriving at these insights exciting, in a way that is easy to understand and that makes it difficult to sit still and do nothing about it. When we do that, we are practicing Zen and the Art of Blue.

Leaves in fall, © SXC

PArt III

Our Connected Body and Mind

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what did you eat for breakfast today?

I’d like to shift now from the macro-world and mega-society perspective to the world that interests us most: ourselves. What did you have for breakfast today? We can all answer what most Americans or Europeans have for breakfast every day: some combination of coffee, orange juice, water, tea, fruits, muffins, cereal, eggs and, toast. Though Americans tend to make choices about what they eat according to current soundbites about health – many have fallen prey to market-driven fads such as high protein and fiber, low fat, carbohydrates and cholesterol – our breakfast choices have more or less remained the same. The world’s diet is increasingly looking like an American diet. This is not about right or wrong, this is about making the connections and creating space to make reflections: Zen and the Art of Blue for you.

There is a pretty good chance that your breakfast contained at least one of the items on the list above. Assuming that it did, when we look down our breakfast plate we are actually looking at a microcosm of the interconnected world. Let us examine a very basic yet interesting scientific concept which connects breakfast and the world – stomach acid! We know all about stomach acid. We try to settle our stomachs when they get upset and everyone has thrown up before. The disgusting taste of vomit comes from the acid content. Burps can also taste like acid. Acid is a great place to start making connections and links to the world and you don’t even have to know any of the science jargon to get to the core of it.

What do gastric acids have to do with breakfast, the world, innovation and a better, happy and healthy future? Let’s begin with the simple concept of pH. Nearly all breakfast foods such as milk, butter, coffee, juices and fruits are in the acid category. In fact, much of what we eat falls into the acid category. It turns out that we constantly pump acidic foods into our bodies, which is causing us to become more acidic on our insides. Then there is acidic carbonated soda (hopefully not part of your breakfast!). Who would think of drinking soda at breakfast? We all know a few people who do.

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Our breakfasts have some foods that are more acidic and some that are less so. There is nothing bad with consuming acid food; we just have to be careful to balance it out with other foods and drinks. So we have to combine them, or shall we say create connections. We can pick out foods to offset the acids that make our stomach hurt (avocados, papayas – see the list at the end of the chapter.) We can figure out which foods make your body more alkaline. Right here we can take note of what we put inside our bodies and learn to achieve some balance.

How do the insides of our bodies relate to the outside world? One of the big problems occurring in both our bodies and in the ocean is that both are becoming more acidic. We pump many acidic foods into ourselves and high amounts of acid are released into the air, mainly from burning fossil fuel such as petroleum and coal. Not only are we breathing acidic air but rain has become acidic, which in turn makes the water we drink and the air we breathe acidic. It seems we are making a great effort to turn the world and our bodies into acid. And we ought to avoid that if we’d like to stay healthy.

Did you know that cancer thrives in an acidic body? Did you know that the ocean, where all life began, has a pH of 8.2? Cancer has a difficult time surviving, let alone proliferating in a body that emulates the state that brought life to Earth. Did you know that one of the big threats to the balance of life on Earth is not simply climate change that will cause the sea level to rise, but the actual change of pH of the oceans? The algae in oceans generate the majority of the oxygen we need. Actually, according to some scientists, the oceans generate ten times the amount of oxygen generated by trees. The oceans are the largest absorbents of carbon dioxide, which is considered the main culprit of climate change. So, if the capacity to generate oxygen and to absorb CO2 is reduced, then we are really talking about a fundamental shift in the balance of life on Earth. Remember at first there was only anaerobic life, life that consi-dered oxygen a toxin. Then, when cyano-bacteria started pumping oxygen in the air, life had to change radically and aerobic bacteria evolved. These need oxygen to survive. We human beings are the result of that oxygen revolution. You can imagine if we now start reducing the oxygen generating capacity of the oceans by reducing the pH … then we are playing with life as we know it.

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Even if we preserve all the tropical forests in the Amazon and South East Asia, which in itself is a challenge, we do not seem to be capable of taking this on seriously as a human species and we are bound to run out of oxygen sooner than we like. So following the wisdom of Gandhi, if we want to change the world, we better start with ourselves.

That is why I suggest that you start making connections between acids and cancer now; it’s as simple as that. We really begin to understand what is going on in this universe by first understanding what is going on with our body. Once we understand how we can reverse the trends in our body, we can see how we can start turning this Blue Earth around as well. The experience I have gathered in over one hundred nations tells me we are very likely to change our habits when we realize that our health or our life depends on it. Those of us who have suffered a heart attack or contracted lung cancer tend to stop smoking. There are of course a few exceptions to the rule. At the same time, when we realize how we can be happier and healthier with such ease and a few minor changes, making a series of connections instead of imposing a whole range of radical shifts, then we are also more likely to accept the new way of looking at the same reality.

What happens when you drink coffee the same way you always have, especially when it has been prepared with acidic water? It’s even worse if this coffee is the first thing to ingest into your body after waking up and going to work without any other food added. What happens to your stomach when you consume a lot of coffee, something like drinking 4-5 cups every morning, preferably made as an espresso with foamy cream and some sugar or perhaps artificial sweeteners blended in by an expert at the local coffee shop? Welcome to the world of cappuccinos, double espressos, macchiatos, marocines and café lattes.

Telling the bad news about coffee is not a good strategy, because it is true of both adults and children, if you say you can’t have something they’ll want it more! Instead of looking at the negative and ruling out what is supposedly “bad”, we must change our thinking. Here comes the value of connections. We can easily learn that acidic food or drinks are fine as long as other ingredients balance them out. We can actually add something to an acid-based beverage to

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make it good, or even better. If you mix coffee with something tasty then the acid can be neutralized. The good news for all coffee lovers is you just have to mix it with other “stuff ” and you can continue enjoying it.

What do we add? Well let us think this through without offering instant grati-fication. Where did coffee come from? In the Arab world where coffee has been grown for over 1,500 years, a spice called cardamom is added. Somehow way back when, they figured out that when you drink a lot of highly concen-trated coffee like what is served in Beirut, Damascus, Alexandria or Jeddah, you quickly get a burning sensation in your stomach. Someone figured out if you add some cardamom you still get the kick of caffeine, you enhance the taste and it’s easier on the stomach. We know now that cardamom helps neutralize acid. Try it! It is available in any grocery store and tastes good in coffee. Add a little bit of cardamom instead of milk (which when pasteurized is also acidic) and you get your cup of coffee with less risk of side effects. If you happen to pass by Peet’s Coffee in San Francisco or Doutor Coffee in Tokyo, the places where they serve you the best coffee blends, try the prepared cardamom mix which you can chew on while drinking your coffee or add as a fine powder to enrich your coffee’s taste.

Have you been to Bali lately? Indonesians learned to drink coffee back in the time the Arabs started trading in the region. They could not afford the expensive cardamom spice that originates from India. Since the spice would not grow locally they settled for slices of fresh ginger, offering a great taste and a change of pH. It has evolved into a typical blend that is locally served. Of course you can have ginger tea as well, with a lot of sugar added. I will take up the sugar connection later on in more detail (to the dismay of sugar lovers of this world).

Since perhaps you only vaguely remember the world of chemistry, let’s integrate a little pH info into the chapter. Do we ever think to ask what the pH of our food is? What is the pH of coffee? Juice? How does pH even work? As a reference, the pH of the ocean is 8.2; thus life began with a pH of 8.2. Stomach acid is about 2.0 – the lower the number the higher the acidity. Has anyone ever wondered about the pH in the air our children breathe at school, the air

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you breathe at home while sleeping in your bedroom or in the office? It is guaranteed to be acidic as well. It seems we have gone all out on acids. Health-wise, with all of the acid based foods we eat and sodas we drink, our blood has a hard time maintaining its pH level of 7.38 (remember acids are lower on the scale and alkaline are higher). When our body has a lower pH we are more prone to getting cancer, which flourishes in an acidic environment but does not thrive at all in an alkaline environment.

Now let’s look at what an 8th grade science class would have children learning about pH starting with the definition – standard classroom practice:

The definition of pH is: the measure of acidity of a solution in terms of activity of hydrogen ions. The pH of water is neutral; on one side of the pH scale are acids and the other side alkaline (or bases). The pH scale, which ranges from 0 – 14, rates solutions with a pH greater than 7 as alkaline and lower than seven as acid. The pH scale is expressed on a logarithmic scale.

Do children or parents become passionate about this definition? Perhaps, but most likely not. Is the definition interesting? Young readers are no doubt much more interested in vomit! My point is that we need to intuitively understand science and know how to live in a way that puts us in order to be in charge of our health and future. This intuitive sense of science is what we could and should be coming to kindergarten with. Unfortunately we did not have that benefit and neither do our children in this modern day and age. We passed the exams and memorized the definitions and then forgot all about it without ever realizing what this had to do with my breakfast.

Now for a short story about oxygen. Everyone knows we breathe oxygen - pretty standard information. But oxygen is actually a bad thing. Remember, when the earth started there wasn’t much oxygen around and there was plenty of life doing just fine without it. Then some bacteria started producing oxygen but it was a toxic gas. So life on earth had to learn how to deal with oxygen, and some new life forms figured out how to neutralize it. People also know how to neutralize oxygen; we breathe it in and it is mixed with hydrogen in

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our bodies. Where does the free hydrogen come from? The higher the pH, the more hydrogen can react with oxygen, creating water.

Look at all of these connections. It opens up a complete new world. We can go in any direction from balancing pH in meals, to exploring spices such as cardamom, from checking rain water with litmus paper to learning about air and planning menus for breakfast, lunch and dinner that are the most spec-tacular and experimental dishes ever! What is then created is an environment that makes us think and, once we see the connections, one that make us act. We can start asking relevant questions about all aspects of life and the scientific underpinnings of these answers will always make us want to know more. This empowers us to be healthier and take the future of our bodies into our hands.

ACIdIC FoodsCommon acid forming foods you might eat include: asparagus, beans (dried), beef, bread, butter, cashew nuts, cereals, cheese, chicken, chocolate, cottage cheese, eggs, fish, flour, ham, honey, maple syrup, margarine, meats, oats, pasta, peanuts, peas, pork, prunes, rice, sugar, syrups, tapioca, turkey, walnuts, wheat, wheat germ and wine.

What foods increase alkalinity in your body? Alkaline forming foods you might eat include: alfalfa (sprouts), almonds, apples and apple juice, apricots, arti-chokes, bananas, beets, berries, broccoli, cantaloupe, carrots, celery, coconut, cucumbers, currants (fresh), curry, dill, garlic, grapes, grapefruit, green beans, guava, lemons, lettuce, lime, mango, melons, molasses, nectarines, okra, olives, olive oil, oranges, papaya, parsley, peaches, pears, pineapple, plums, pumpkin, radishes, raisins, romaine lettuce, seaweeds (wakame, konbu, nori), soybeans, spinach, squash, strawberries, vegetable oils, watermelon and wild game with the right spices.

Now we have to add a word of caution. Even though the fruits and veggies are listed as alkaline, these may still be acidic, very acidic indeed. The reason is that these foodstuffs are all too often harvested while they are green and are left to ripe during transportation over long distances, bathing in a special environ-ment filled with preservation gases. As a result the fruits never had the chance

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to become alkaline by bathing in the fresh air or benefiting from the daily sun. Those bananas, lemons and lime could be acid anyway since they were harvested and shipped from far away. Dried fruit, nutritious as it is, suffering a similar fate. Nearly all dried fruit is processed with sulfur, leaving a blanket of acidity over the marvelous alkaline basis. Yet another opportunity lost.

Then there is the difference between one and the other. Again, let us go back to the Arab culture. It is forbidden to eat pork as some religions like Judaism also prescribe. Well there are many reasons why this is the case. The Chinese will argue that there are good reasons to raise pigs since their efficiency in converting vegetable protein into animal protein is so much more efficient than a cow’s. However, pork meat is rich in sulfur, thus producing sulfuric acids in your body, making your body even more acidic in the digestive process. In the end there is some pH logic in advising people not to eat pork.

The whole craze in Europe about slow food where people wish to consume only local fruits and vegetables makes scientific sense, above and beyond the emotional bond to eating something fresh from the farm. Local food often tastes the best and is the most likely to be alkaline, even when we drink it with a good glass of Barolo - that is acidic. Seasonal food gives you the micro-nutrients best suited for each time of the year. The Native Americans used to eat this blue smut growing on corn called huitlacoche in Aztec. It has all the stuff you need to prepare for a harsh winter. The pioneers in the West consi-dered it a threat to their harvest and would burn any corn that had the blue fungus. In addition, they used strong fungicides to prevent “bad harvests”. In the meantime the world has learned about the great tradition of huitlacoche and it is now harvested in Mexico as a delicacy and exported as health food to the aficionados. We always seem to be learning something about the connection to the good stuff even after brandishing it as bad stuff. We always seem to learn the connections to the bad stuff after brandishing it first as good stuff. Do you think we could get it right a bit earlier on?

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Water strider, © Fotolia

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sugar and Fat

There is more to breakfast than pH! In addition to acids there is a second culprit adversely affecting our health that is no surprise: sugar. No one can deny the fact that kids in general and Americans in particular love sugar. It is not a unique American characteristic. The Chinese love it and the Europeans have their way of devouring their tons of sweeteners. We as the human race cannot seem to get enough of the stuff. On average, ½ a cup of sugar is consumed per person per day, the average American eats and drinks an estimated 150 pounds of it annually. Our body’s digestive system was designed to process about 10% of that. Sugar is also enticing, almost acting like an addictive drug. Most of us are very attracted to sugary items. Then there is the plethora of sugar mixes in everything from toothpaste, detergents, drinks and food to massive media pressure – all undermining our best efforts not to eat too much of it. Actually you have to be very determined not to eat sugar or its artificial substitute sweeteners, it simply is everywhere.

What does sugar do to you when you eat it? Most of us would answer that it raises blood sugar, rots your teeth, makes your stomach hurt (that good old stomach acid again.) Wouldn’t we all love a way to consciously decide NOT to eat sugar? Some of you might have the discipline and can follow unque-stioningly what your doctor or nutritionist says about sugar being bad for you. However, most of us need some help to keep our motivation going if we want to kick the sugar habit at least by a factor of ten. Let us once again get back to making connections with science.

Have you ever looked at water striders on a pond? Most of us have seen common water striders - those bugs that look like mosquitoes walking on the surface of water. We may not have stopped and wondered how they are capable of walking on water. They actually live on the surface of water in ponds, slow streams and other calm waters and love to eat critters that have drowned. Next time you see them Hhave a closer look next time you see them. In a close-up video you will see that water striders propel themselves forward without breaking the water. Water striders actually walk or skate on water because there is enough tension to support their legs that are covered with a very strong hydrophobic wax.

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Hydrophobic means that this surface repels water vigorously. Children can do a little experiment with a needle and see how it floats on top of the water because of the water surface tension.

What does this have to do with sugar? Have your children add sugar or soda to the water and the needle will immediately sink. If you add sugar (or a detergent) to water the strider will sink immediately too. If you have water striders in your neighborhood do this experiment. Children will, of course, feel badly for the poor water striders drowning on the spot; however, these types of experiences really stick and it is important for children to see the water strider almost drown – then they can come to the rescue!

Coming full circle back to breakfast with breakfast foods - pastries, pancakes, croissants and muffins - we are putting more and more sugar in our stomachs. Now that we know about water striders what do you surmise is happening in our stomachs? Because of the huge doses of sugar in our stomach, half digested foods and acidic bacteria can penetrate the stomach wall into our blood without much effort. Normally our food would go from the stomach past the pancreas and into the intestines, which are connected to tiny blood vessels so nutrients can enter into the blood. The bad news is the huge amounts of sugar in the food passing through our stomachs has made it permeable in a way it never was before. That is not the way it was designed originally.

Have you ever had a headache? One of those that hit you between the eyes and make you scream for fast relief ? You take this over the counter medicine and to your surprise within minutes your head has stopped throbbing. How was that possible? If you would have taken a pain killer that would have to travel all the way through the stomach to the intestines; it would have taken at least an hour on an empty stomach to carry the active ingredients through the intestines into the blood stream. No one wants to wait for an hour. That is why your fast relief headache pills can be compared to little sugar bombs; once they are released into the stomach, acid will rapidly reduce the tension of the juice permitting the active ingredients to permeate through the stomach wall into the blood stream. Have you ever heard that taking too much aspirin may give you ulcers? Have you realized that ulcers are caused by acid bacteria, very acid bacteria

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indeed that lodge into the wall of your stomach and eat their way through the protective layer to the point where your stomach is literally perforated? If that happens you are going to need surgery.

Children who have seen the water strider drowning can make the connection to their stomachs. You can explain to them some things in their stomachs really need first to be broken into pieces in the stomach and then they can flow through the intestines. Too much sugar is not so good for children or water striders! The reduction of water tension by adding sugar or detergent makes water wetter. While we may have a hard time picturing a reduction of the surface tension, we can better understand that sugar makes water wetter. Normal water will simply form a little drop on a textile cloth. However, when you add a detergent it will quickly penetrate the textile fiber and carry dirt away with it. And, if you think that the whole sugar story does not apply to you because you have long opted for artificial sweeteners, I’ve got some bad news for you. The effect on water surface tension that artificial sweeteners like aspartame or saccharine have are much worse than that of processed natural sugars from cane and beets.

Let us now link it all back to pH. Our intestinal track is alkaline. The pancreas squirts alkaline “stuff ” all over that digested food coming down the pike and the pH goes up from 1 to 3, or even 4 to 8 or 9. Bacteria and micro-organisms that live in an environment that is acidic will nearly all die when they go into an environment that is alkaline. So, the acid-loving bacteria that do a good job of breaking down food in the stomach will never enter the blood in a healthy and balanced digestive system where they can cause illnesses. By forcing these micro-organisms to migrate through the intestines they lose their preferred habitat and simply do not multiply. This is the most ingenious way of staying healthy; create an environment in which the acid guys help break down the food in the stomach but cannot thrive in the intestines.

But ... if we have a massive amount of sugar combined with high acidity in the stomach, over time the acids can over time wash off the natural protec-tion of the stomach wall which normally does not let anything through. This protection normally makes it impossible to enter the blood stream through the millions of veins and arteries connected to the stomach. Now with that layer

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gone, bacteria and even half-digested food like big pieces of protein can easily penetrate the wall and enter the blood all because of … sugar!

If you are able to visit the Paracelsus Clinic of Dr. Thomas Rau in Switzer-land, let him take a picture of your blood and you will see the acid bacteria and half-digested proteins floating around where they should not be. Your stomach wall is perforated with tiny holes and while you may not feel sick yet, you are putting too much stress on your body. If you put too much stress on your immune system, over time it will get stressed out or exhausted and become incapable of coping with all the diverse health issues that normally do not come to your brain’s or nerves’ attention. Then you run the risk of getting really sick when a genuine problem comes around and your immune system is too weak from coping with all these other issues all the time. Your immune system can only handle so much at a given moment. However if your acid stomach and alkaline intestine is intact you stand a good chance of recovering your health and regaining your strength. Why? Because that is the way it has been designed over the past 60 million years.

We said it and I repeat that today we are eating 10 times more sugar than three generations ago. The wise advice is - eat 10 times less! And, we have to enjoy sugars which digest easily and fast, quickly losing their capacity to reduce water surface tension. I would never say that you have to cut sugar out completely. Prohibition is not my style, consuming the best in moderation is the name of the game. Anyway, it is impossible to completely avoid sugars; and why would we, it tastes so good! If we are careful, however, we can find the sugars such as honey and fructose that give us joy and please the palate while reducing water surface tension for a much shorter time. Our bodies find it hard to break down crystalline sugars and synthetic sugars in particular simply because the digestive enzymes we produce never had to do this kind of a job. This means we must make an effort to keep water flowing through our body at its natural tension for as long as we can. With a little extra thought we can expose ourselves to this information and allow ourselves to live with an awareness of both our insides and our outsides. Look at labels carefully. Look at the difference between raw and crystalline sugars. Look at fresh local produce. Look at options for sweete-

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ning food that are not from sugar beets or cane and avoid artificial sweeteners if you can since these are very effective at reducing water surface tension.

We are continuing to make connections. What about the best friend of baked items that contain sugar – fats? This is the third and last part of the gory description of what is going on in your stomach. Fats are good science for us. Do a little experiment. Take some vegetable oil either at room temperature or heated and put ice in it, or put it in the refrigerator. Children are very disgusted by what happens when fat freezes. And now here is the oil. Heat it up to 100 F degrees and pour it into cold water – yuck. That’s what happens in your stomach when you drink ice water!

What is the first thing you get in restaurants in America? Ice water! Right away at dinner we make certain that all the fat we are about to eat freezes. And, when our empty stomach has barely recovered from the ice cold shower, we flush down another gulp of freezing water in between two big bites. What happens when you have frozen fats in your stomach? Some of us even love to chew on ice and make the job of our digestive system really hard. The pH must lower even further to break it down, creating a vicious cycle, because frozen fat does not digest. We don’t digest very well if the stomach is continuously exposed to cold water.

Look at bacteria under a microscope and see how these thrive in an acidic envi-ronment. Observe how these acidic bacteria creep into your blood and you will hopefully not want these to stay there! You might consider creating an alkaline environment in your body which makes life for harmful bacteria almost impos-sible; except for where they are needed, e.g., in the stomach. We could “see” how we can even stop the proliferation of cancer cells provided we go high enough on the scale of alkalinity. Many times an emotional connection will be made when we have experienced a relative who has had cancer, a heart attack, a stroke or simply stomach problems or even osteoporosis. Did you know that the higher risk we will suffer from osteoporosis the older we get is mainly due to the acidification of our body? We are slowly but surely dissolving our bones in this acid broth - our body. It does not make a difference if you take massive amounts of calcium pills unless you ensure your body is alkaline. The risk of

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osteoporosis will only fade away when the pH is high. The best way to avoid osteoporosis is to drink a lot of alkaline water, and I mean a lot. You remember that an embryo is over 99% water, a newborn baby is over 90% water. Adults typically dehydrate over the years and their body may only contain 70% … and thus the older you become the more acid you are and the less capacity your body has to cleanse itself.

The logical next problem is … constipation; mainly due to the lack of moisture in the body. All of this because you drink ice water? No, not because you drink ice water, but because you have set into motion a vicious circle that keeps on running from bad to worse with the low pH of your food, the excesses of sugars and the addition of coldness. However, if you know the dynamics of the vicious circle, you can turn this into a virtuous circle.

Interestingly enough, in looking at the traditional Japanese diet, the last thing the Japanese have for dinner is green tea, which is served lukewarm. Right before that last cup of tea, the Japanese have miso soup made from fermented soybeans (very alkaline at 9.7). Tofu, scallions, and seaweed are added to the soup - all with a pH of nearly 10. What are Americans having to round of their dinner? Dessert on the menu always includes ice cream with chocolate sauce, cake covered with frosted sugars, sweets full of sugar, of course plenty of frozen fat and some extra sweet strawberry sauce! How much of a shock for your children would it be to try miso and green tea for dessert? How much of a shock would it be for your body to be treated to a warm and alkaline closing of a meal? Think about it, that body is you!

Have you ever considered what the French drink with their food? Wine of course. What temperature is the wine? We know that the French are experts in serving their wines at room temperature. Have you ever considered what the Germans drink with their food? Beer, and lots of white wine. Guess at what temperature both are served? Cold indeed. Now ask which of the two nations has more obese citizens, and which nation has more heart patients? You can make the connection rather quickly. It is no surprise when cold drinks make fat more difficult to digest that this habit is reflected in national health statistics; twice as many Germans suffer from cardiac issues. Now, a final question: at

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what temperature do the Japanese prefer to drink sake? The answer is not a surprise either. What do Americans often add to their red wine? No surprise either.

There is so much more to be added to the interconnected truth and it is a pity the debate in the media is limited to low carb, zero cholesterol, low fat. We should question why food allergies have risen so dramatically over the years. What do we know about the rapid increase of food allergies? More and more children no longer tolerate cow’s milk. Lacto-intolerance is estimated to affect 30% of the population. We wonder if anyone ever asked the question how many stomachs do we have? How could we ever think that milk that is made for a calf that has four stomachs could go down well if we give it to a child with only one stomach? Then we add all those hormones and antibiotics to it and are surprised that children and adults are increasingly lacto-intolerant. The cow needs to develop muscles and bones, fast. That is why the protein mix from the milk provides the nutrients to build up the body fast. What does a child develop first?: Its neural system and its brain. So why don’t we provide the nutrients that stimulate the brain like seaweeds which are rich in iodine?

What about gluten? How much of the population cannot take gluten anymore? These are generated by acid-producing wheat. Why don’t we try alkaline varieties like spelt, amaranth and quinoa? How many people are aware of their innate intolerance to eggs and chicken, especially since we have such a hard time controlling salmonella and E.coli. These micro-organisms have become so resistant to antibiotics that only a very alkaline body can deal with them. Sometimes our body simply tells us enough is enough and generates some allergies, indigestions and skin rashes. Unfortunately, when our body rings the alarm bells we only treat the symptoms and are not prepared to tackle the root causes. The acidification of our body is a root cause of many of our health challenges.

Perhaps, it is at your regular check-up at the dentist when you notice that your root canal treatments - which saved your tooth at that time - have converted themselves into breeding spots for highly acidic bacteria that will travel from the inner sides of your jaw throughout the body. Knowing that these bacteria

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thrive in an environment of pH one, it could well send a chill down your back and wonder what is the best solution to get your body back on track. How to eliminate that dangerously acidic sphere in your body? When the team at Paracelsus Clinic found that the root of one of my teeth had a local fever of 101 F, without me ever consciously noticing, then I knew that my body was putting up a fight it could not win. The root treatment had been there for over a decade. Within weeks after the removal of this source of stress (pulling the tooth) on my immune system my energy levels sprung back. It did not take long for me to learn how to take control of the situation; I was forced to understand all the connections that unfold before me. As I understood more, I knew how to be healthier on my own terms without the magic of antibiotics and vitamin capsules. Every day I am finding new ways to be healthier. Ever since I succeeded in turning the tides it starts getting more fun all the time to discover the Art of Blue.

Ice cubes, © Fotolia

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building design based on Flows

Starting with the connections of the universe and the earth, we then focused on the connections in the microcosm of our body. While it is important to be aware of what we eat and drink and know how to manage our health, it is equally important to reflect on the structures in which we live. These have undergone major transformations as well; and even though we believe we are living in the age of modernity, it seems that quite a few realities about the way we live are lacking quite a few connections.

Where do we spend most of our time? At home, at work and at school. Remember that about eight hours a day are spent in bed. Perhaps another eight are spent in the office or at school so does it not seem logical that we reflect for a moment about all the connections that you should make when designing the place where you live your life? What would be the first question you should ask about the place where you will spend so many hours? Think about what is the most important question you should ask about your body?

Indeed, what is the pH of the air you breathe? Has it ever occurred to you that when you should eat as alkaline as possible, that you should also breathe as alkaline as possible? And just as our food has turned acid over the years, the air we breathe has turned very acid as well. There is no escape possible. Due to our excessive use of fossil fuels and the massive amount of carbon dioxide that is pumped into the atmosphere every day, the air is acid, very acid indeed. If you live in a city, it is guaranteed to be below 6 unless you are close to the beach.

However, each and every one of us has the opportunity to create our own little cosmos in our home, at school or at work. The next time you talk to an architect, ask what is the pH he projects his masterpiece of design will offer to the people using the building. I am convinced that even the greenest will never have thought about this key fact in life. It has been placed in one of our silos where we have parked separate pieces of life. Acidity is for the chemists and not for the architects.

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If you take the time to check the pH of the air in your house, you will quickly realize that the air from the outside is acid and is compounded by the fact that just about everything in your home or office will be emitting more acids. So what is the use of making certain you drink and eat alkaline when in the end you need to also breathe alkaline? It is possible, actually quite easy provided you do not think about physical structures as static buildings but rather as areas that are subject to multiple flows. If we understand these flows and how to take out by design the things that generate acidity and put in things that offer alkalinity, combine them with functionality and beauty, then we will see the emergence of a completely new level of comfort.

When I started teaching at the School of Design at the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico di Torino back in 2001, I opened the course with a review of breakfast. Then - to the surprise of all - I presented a review of the seven major flows through a building: air, water, light, sound, people, energy and matter. It is interesting that the original designs of dwellings foresaw an intensive flow of all these items. There were no windows and only thatched roofs, thus the fresh breeze would be the norm. Over the years architects have aimed at reducing the flow of air and lately, in order to save energy, many buildings have become so insulated that hardly any air gets in or out. The walls do not breathe any more; absolutely nothing penetrates the roof any more. Of course the objective of saving energy is to be applauded, but shutting out the flow of air is not good at all. It is possible to have the air flow and at the same time save energy. Of course we can!

FLow oF AIrFirst of all we insulate with chemical foams that are, without exception, releasing acids in the form of gas into the air. These foams sit in the walls and the ceilings. The main polluters are the fire retardants which must be placed in insulation by law in many countries. We even go as far as putting flame protec-tion shields on mattresses, duvets and pillows, meaning that we breathe all night what should never even have been around us. Of course each of these products has been approved, one at the time. It is the combination of them all, the system, that creates an overdose that we should avoid. The best way to reduce the load is to have air flow. The promoters of energy efficiency will criticize

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this and they are right, opening up the house again is not a plea to eliminate insulation and double glaze windows, it is arguing for the flow of air in order to make our homes healthy, so we can be happy in them.

How do the termites keep their nests at a constant 86 degrees with around 61% humidity? How is it possible for this critter to bring 15 percent of the biomass into the deeper soil in order to farm mushrooms? Yes, termites are mushroom farmers and they have learned over millennia that unless the temperature and the humidity are right, the mushrooms simply do not proliferate even if you offer the best substrate. Termites learned to build chimneys in order to regulate the flow of the air. And it doesn’t matter if it’s in South Africa or Australia, termites will always manage it regardless of the outside temperature. The chimneys warm up the air, which rises, and escapes from the nest, creating an under-pressure. The hot air (or cold air) from the outside is channeled through tiny tunnels going underground into the nest. The termite knows exactly how tall the chimney must be, how long the underground tubes must be to maintain the same temperature and humidity. How come the termites figured this out millions of years ago without the need for fuel or energy? Termites do not even need a thermostat!

Basically we have to recognize that the termite has been fine-tuning this tech-nology for millions of years. We humans have been at it for less than a century, so how can we expect to use air flows efficiently if we are not even able to pull together the mathematical models that would make sure the people living in these buildings would have a predictable and comfortable air flow? Designs that use the wisdom and experience of termites are nothing new. The Egyptians applied them, the Incas knew how they worked and even modern day architects at times rely on this extravagant way of thinking to create a comfortable envi-ronment in offices, shopping centers and schools. Eastgate in Zimbabwe saved 3.5 million dollars in capital investment from offices and shopping complex while cutting operational expenses by 20 percent. Daiwa House in Japan converted an office for 150 staff using this technique. The surgeon’s room at the Las Gaviotas Hospital in Colombia applied these principles. Anders Nyquist from Sweden succeeded in convincing the local authorities to convert a school into a system with natural airflows. And guess what happened? Families

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started moving to the neighborhood so that their kids could go to school in the healthiest environment of modern times. The parents are happy and the children are studying better.

Airflow through buildings has multiple benefits. Dust and minute toxic substances are able to escape the buildings. The advent of electronics at home and in the office has increased dust levels inside; what’s worse it charges the particles making them one of the main causes of allergies and asthma amongst children. The mere flow of air is not enough, though. You also need to cleanse the air and to bring more oxygen into the building. In natural systems plants abound and it is not difficult to recreate this environment. One small company has pioneered the concept of living filters, a collection of 150 different plants is strategically placed in the building, close to the inside roof and in a permanently lit environment. This cleanses the air, enriches it, leaving it nice and … alkaline. It even offers us a chance to learn more about plant biodiversity.

When a building is closed up and insulated humidity gets trapped inside. This is the main reason why fungus grows in the basement where there is no light flow either. How do we “combat” the fungus? Well, professional companies will come out and treat the walls with metal oxides, which will off-gas for a couple years, freeing you of the need to worry about any fungus. However, it will fill the air full of particles that you should not be inhaling at all. Actually, we create conditions for the fungus to thrive; our simple “cause and effect” way of thinking failed to make any connection to the impeded flow of air so the only solution is to call the expert with the chemicals. If we were to design the building to have an airflow through the basement, we not only eliminate the breeding grounds for the fungus, we reduce the risk of respiratory diseases from the spores the fungus pumps into the air. We simply have to apply the laws of physics, and as the air flows through the building, the conditions change making life for these fungi difficult, if not outright impossible.

Homeowners invest in double glazing, perhaps even triple glazing their windows. This is a sure way to save energy and many local governments even subsidize it. The objective is correct, however all too often these energy saving measures include covering the windows with a UV-protection film. Why do we

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want UV to be eliminated from the flow of light that enters into our home? The reason is simple, UV fades the carpets and the pictures on the wall. This is certainly a good reason to block out these rays. The bad news is that by avoiding de-coloring in this way, we are ensuring that mites and fungus live on happily without their natural physical enemy controlling their presence. Imagine the following scenario that is unfortunately fairly common in our schools and offices; more than we would care it to be. Carpet tiles are installed, sometimes even by companies that are pioneers in their fields like Interface. UV makes certain that the floor where the sun rays touch the ground maintain its bright-ness. But at the same time … ensure that you convert this carpet into a “mite farm”.

Who wants mites to proliferate in the building? No one! Mites are another known cause of allergy and respiratory diseases and therefore any effort we can undertake to mitigate the risk should be made. Who knows about the undesired side effect of wanting to preserve color? Why is it not debated? The reason is simple, we are not connecting the facts and we are simply overlooking the reality of a building when we impede the natural flows from going their own way. Who wants to live, sleep, study or work in a mite farm? The way to break through this myopia, this blindness arising from ignorance is to consider the flow of air and light and start thinking beyond mere energy savings.

FLow oF wAterThe next flow that needs consideration is water. Of what use is water in a building? Though we like to think that the main purpose of water is to drink it safely, it seems that the reason for us to pump drinking water through pipes is to “ruin it”. Without exception, the biggest use of water in houses, and defi-nitely in schools and office buildings, is for toilets. It seems that while we are blocking the flow of air and light in modern buildings we are exaggerating the flow of water. Why ?

Imagine that it took our body, yes our human body, millions of years to design a digestive system whereby at the end of a lengthy and delicate process we excrete the solids from our body through one channel and the liquids are discharged through another channel. The first thing we do is mix it with … drinking water!

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If the purpose of our way and means to acquire nutrients was to blend solid and liquid waste, why do we have this complex system of kidneys, liver and intestines? And if drinking water is a unique commons for the people to which everyone should have ample access, how come we use drinking water to mix two components which we never intend to eat or drink in the first place? It seems that we are not seeing the connections (again).

Water is the most precious substance on earth. Water in the oceans and water particles in the air give our globe its beautiful blue color. Drinking water is expensive and not readily accessible for large parts of the earth’s population. So why do we destroy water by blending it with feces and urine? Urine is a wonderful liquid. It is very rich in potassium, one of the core components for making our heart pump. That is why our body, which cannot accumulate potassium since it is a toxin in our blood stream, will discharge it rapidly as it flows through our body in sufficient amounts. Urine should not be wasted, but should be returned to nutrient cycles. Did we forget that the Roman emperor had the unique privilege of collecting urine from his citizens? Today, urine and feces are simply discharged and imagined to be “gone and vanished”. However, we know that it ends up in septic tanks - if we are lucky - the overflow is channeled through a sewage system to water treatment systems where the organic matter is chemically treated in a costly process, then devoured by bacteria with a great expenditure of energy.

Feces are a different matter. After all, that is the reason why it was separated from the urine in the first place. If you combine feces and urine, you cause a typical smell, one that we really do not like around us. If you keep feces and urine separate, as they were intended to be, there is no smell provided there is a flow of air that dries out the feces rather quickly. That is the function of the dry separation toilet that has been designed and operated for many years, but only recently fine tuned by Dr. Matts Wolgast, a Swedish scientist from Uppsala University.

If we reduce the flow of water by eliminating the need to use water as the trans-porter of feces and urine to central water treatment plants where viruses, E.coli and salmonella thrive, then we avoid a lot of risks that are linked to dealing

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with these potential carriers of illnesses. A sick person may discharge up to 100 billion viruses per day. We are of course aware of this, explaining why we flood the system with harsh chemicals so that we can control potential bacterial infections. Even if the chemicals are 99.99 percent efficient 10,000 viruses will survive the chemical onslaught; one is enough to make you sick. While bacte-ricides eliminate the risk of diseases they render water totally useless. There is no reason we should have to deal with the health consequences of mixing feces and urine by adding chemicals. The solution is simply: don’t mix the two!

We think of water as the liquid that flows through pipes from somewhere where it is abundant to wherever we need it. Cities have established a vast network of water redistribution. Imagine the thousands of miles of pipes that bring water from the Colorado River to Los Angeles. Imagine the huge investments New York is making to install septic tanks in upstate New York in order to preserve its catchment area. And now imagine what happens to all the rainwater? It is simply drained away! How can this be possible? That is preposterous! The state of Colorado even used to forbid its residents from capturing rainwater; but, at a time when water is increasingly costly, how could it ever be permitted to simply flow into a sewage system so that sometime somewhere it could generate elec-tricity or offer irrigation to farmers, or provide liquid for a toilet to flush in the city?

The time has come to think of water as the most precious resource we have. If you do not drink one liter of water a day you simply will not survive. So how come we treat water the way we do? We simply do not see the flows. Rainfall is the most natural way of capturing water and every building and every street has large amounts of catchment areas that should channel water towards its most immediate use. No need for pumps or treatments, - gravity will do the job. Buildings that generate their own water downtown seem to be farfetched. Just ask yourself once where you can find a huge amount of untapped water. You might have guessed: in the air.

Rain falls on the roof and on the parking lot and there is no reason to let it escape. Also, we simply fail to recognize how much moisture there is in the air. We need to learn from the Namibian desert beetle or the Welwitschia mirabilis, a

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desert plant that shares its expertise on how to condensate water from the air with the beetle. Have you ever observed your air conditioning? It drips water all the time. Have you ever asked yourself how much water flows from “the air”? Have you ever seen the cooling towers on top of office buildings? These towers are known to sweat. If the air expelled through the top of the buildings were to glide along a surface with a low dew point, it would be the equivalent of a river channeling hundreds of cubic meters of water per day from the roof … to the basement. Interesting, when we study the flow of air from the cooling towers we discover a flow of water from the top of the building down. Is that not a way to reduce energy consumption and cut down on water needs at the same time since water on top does not need to be pumped up? Is this reality, or simply a dream?

The flow of air and water combined offers a whole range of opportunities that can only be converted to reality by understanding the connections between the results that one wishes to obtain and the laws of physics and chemistry that are easily taught but seldom put to practice. Take the example of hydro-phobic and hydrophilic. The words are difficult and hardly find any attention in the classroom. Cooling towers and massive clouds of saturated air flowing over a sheet of squares where one “dislikes” water and the other next to it “loves” water: This is the way that water flows downward, rapidly forming nice droplets that fill tanks on the top of buildings without any need to pump it up there. While this may not be enough to provide for a single family home, these insights can help us imagine how to avoid the “heat islands” inner cities are often creating.

What is a heat island? Well, the sweltering heat in New York or Boston during the summer makes building managers turn on the air-conditioning full blast. Hot outside air is pushed through these cooling systems and saturated heated clouds form that hover around the buildings. The more the air conditioning blows out cool air inside, the more hot air flows outside. And since the buildings are picking up the air around them, the cost of cooling goes up and the area converts itself into a heat island. When the heat island is at its peak, Legio-nella will be able to flourish. Remember the Legionella outbreak? This does not work in the winter, it works best in the summer as temperatures rise, biofilms

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get thicker and the health risks are greater. The more people flow through the buildings, the more heat is generated inside; after all each adult represents about 60 watt per hour. A hall with 1,000 people produces 60 kilowatt and that requires a lot of cooling.

Can you imagine a school gymnasium where it would get fresher the more people were inside? The athletes would love it and the crowd would be more comfortable. That is exactly what the multipurpose hall at the Laggarberg School designed by Anders Nyquist achieves. Nyquist is a pioneer of modern day architecture. In the summertime people often complain that a room may be too cool. The best way to increase the temperature is simple … open a window. This reduces the lack of pressure that slows down the flow of air. Window openings that automatically adjust themselves can be installed to regulate this process. It saves energy, is based on the flow of people and air and increases the level of comfort. Is that not what buildings are all about?

FLow oF souNdOur understanding of how the flow of air, light, people, sound, energy, water and matter shapes the structures that we inhabit provides new insights on how nature creates structures that house these flows. This understanding also gives us some very practical insights about how to build our homes, offices and schools while considering more than just cost and functionality. Let us examine the flow of sound first. The groundbreaking work of Alexander Lautenwasser offers a glimpse of what scientists will struggle with for decades to come. Laurenwasser takes a drop of water, puts is on a metal plate and turns on a sound machine. Sound is a wave, and these waves can come at different levels or frequencies. The water starts moving around when the soundwaves hit the area around the water and different waves generate different movements. The movements are predictable, that is to say, at a specific amount of Hertz there is always a particular type of movement. A minimal change in the wave causes these quite complex yet rhythmic movements to change as well.

So the flow of sound is providing the shape of the structure that emerges around this body of water. How does that apply to our body? Well an embryo is 99% water and the mother produces a series of sounds. Remember how some

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pediatricians suggest that expecting moms should listen to music, should sing just like the Gregorian and Tibetan monks chant? New insights are emerging and of course this is only a hypothesis; but that is how new and creative ideas emerge when we see something new we have never observed before and we start making connections. The hypothesis is that first there is sound, which causes water to flow, and maybe soon after the heart shapes according to the flows of specific types of water (blood). It will certainly cause a lot of debate with the typical rejection at first from the established scientists, followed by an overwhelming amount of proof why it cannot be so, and perhaps in a few decades mounting evidence on the flow of water, air, sound, energy, light and so on will offer us answers to how natural systems provide shelter and channel the flow.

The second observation is related to the buildings we inhabit and my reflec-tions are dedicated to the most vulnerable members of society: young children. Children are exposed to multiple flows that shape and form them. Some we cannot do anything about, some we can. Once we see the connections we have the responsibility to channel the flows to create the best for the health and the minds of the next generation. Here, two areas come to my mind: bedrooms and schools. Little babies spend more than half of their early life in a cradle sleeping their time away while they build up those unique neural, immune and digestive systems that will make up our personalities and bodies. It is absolutely imperative to start thinking in terms of the flows through the bedroom where the infant is growing. If the room is full of formaldehyde (glue in particle wood, carpet flooring, wall paper), heavy metals (bright colors, bactericides and fungi-cides), and bromine-based fire retardants (mattress, bedding, curtains, flooring, seats), the windows are triple glazed and UV protected with a think carpet to temper the sound (the mite farm), and the water is heavily chlorinated (thus acidic), then we know the flows in the room do not provide the optimal envi-ronment for the child to develop. Katherina Tiddens, the pioneering founder of the Terra Verde store in Soho, New York gave up her store where she sold healthy and ecological products in order to dedicate all her time and energy to the design of cribs and interiors that are free of chemicals. She creates spaces where the air is fresh and children can strengthen their immune systems with a

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lower risk of developing allergies and respiratory ailments that now affect up to 30 percent of the children living in cities.

The other important location is schools. Children spend an estimated 20,000 hours in classrooms. This is a staggering amount of time. So how could it be possible that when considering school buildings and classrooms more attention is paid to costs and energy savings than anything else? I have only scratched upon the surface of the issues, but there are vast opportunities to design school buildings that are much cheaper to maintain, much healthier for the kids and showcase many dozens of scientific insights and innovations put into practice,. And they can be built for less, too.

Imagine a school where over 100 core concepts of physics, biology and chemistry are visibly integrated in the building’s structure. Take climate control for example. This is not a demonstration in a lab, this is actually applying under-stood laws of physics which state that hot air rises and cold air drops. This can be used to maintain a comfortable temperature in rooms if it is combined with the creation of air circulation arising from the equalization of low and high pressure zones. Basically the building combines meteorological phenomena with the basic principles of airflows to maintain a constant temperature and humidity using changing pressures. Imagine a school building where highly efficient light bulbs shine day and night powered by fluttering wind belts placed on one hundred varieties of plants which are automatically sprinkled every 15 minutes with evaporated rainwater that has been collected from the roof. This reduces the level of dust particles and air pollutants flowing in from the outside or generated inside. The inner walls, which are typically just filled with air and some insulation material, are now filled with shredded seashells and dried seaweed. This not only serves as a wonderful sound barrier but dried seaweed absorbs up to ten times its own weight in moisture and is highly alkaline. There is no risk of fungus attacking this building and no need to spray chemicals to drive the mites out of the carpets. Why? Because the air flows in the building combined with the materials render the humidity stable and the pH alkaline.

The details of how to apply this requires an insight in the system and not simply the application of a set of rules. That would be beyond the scope of this book.

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I would, however, like to share my experience at the High Tech High School in San Diego. The school set up shop in some old army barracks. This is where planes and boats were maintained so the walls are basically huge windows. The flow of light into the building is a dream. However, in the summertime, espe-cially on the south side, this huge transparent screen turns into a green house. It was rightfully argued that the heat generated would require a huge investment in air-conditioning so the best option was to simply hang a huge curtain from top to bottom. The curtain blocks the light and the heat and the energy savings kick in. So far so good. This is an example of cause and effect, simple and practical solutions. Let us look at the same situation based on the experience of the Green Zone in Sweden designed by Anders Nyquist.

A transparent double window containing lateral separations is built on the front or the back side of a building. Inside this structure every other opening is filled with twisted aluminum foil and the window is lined with a black cover. As you can imagine, the foil attracts the heat and reflects the light while the black cover absorbs it, letting the temperature inside rise to 100 degrees. The air rises and finds its way to a vertical shaft. The hot air flows up. This heated air is channeled through a heat exchanger that works like a refrigerator. Do you know how a refrigerator works? Basically the hot air is pumped out through a medium so that only cold air is left. You will feel hot air coming out of the fridge in the back, while the coldness is inside (another flow you see). So the hot air generated by this massive window is now generating cold air through this heat exchanger. The light can still get through and the flow is preserved. The good news is that the cold air is generated on the roof. What does cold air do? It drops.

I offered the High Tech High School free consultancy to create a basic design to convert that huge hall, which is an energy guzzler today, into a prime example of how to save money by using the light, air and energy flows already present. Five years on, budgetary restrictions have prevented the full imple-mentation of the concept. Interestingly, Ford Motor Company, a company not exactly known for its pioneering ideas in sustainability and energy efficiency, has installed exactly that same system at its car dealership in Umeå, Sweden. A few hundred plants act as a living filter, cleansing the noxious car exhaust

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coming from the dealership’s garage. Corporate leadership can be remarkable sometimes. I hope that the experience Ford had in saving money in Sweden by providing a healthy environment and comfort, all the while creating a compe-titive edge, will inspire many others - including the hybrid manufacturers - to think beyond the car engine and the exhaust they produce, to imagine a system of structures that flows with the air, light, sound, energy, matter and people! I hope I have succeeded in provided you with some more insights into the Art of Blue with these examples.

Eastgate Shopping center and offices, © ZERI

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the Five Intelligences

Now we have covered the theory of connections at the macro level of the Earth and the Universe and the connections at a personal physical level with insights into how food affects our bodies. We have a sense of how the Blue Earth evolved from chaos to a rich and diverse living system by converting energy to relationships. Now we have an idea how the same connectedness at the macro-scale can be applied to the microcosm of our body. The time has come to reflect for a moment on the metaphysical level. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. It is all connected; the only challenge we face is that we have not realized it yet.

Have you ever heard of Masaru Emoto, the Japanese water guru who uses wonderful pictures to demonstrate how your emotions are reflected in the water crystals? Have you watched the videoclips of Alexander Lautenwasser who demonstrates how sound makes water droplets dance according to a pre-esta-blished rhythm (I mentioned this in the previous chapter)? Have you read the work of Viktor Schauberger who describes living water? And, does the name Paul Schatz ring a bell? While none of these pioneers would be accepted as “scientists” by the established academic community, they are frontline thinkers with clear proof that there is more in water than a molecule consisting of hydrogen and oxygen, pH and water tension. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and some of that whole is related to our state of mind.

The metaphysical component at play here surely deserves a book on its own so at this time I would like to just broaden our traditional perception of intel-ligences from the mere academic interpretation qualified as your IQ, or intelli-gence quotient. This is derived using a scientifically-based testing scheme. We would like to expand this to include emotional intelligence, a concept inspired by the work of Karen McGown who first coined the term. Then, we connect the academic and the emotional intelligence with the arts. The capacity to express yourself through the arts, ranging from dance, music, painting and sculpturing is a distinct intelligence which is all too often lost in this world of quantification and rationalization.

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The fourth and key new type of intelligence is what we have been discussing for the past hundred odd pages: the capacity to think and design in systems where everything is connected and our wisdom is based to a large degree on our capacity to continue uncovering connections, seeing what we never saw before. While academic intelligence seems to attract all of our attention, the arts and emotions are barely talked about. The capacity to connect is definitely a kind of intelligence that is rarely nurtured anywhere on this planet. I do not believe we have to choose between one or the other; these are just some of the forms of intelligence. There are more.

Finally, what is the use of mastering all these four kinds of intelligence if at the end of the day we do nothing with it? That is why I call for a fifth intelligence; the capacity to make things happen. The capacity to awaken the entrepreneur in you, the person who moves from fantasy to reality, from idea to market. Moreover, how that individual is committed to making a difference, not just for her or his own sake, but rather for society and the world at large. It is a unique characteristic to be able to translate vision and design into implemen-tation, to assume the risks involved, investing in time and exhibiting persever-ance. Projects that connect the realities in this world make a difference on the ground as we have seen from the initiatives that were described in previous chapters. However, none of these projects would have succeeded if it were not for the unsung heroes on the ground like George Chan, Paolo Lugari, Ashok Khosla, Mario Calderon, Udo Stritter, Michael Baldwin, Sister Meagan, Father Nzamujo, Margaret Tagwira, Chido Govera, Lucio Brusch, Carlos Bernal, Lynda Taylor, Robert Haspel, Shuting Chang, Denise Machado, Li Kangmin, Nirmala Nair, Lynn Mortensen, Markus Haastert, Anne-Kathrin Kuhlemann, Anders Nyquist, Yasuhiro Sakakibara, Yusuke Saraya, Stan Shih, Brian Je, Miyako Yoshino, Wendy Luhabe, Wendy Lucas-Bull, Gill Marcus, Chime Paden, Abdul Majali, Shawn Frayne, Eduardo Ferreira, Prishani Satyapal and so many others that I have had the privilege of working with over the years.

These individuals go beyond the business entrepreneur who turns a good idea into a solid money making venture and assumes the risk it takes to succeed. We would like to instill in all of us the desire to make a difference by dedicating the time and effort it takes to get out of this air-conditioned, protected atmosphere.

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To commit to move into a world we have never experienced and simply take action because each of us knows that there is such a place and there is a dire need to improve on the predicament of millions. Let’s start one at the time.

For those of us who are parents, we all want our children to be better off than we are. Most parents pursue the ultimate goal of having their children do better than they could even have imagined. But if we only teach our children everything we know they will never be able to do better than we have done. If we only apply what our parents taught us we can never do better than they have. The world is evolving and we need to keep up with the change. We need to use this inevitable change around us to call upon our creativity, to translate our visions and our insights into a new reality using science and our newfound understanding of how the world before us is connected. If we are indeed disco-vering this incredible interconnectedness, then we should make sure our peers and children can discover even more links than we could ever have imagined.

To permit society to do better, much better even, we must create the physical, emotional, mental, and artistic space to generate new knowledge and explore fresh wisdom that can be translated into action on the ground. If you have read up to this point, chances are that you have already experienced an opening of your mind to inquiry, creativity, and an appreciation for out-of-the-box thinking. Chances are that you are feeling passionate about this because you sense, like I have, that it permits you to be positive and pro-active. Chances are that you want to create the space for yourself, your children and community to be intellectual, thinking positive and moving forward for the betterment of all. After all, who finds joy and satisfaction in life only thinking and talking nega-tively, highlighting the bad instead of focusing on the good?

Just how do we give ourselves the space to change creativity into design and design into action? The first thing we need is a positive mindset. The time has come to stop being satisfied by doing less bad. We have to do more good. Is it satisfactory to you to pollute less when you know that releasing toxins in the environment is detrimental to our health? Along the same lines of logic, would a judge ever be pleased to hear that the convicted thief promises to steal less? Of course not! Now is the time to move resolutely toward fostering the good

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in society. I submit that this creative and positive framework needs to be based on a solid understanding of science.

However, science alone is not enough. We need emotional intelligence on top of academic knowledge. No one is motivated by endless hours of emotionally empty work – whether at school, at work or at home. When passion doesn’t enter into it, the brain is simply not engaged. Creativity based on science does not mean my goal is for each of you to obtain a PhD. The goal is for you to have the desire to go for new insights, to navigate uncharted territories and to never stop asking questions that may or may not have ready answers.

A true scientist cannot separate science from passion and joy – life is both. Can you imagine Jacques Cousteau the master of marine research or Jane Goodall the queen of the chimpanzees if they were emotionless about their work? What could drive your passion is often not only one science subject but science that integrates everything into a world of reality, possibility and connection. What creates joy and motivation for children from preschool through high school are activities that inspire them to grasp how their world works and show them how they relate to the larger world. Children feel the need to make the difference we each hope to make. Do you think children react without emotion when they see other children are dying from hunger on TV? The children become emotionless if they cannot imagine how they could make a difference; in other words, if they cannot imagine how they could contribute and connect.

How can we generate the motivation and the space to convert ideas into reality; not just for us adults but also for the children? Young children are constantly imagining, dreaming, expressing curiosity and experimenting. They are naturally drawn to activities and materials that engage all of their senses. They love to transform materials into new things. They love to explore stones, dirt, mud, sand, water, ice, gelatin, gravel, shells, straw, seeds, flour, feathers, clay or rice. Encourage them and make sure they make a mess! Once we are adults, we hate cleaning up the mess that comes along with experimenting and discovering. We want everything to be clean and predictable. Unfortunately life tends to get messy once in a while, and real progress even depends on it.

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Remember when we were children? We used to go outside and stay outside, spending a lot of time playing, doing nothing, looking at and observing nature. We can draw children’s attention to lots of little things outside. There are scien-tific observations to be made in all sorts of movement: climbing, flying kites, swimming, surfing, gardening. For children, life is all about connecting the dots, categorizing, figuring out links. Looking at the coffee the teachers drink and the mushrooms you can farm on the waste, going beyond the planting of a tree but understanding that trees are rich in sugars that do not create cavities in your teeth and sugar is a wonderful source of fiber to make paper. Realizing that a banana peel and an egg shell mixed with water and a bit of lemon juice will generate electricity; enough to make your heart pump 500 gallons of blood through four chambers each day for the rest of your life. It is time we regain that paradise.

If we want to innovate and improve we have to have the space to imagine all those links and millions more. Then we can start to design – but not with a predetermined outcome or product in mind, but with a process that will show the way to something new. Process is more important than product. At home creative projects and designs come out of unstructured drawing, writing, dressing up, role-playing and, ’ not to forget, dancing. The tendency in this day and age is for parents to push forward those developmental timetables and skills that someday may make money. Instead we need down time - non-hurried, non-stressful time to imagine and be creative. Our lives benefit more from spontaneity and non-structured time. Joy comes from those moments of unplanned discovery. Children and adults alike love a nice surprise - that is why gift-wrapping is so much fun.

Take the time and create the space to find out something new you never planned or expected. Every year I take my children to a place where I have never been before and we figure it all out together, plan as we go and enjoy the thrill of the unexpected, both the good and the bad. Once I took my two sons to the Arctic Circle in the beginning of January. This is not exactly the warmest and the brightest season to visit these magnificent plains. We had decided that we would learn to survive in the snow like the Saami, the indigenous population of Northern Sweden, Norway and Finland have done for over 10,000 years. It

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was cold, very cold indeed. Our friend Lars taught us how to make fire in the snow with thin wet branches and how to create a camp in the open by digging a protective shield into the white snowy plains. Laurenz-Frederik, my second son, got really cold feet. Even though we got the fire started and warmed up our hands, his feet were too cold for comfort. Lars told Laurenz-Frederik to take off his shoes and walk in the snow. He was pretty desperate at this point and just did it on blind trust. After a few minutes with bare feet in the freezing snow Lars massaged arnica oil on his feet and told him to put on his socks and shoes again. He never had cold feet again. It is these counter-intuitive experi-ences that redefine what is cold, and what is pain. Actually my son redefined the concept of pain.

We need the space to feel some pain, to imagine the unconventional, to go beyond the known limits, trusting who we know, and making mistakes without judging and finger-pointing, without the protective eye of the mother hen who shields her chicks from taking risks. Learning is messy and sometimes uncom-fortable. We need to rediscover what we like, what we can tolerate and how we react when we know we are on the wrong track. Being able to learn from difficult times and failure is a huge component of success and the emotional intelligence trait of resilience and perseverance is thought to be the most important quality in lifelong success. Who can realize a dream overnight?

As we become adults we create our own ”air-conditioned atmospheres” and only go about the comfortable routines we know, protecting ourselves from surprises and the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing how to act properly. That makes us incapable of coping with change that is inevitable. We are on a path of co-evolution and everything around us is in perpetual motion. Our emotions evolve as well. We can model life-long learning by trying new things and making mistakes along the way. Whatever was once a painful experience becomes a funny anecdote soon afterwards. When I encountered a deep crisis in my business in 1993 and decided to leave the money-driven rat race, one of my dearest friends told me that the problem I had was that this crisis came too late in my professional life.

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His Holiness the Dalai Lama urges us to go once a year where we have never ventured before. So let us go for some adventure and see how each one of us reacts to that new environment. Learn to understand the stress others go through and take the time to control your anger when things do not go your way fast enough. Perhaps your way is not the best way. Perhaps we need to unlearn some things before we can learn how to connect very diverse phenomena into an ideal whole in order to come up with the best solution for that time and that place. There is no sacred truth. There are only temporary truths. When new insights emerge, dialogue with others - the more diverse the better - will open our horizon and we will jointly discover new links. This will permit the emergence of a new web of life the likes of which we have never seen before. This is the Zen of the Art of Blue.

Along with the emotional angst that comes from trying new things, we also have to deal with the fact that when we are committed and adamant about acquiring something we will try to get it in whatever way we can. We should encourage everyone who is determined to forge their path in life to go for it. At times it is better to stand back and let them try instead of applying our wisdom and experience which may only lead to “over-fishing” to paraphrase the old Chinese proverb once more.

How many of you remember that story of the entrepreneur who started a business after dropping out from university? The group of billionaire college dropouts is unbelievable – Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Richard Branson. Of course there are more college drop-outs who never made much money, but perhaps they pursued their dreams in line with their capabilities and decided that there are more important things in life than running after money. What about Wangaari Mathai, the Nobel Laureate, who decided to start planting trees to provide shade? Or what about Mohammad Yunus who also got a Nobel Prize for starting a micro-credit bank others considered a waste of time and money? Or Elie Wiesel, another Nobel laureate, undou-btedly a man with great consciousness who for decades demonstrated with his actions that when injustice is done to one individual, the moment and the place where this occurs must be the center of world attention? Have you ever come across Aurelio Peccei, the top executive from Fiat and Olivetti who mobilized

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hundreds of top policy makers, scholars and business friends to imagine a world that thinks beyond money and material wealth? Have you ever heard of Ashok Khosla who decided to leave his comfortable posts as professor at MIT and the United Nations to create the largest NGO in India that reaches out to provide drinking water and building materials to villages in India, creating three million jobs in the process?

These entrepreneurial persons in or outside business were prepared to throw everything overboard and follow their vision passionately. Or were they following their passion without a vision? They acted with great impatience, moving quickly to action knowing that it would take some time before they saw results. They made a distinction between fantasy and vision. Fantasies are dreams that will never come true; a vision is a dream that you can make happen. They thought and still think big – not just big, they think in terms of huge and present wisdom is certainly not their guide. They are prepared to change the business model or the societal logic. The time has come to change the business model from this almighty focus on core business based on a core competence, as if humans are only supposed to perform well in one area. It is time to listen to the wisdom of the Fourth King of Bhutan who at his crowning asked that development not only be the pursuit of material wealth, but also the pursuit of happiness as it was originally described in the US Declaration of Independence. The pursuit of happiness ... nice idea?

We need the space to conceive of what no one could have previously imagined. In this world we need to be prepared to think about our families, our commu-nities and about how we can get this enormous ship called Blue Earth from its current erroneous route back to a more sustainable, just, healthy and happy path. I don’t really want to say we are completely on the wrong path. However, I hope you agree looking at the world and society today, that there is a lot of room for improvement. Change for the better is only going to happen when we make it happen. When we feel like having an answer to a pressing problem of our time we should not ask anyone to be patient and to wait for the others to grasp what is at stake. We have to be greatly impatient and show incredible amounts of passion to make a difference; when our passion is ignited we can turn this ship around quite quickly. When a passionate person talks to you it is

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often contagious. We should have the space and the encouragement to think and act like visionaries - all of us. We should set out to discover connections no one has ever conceived of before. Is there any reason we shouldn’t do this?

In fact, we can be the new entrepreneurs – yes, despite our angst we have unbe-lievable minds and with the wonder of conceptual capacity we make huge leaps in the connections we are able to fathom. Together we are the designers of the present and future. We need to feel like teenagers again, we need to wake up that child in each of us. Young people need to sense that they are appreciated and that their peers take their ideas seriously, even if they have no money and no experience. What we all need to have is a sense of urgency, a good reserve of energy, a desire to make a difference and the audacity to go beyond the obvious. Better even, children with their young and fresh minds (or adults nurturing the child within) are technology and information-gathering experts and they know how to get data at the drop of a hat. They have passion, they love music, cell phones and video games and soon will look at laptop computers like dinosaurs, much the same way as baby boomers looked at mainframe computers. Kids in countries from Bhutan to Finland swear by their iPhones and iPads, which no doubt will be the icons for this generation as the Walkman was for the baby boomer.

To give an example of the type of connections we can be exposed to, we will go back to the case of coffee. This is to give us a feeling of where “connecting the dots” leads, of the types of problems we will have the ability to deal with and the mindset to be thinking positive even in the wake of the worst news. This time let’s bring Starbucks into the equation. First, if you recall, only 0.2% of the coffee plant is used. This means that 99.8% of the coffee bush is wasted. This equals a factor of 500. That is the total “potential” value added if things are done with the rest of the coffee plant. Not bad to identify a potential of “factor 500”, but not good enough. I have already mentioned that the farmer earns one tenth of a cent (or 0.001 of a dollar) for each cup of coffee sold. Who has been at Starbucks today? A large coffee is around $3.00. That means that Starbucks made 3,000 times more than the farmer for simply adding hot water! Of course this isn’t a completely accurate depiction, but you get the idea

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and we understand the order of magnitude between the income of the farmer and the purchasing power each of us is prepared to spend on a cup of coffee.

We do not suggest that you now instigate a boycott of Starbucks. Others have suggested that Greenpeace should campaign against the coffee chain or coffee drinkers for exploiting farmers and generating so much waste. You could, however, look at the same reality from a completely different angle, a positive one. The point is to remain positive, to control your emotions and not get into the reactive mood that dominated the baby-boomers of the sixties and the seventies. Starbucks could conceivably be admired for having provided us with the proof that by merely adding hot water to ground and roasted coffee you can make three thousand times more than what the raw material is traded for in this global market. That is not a bad business model to be inspired by, especially in our positive minds ready to contribute to a better world! You might even think of the businesses you can get into that coffee-lovers haven’t come up with yet! What some may see as a negative can be an inspiration for all of us – what positive dreams could this business model inspire? Let us study all the possible connections.

Has anyone out there taken the next step in the coffee system? The water was added at Starbuck’s, but back at the coffee farm they still were only using 0.2% of the coffee plant. What is the real potential? Take that 3,000 times value added to the coffee by adding water and multiply it by 500 if we find out what to do with the 99.8% that is wasted and you have a potential money making machine in the order of factor 1.5 million. Just think if that farmer used the rest of that coffee plant for mushrooms, herb teas, spirulina and all the rest of the things we mentioned before. What do you think entrepreneurs could come up with?

Now we are talking about invigorating real entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, business models are mostly myopic in our society. If a farmer was in a crisis because there is so little money to be made with each cup of coffee, traditional business strategies would first urge the farmer to focus solely on a solution involving coffee itself. The business books will stress efforts to reduce the cost of production, streamline farming by searching for economies of scale,

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eliminate jobs through automation, and then look at the cost of distribution and marketing. A businessman would quickly imagine ways to implement improved supply chain management, introduce outsourcing and create a perfect delivery system from the planting of the bush to the delivery of the coffee beans to the consumer.

This core business strategy all business graduates have been brainwashed with would never focus on using the whole biomass. It is only interested in what is sold as coffee on the market and a small fraction of the profits is directed at social and environmental damage control. If the coffee cannot compete internationally then the farmer will be advised to plow all the bushes into the soil and plant another crop. Have you ever known a farmer who willingly and quickly drops five generations of tradition and experience and ventures into another crop without experience? This is what the World Bank suggests when it offers financing through funds aimed at restructuring local economies. So farmers take the jump into the unknown and start planting passion fruits and asparagus. What do you think happens when 100,000 farmers start switching to these new crops? Prices on the world market will drop dramatically for passion fruits and asparagus and only “the most competitive farmers” will survive. This leaves the other 90 percent to try yet another successful crop, probably mort-gaging their farm also a second time. Do you believe there is a future for this strategy in the eyes of the farmers? Do you believe they will happily embrace globalization because it will make products cheaper …?

However, a solution that uses coffee husks as mushroom substrate which is then used as feed for animals uses 100% of the biomass instead of merely farming a crop with a minute fraction of 0.2% that can be exported. Since highly stream-lined coffee farms aimed at maximizing coffee output do not provide a lot of food for local consumption it is easy to understand how farmers are attracted to the plant-mushroom-animal combination. This generates 1,000 times more essential amino acids - by farming mushrooms and raising animals - for human consumption than the monoculture coffee farm. This allows the farmer to feed his own children and meet local needs while catering to the international market demand for coffee and for mushrooms. Does globalization makes sense under these conditions?

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Farmers these days have few options. The age of globalization has taught them that all other businesses will in the end put them out of business. The question we than can raise is why doesn’t Starbucks support its farmers to grow mushrooms? Why doesn’t Nestlé or Kraft Foods initiate a massive mushroom farming program in their coffee processing plants where Nescafé and Folgers instant coffee is produced? Currently thousands of tons of coffee waste are simply destroyed. Is there no future business in food that is free of cholesterol and saturated fatty acids? Is that not what the market is demanding? Aren’t the margins on tropical mushrooms high, judging from the price you pay at your local food store? Aren’t there a lot of people suffering from malnutrition? The reason large corporations are not prepared to enter the business of providing you tasty, high quality mushrooms at a very competitive price is that it is not part of their core business. You as a consumer miss out on an opportunity to eat shiitake daily at about two dollars a kilo or one dollar a pound. That is about what you would pay for a (hormone-rich) chicken or tilapia fish. So what do you say about that?

Or are you trying to calm your bad conscious by purchasing fair trade coffee that pays the farmers 30% more? Do you think that this premium is enough to take one million farmers out of their predicament? Or do you believe that you can save one farmer at the time? Looking at this it becomes pretty obvious that what is not needed are more students with a Master’s Degree in Business Administration (the famous MBA) learning the same old economic theory and corporate strategy of searching for discounted cash flow and leveraging balance sheets while improving returns on investment. We need to allow ourselves to have open minds and the freedom to move into that “gap” of imagining what has never been imagined before.

Clever entrepreneurs can solve pressing local problems. For example, in the poor highlands of Colombia, children saw mushrooms popping up on heaps of coffee waste that were dumped in the canyons and polluting the local rivers. They took these mushrooms to school and started to farm them with the help of the teacher. They found the mushrooms to be delicious and the community started to use them in their meals. Poor people started collecting all of the coffee grounds in the inner city and farming mushrooms on them as a community

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business. This is in fact what is going on all over South America with appro-ximately 10,000 people generating jobs because farmers decided not to drop coffee entirely but rather stick to coffee and expand within the business. The ZERI Foundation I established after learning about these kinds of successes will not be content until all 350,000 Colombian coffee farmers have seized the opportunity to create an integrated farm that provides more food, higher productivity and more jobs while permitting the Earth to produce more with what we already have. Now do not think that this only applies to coffee; we can do exactly the same with tea as students in the city center of Berlin have proven after being exposed to the logic used here with coffee1.

This is not just a dream. All projects described throughout this book show this is possible today. It is possible for poor farmers in the developing world, it is possible for the cement workers in the industrialized world, it is viable to farm mushrooms on coffee and tea waste in Berlin, Germany. It is now being done just North of Amsterdam. There is no need to wait patiently until tomorrow. Pressing problems were solved in a positive, creative, generous and adaptive way; and they were solved fast. Imagine the smile on the face of a child harve-sting the first mushrooms barely 14 days after starting to work with the coffee grounds. Imagine the smile on the face of the factory manager in Japan who is converting idle cement kilns into a cash generating operation just two years after the idea was first introduced. There are more than such 100 innovations that I have analyzed in detail and all of them are available by simply going to the website www.blueeconomy.de. One day these new entrepreneurs will create more jobs with higher levels of productivity, better quality products at lower prices and more output with fewer resources. The present economic model built around the core business and financial engineering may be the best one we have been able to put in place so far. But do you agree that there is so much room for improvement after the debacle with sub-prime mortgage rates and huge government bail-outs of banks and multinational companies that will burden us with higher taxation for generations to come? All we have to do is believe it is possible and make it happen, basing our logic on scientific insights and benchmarked initiatives. And so much is a matter of the state of your emotional intelligence while seeing the connections no one has seen before. It is about Zen and the Art of Blue.

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In addition to creative and connected thinking, solid academics and basic emotional intelligence and the capacity to make things happen, a key element is the capacity to express innovative and creative ideas that are ready for imple-mentation in a language that is easily understood. The arts are a universal language. Drawing, painting, digital animation, cell phone graphics, dance, musical instruments, rap and hip hop, game design, theater. Sadly, as more and more emphasis in today’s world is concentrated on making money with what we know, subjects that are already on the sidelines such as art, music and performance are neglected even more. These are relegated to the world of philanthropy. Actually most people have to remove themselves from their job-environment to be able to express themselves, feel good and share any vision they may have that integrates both body and mind. The time has come to be able to do both and stop being forced to choose.

It is essential for us to have music and arts as part of our day. There are some of us who literally need this outlet to discover ourselves; we need to be able to use our hands to sculpt and channel energy through painting, acting, dancing and singing – and without being graded. Through the arts we can communi-cate our innovative insights into sciences without having to worry about the jargon. Through the arts we can channel our emotional energies without having to worry about societal permissiveness. Thomas Armstrong, author of The Best Schools, says, “In the course of expressing themselves artistically, students can sublimate sexual energies, channel violent impulses, sort out emotional conflicts, and build a deeper sense of identity.”

Take the example of the Peñasco High School in New Mexico. This school is located just a stone’s throw away from Los Alamos National Laboratories. The county of Los Alamos has the highest concentration of PhDs in America while the county of Peñasco has the highest number of kids dying of drug overdoses. It is no surprise that the Hispanic and Native American communities that find it hard to land decent jobs are getting into trouble at school already. Violence is rampant and the turnover of teachers and school principal is high.

At the invitation of the Sustainable Communities Foundation (SCI/ZERI) I was invited to expose high school students to a program that includes science,

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emotions and arts. While the young adolescents got excited about the content and the approach during a brown bag lunch, Simon Vasquez, one of the student leaders, commented that these consultants who come for one day are quite a waste of time and money since they never come back. These consultants cash their check and really do not care about the real plight of the young Hispanics in a lost school in New Mexico. I sensed both genuine criticism and a craving to establish contact so I offered to return anytime he wanted on the condition he summarizes what he picked up that day in a rap song. Simon reacted in surprise “How did you know I like rapping?” I quickly responded “Of course the way you talk and the way you move tells me you must be a darn good rapper. So let me know, drop me a line whenever you are ready.”

A few months later, Simon sent me an email that the rap song was ready. Fortu-nately my schedule permitted me to swing by three weeks later. I showed up and Simon had organized a lecture to the whole high school. It was the first time the school attempted to hold a session with the whole student body. Simon intro-duced me to the auditorium and the best way to describe the learning method that got him interested in science and community affairs for the first time is to summarize it in his rap song. He performed the song and even though I had never been a great fan of rap, I was instantly fascinated by the ease with which he got all the concepts clear and how these were shared with his fellow students in English and Spanish.

Simon may have flunked his science and English classes, but there is no doubt he is the best communicator on science in English and Spanish rap. The same week we recorded the song in the studio and presented it on the local radio station in Taos. Well that was not just any radio station, it was KTAO, the first solar powered radio station in the world. Simon graduated from High School and made it to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. While the police and the courts closely monitored Simon because of his past record, it became obvious that he is a born leader who could use his skills in any setting, as a criminal or as a good citizen. It was the combination of arts, emotional intelli-gence and comprehension of science that allowed him to see his options clearly. This created a platform for him to choose a positive future. And, being a leader, his choice influenced the choice of many more.

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Simon was grateful for the experience and offered the greatest thing a Hispanic family can offer, dinner prepared especially by mama. I learned how the family suffered a couple years before our first encounter the tragic murder of their daughter, losing the custody battle for her baby orphan because the court judged they did not have enough space at home. Simon faced tremendous challenges in his childhood. He overcame the drama that so many families have to face and found out how the education system was simply bogging him further down, not permitting the channeling of his energy and anger toward the envisioning of a positive future. A positive future he so dearly wanted. Individuals like Simon search for their way in life to see opportunities, which once were described by the French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel as “possible futures”.

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“Out Da Box”lyrics and music by Simon VASQUEZ © 2002, Vasquez

una mano lava la otra y las dos lavan la cara

We were born to the Earth and yet we hang her It’s time to help the Five Kingdoms of Nature

And clean up our acts and stick to the factsWhen you move to the future you can’t go backLearn the new ways and don’t stay in the daze

The ZERI curriculum is all the crazeToo much waste and what to do not a clue

ZERI can teach you a thing or twoOne kingdoms waste is another’s treasure

To the bird its waste but to the tree its pure pleasureThe benefits of ZERI reach beyond one’s measure

So wake-up and snapWe are making electricity from ordinary crap

I know it sounds funny but it’s trueWhat do you think about that

ZERI is a wave that’s flowing real hotIt’s time to start thinking out da box

chorusWhat the future has hidden ZERI unlocks

It’s time to start thinking out da boxWisdom from the past once lostNow rediscovered at ZERI’s cost

It is time to start thinking out da box

We are the only species that creates hazardous wasteNo other species destroys the Earth’s face

But the grass is green the sky is blueYou think it’s a simple treat

but there is more to understand between the two

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like how they work together and how we helpwe need to work together it is not about selfhelping the environment will help your health

unlocking the secrets of mother nature’s wealthI don’t think it makes sense to waste water when you flush

We need to use something that won’t cost as muchIt is the purest substance now we turn it toxic

We’re the human race against natural logicAnd that’s crazy, it’s just crazy

chorusWhat the future has hidden ZERI unlocks

It is time to start thinking out da boxWisdom from the past once lostNow rediscovered at ZERI’s cost

It’s time to start thinking out da box

Soluciones limitadas ZERI nos sacaEs tiempo de pensar fuera de la cajaSoluciones limitadas ZERI nos sacaEs tiempo de pensar fuera de la caja

En los tiempos antes de nuestra culturaLa gente no hacia tanta basura

Tenemos que limpiar nuestro paisTenemos que guardar la semilla de maisLimpiar la tierra con enzimas de lombriz

Y en esta realidad andaremos felizAndaremos feliz. Andaremos feliz.

La madurez consiste en realisar los suenos (borrowed from Paolo Lugari’s mural painting in Las Gaviotas)

Nunca dejemos de sonarNunca dejemos de sonarNunca dejemos de sonar.

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Coffee plant, © SXC

Coffee beans, © SXC

1 If you want to go and visit, write to [email protected] and see for yourself what a difference can be made, thinking positive and acting fast.

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Chapter Ten

21 Virtues

Making poor people happy, just imagine! Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Laureate Literature

To be sure, the various kinds of intelligence are key, but virtues are the heart of any human being. When I was asked to assist in the design of a learning program for high school children to introduce them to virtues and ethics, it struck me that as a teenager I had little or no interest whatsoever in the ethical conduct that parents and teachers tried to instill in me. Their language and attitude towards virtues did not jive with my desire to enjoy life. I noted how my father had left my mother despite the inscription “loyalty is my honor” on a cross above our doorstep. I saw adults espousing double standards telling kids not to steal while at the same time elevating company executives to hero status when all they did was simply pollute less. Does it strike you as normal to consider someone who steals less to still be a thief while someone who manages to pollute less is a hero? Doing less bad is still bad. What we need to find out is how to do more good. I remembered a debate with my ethics teacher who was trying to explain to me that a commandment requires children to love their parents (and that is fine); but why doesn’t it command parents to love their children as well? Over the years I learned how success breads jealousy, how so-called friends turn their backs on you for money and security or to get your post and acquire fame riding the wave you created. It seemed to me as a rebellious teenager that not only children should learn about basic virtues and ethics but that the adults might need some rejuvenation of their thinking as well. Starting from that observation I wondered why or how this could have changed in less than a generation. The uncovering of ways to bring virtues to young adults ended up being an exercise to translate the magic of sciences in general, the Blue Earth and biodiversity in particular, into a practice, into how we can wake up the desire in each one of us to be “good”.

Science and Virtues in life have little in common. However, when a junior class in a high school in Colombia were told about the Welwitschia mirabilis, this desert plant in Namibia that developed the unique physical design to capture morning dew, much in the same way as the Namibian desert beetle does, they were only

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half listening. However when they heard that this is the oldest living plant on earth, on average some 2,000 years, that germination may take up to 70 years and that in the end this plant shares its moisture and hard-gotten nutrients with anyone … anyone who chews its leaves, that is. It didn’t take much more to get them listening. To their surprise, the youngsters were now asked to indicate what virtues they recognized in this plant. With a little prodding the kids came forward with generosity, sharing, responsibility, perseverance, patience … Then they received an assignment: who in their local community would best represent the virtues they had just recognized in this desert plant?

The class was not called “Ethics”, that would have been enough to turn everyone off. The class was a special course on unique phenomena in the natural world. It sounded like a program on Discovery Channel and I presented it as if it were a special edition of Animal Planet. Once excited about the unique features of this plant, a class team agreed on the most relevant virtue. This group also identified the local hero who best embodies that virtue. As the year goes by, 21 exceptional plant, animal, fungal and algal species are covered, offering a deep insight into symbiosis, mutualism and ecosystems. The Blue Earth is explained like never before - as an inspiration for virtues. This is Zen! At the same time the latest insights in evolutionary theories, connecting the class to the local community, from the newspaper editor, the local baker and butcher, to the midwife and a local social activist. These 21 examples from nature, and the associated 21 local heroes were gathered into one book, which was published on graduation day.

What do you think the community thought about this unruly class of teenagers? We know very well from psychology that when children talk and write about nature and ethics, the virtues they attribute to individuals in their society actually reflected back on the children themselves. The parents and local leadership felt that this class was the best class ever to graduate. Each of the children picked up the science and excelled in ethics. Over the years this exercise was conducted all around the world, of course with varying outcomes that nevertheless offered deep insight into the virtues that a younger generation is thinking about (in association with Nature).

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If this program had been carried out in Singapore or Japan where children are quite disciplined and the authority of the teacher is final, the results would have been predictable. These programs were first conducted in Colombia, not exactly a country known for high standards in ethics. The first book was published in Manizales, Colombia in 1997. I believe that we have to look at the world “through the eyes of our children”. The world will look very different indeed. The logic of virtues that I learned from exposing children to the wonders of Nature is an assembly of thoughts that offer a deeper insight in the world of ever expanding connections that we are all uncovering all the time. Virtues are everywhere. Really. Especially in the ecosystems that surround us and provide the basis of life on which we so dearly depend.

So what are these virtues? Without going through the details, which are the subject of a book of its own, here is a table with the insights that we have acquired over the years. While we recognize many of them like forgiving, sharing, saving, modesty, respect, work and patience, which have been advanced as important characteristics for many centuries, there are a few surprises that offer us an insight into the new contract with society that is emerging. It is no surprise that the next generation insists on joy and creativity. After all if you are young and “innocent” then you imagine a good time using your fantasy to envisage your future and destiny. The next generation, which I actually prefer to call the present generation since we have to put our faith in them to carry us forward where we have been unsuccessful, has also elevated sustainability to a priority. We have to live in a sustainable way, but all too often these kids live in a house or an apartment that belongs to their parents where sustainability may be talked about but not practiced.

The desire for children to embrace sustainability at very young age has been demonstrated on numerous occasions. Perhaps never has it been so striking as when I was invited to talk to a group of three to five year olds at the Montes-sori school in Santa Fe, New Mexico at a time when there was a drought affecting water supply. Every family was asked to use water only for absolutely necessary things. Washing cars and watering the lawn were strictly prohibited. The principal of the school asked if I could share some ideas with the youngest about how they could conserve water at home.

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With half a glass of water in my left hand I entered a room where all the kids were seated on the floor. After a very generous introduction by the teacher, this 6 foot 4 tall foreigner with an obvious accent sat himself down on the floor as well. So now I was sitting with the children on the floor. After a moment of silence, looking around the room I lifted the glass and pointing at it with my right finger and asked “who would like to pee into my glass?” These words seemed to shock some of them. They looked quite embarrassed at each other until one boy in the front ventured and answer, saying softly “we do not pee in a glass of water”. After another moment of silence I shifted my position and asked: “Who has a dog at home?” And soon more than half of them had raised their hand. “And so how does the dog pee and poop?” It did not take long, nor was there a need to prod them, before there was a detailed demonstration of how the male and the female do it. Now we were having fun as the atmosphere in the room moved from tense to relaxed. There was a lot of activity on the ground until I raised my glass again and asked “Who would like to pee into my glass?” Immediately one boy from the back yelled “We do not do that!” I did not say a word, gazed around the room and an atmosphere of discomfort prevailed again until I asked “And, who has a cat at home?” The theater show started all over, but this time the description included a litter box. “And does it smell?” I asked. “Of course not, you just change the litter once a week.” The children enjoyed demonstrating how the cats do it and no, the males do not do this differently, all of them sit down in the box.

I only had to raise the glass in my left hand, and now half of the room shouted, “nooooooo”, one girl even added “you silly!” Now we were really enjoying ourselves, so much so that the teacher probably was afraid this was getting out of hand. I then asked “who has a bird?” It did not take more than a split second for a few to imagine that the bird droppings fell on the head of the teacher. Amazing, wherever I go in the world when the same story is told the children’s imagination always conjures up the hilarious image of bird droppings hitting the teacher. The children observed that birds do not separate liquid from solids and, yes, they clean out the bird cage once a week. When I simply started raising my hand, without saying a word, the whole room roared. Now I stood up and asked “So what is the first thing you did this morning after you woke up, of course only if you are not wearing diapers anymore?” A few kids put their head

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down and avoided any eye contact, others started thinking, searching for the connection and some 10-15 seconds later, a few of them put their hands on their cheeks and exclaimed “we peed in drinking water!”

It is quite normal to get some calls, or emails from parents after such a presenta-tion. This time, however, the calls came from desperate parents who wondered what to do with their children who refused to go to the toilet, insisting that if the cat can do it in the litter box why can’t she, arguing that there is a water shortage and the last thing we should do is pee and poop in drinking water. While the parents never made the connection; the kids’ brain was wired instan-taneously. The children never forgot nor forgave their parents for making an exception for the birds, cats and dogs while their “master” is expected to waste the most precious resource on this Blue Earth. I know that a few of the girls were so adamant about it that their parents had only one option: a dry toilet got installed and poor father and mother better use it as well to preserve peace at home.

This experience is tightly related to the fifth intelligence, the capacity to make things happen. Our generation is great in talking about sustainability, but remains quite ignorant about what we can do. Even when we read the book “50 Ways to Save the Planet” we know all too well that we fall into the trap of quick and easy solutions that in the end are not a real solution anyway. Ever thought about biodegradable plastics made from corn starch? Or, did you ever considered the consequence of biofuels from corn? How sustainable is a plastic or a fuel that makes food more expensive? Would you agree that there is no sustainability when people are hungry? When corn is diverted from feeding people and animals to making plastics through a triple chemical conversion process then this bio-plastic is biodegradable, but it cannot be labeled sustai-nable. And after the chemical conversion process the plastic -if we ever were able to ask it and get an answer- would never even remember it was corn once. Corn that is diverted from feeding people and animals to making a biofuel that generates per hectare ten times less energy than tropical plants per year cannot be called sustainable.

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It is no surprise that children observing their parents, listening to the debate, following the blogs and reading Twitter posts, are inclined to understand sustainability as a virtuous way of living. While they do not have the power or the money to live out these sustainable practices while living at home, they have the patience (another virtue mentioned by them) to make a difference when they are “older” in about 20-30 years. Do you get the picture? 30 years is within your horizon of expectations when you are a five year old old. It is easy to have the future in mind. When you are 50 another thirty years may be pushing it to the limit, explaining why we tend to get more and more impatient, ready to make compromises and satisfied with the good news even when we know deep in our hearts it is not the best news at all. Worse, we lend a blind eye to the unin-tended consequences caused by our desire to make up for it and just act fast. Sometimes these unintended consequences evolve into blunt collateral damage which we accept as if we were military strategists hunting down terrorists.

Have you ever wondered what the term “organic” means? Organic means that an independent organization certifies “what is not in there”. Organic does not tell you anything at all about what you are eating. This label was a logical reaction in the sixties to the widespread use of toxic chemicals like DDT We were just keen on knowing that these toxins are not part of our food cycle. It is now time to look in our food for “what is in there.” It is not enough to know there is protein, fat, carbohydrates or minerals in there. We need to understand the whole system that produces our food.

Did the farmer get compensated fairly for his effort? Was the farm teaming with local species and enhance biodiversity? Is the produce fresh and local or has it been harvested unripe (green) and shipped over long distances? Is this food representative of the culture and traditions of the native population? Was the fibrous agro-waste used to farm mushrooms, and did the substrate enrich animal feed, or was the manure used to generate methane gas? There is so much that can be “in there” that we do not even know to ask for it. However it is this web of life that we unravel before we eat, that explains why children are keen to endorse “open systems” while “knowing your limits” as two additional virtues for their generation.

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21 Virtues

1 Co-responsibility How a trees grows to maturity thanks to sun, water, bacteria, fungi, micro-algae, animals … Whatever is waste for tree is converted back to nutrients by others. The tree gives what it does not need, and receives gifts it never even asked for.

2 Forgiving Nature has no jail, nor judges. Nature accepts mistakes and even excessive force is dealt with without aggression.

3 Sharing Welwitschia mirabilis, the oldest living plant on Earth, lives in the desert and is on average 2000 years old. It shares all collected morning dew, and the minerals absorbed through its roots are available by chewing on its leaves.

4 Modesty How a small and invisible fungus living on the roots of a plant can secure the survival of trees in the savannah. The mychorrizal fun-gus lives underground but permits huge forests to emerge where otherwise deserts would have reigned.

5 Respect The earthworms work in the dark, cannot see but have proportio-nally the biggest intestines of any animal and can digest just about anything. They adjust the enzyme mix according to the food (and the toxins) they have to digest.

6 Productivity In Nature everything that is waste for one is food for another, cascading nutrients and energy in a never ending cycle thanks to the sun and the stored energy in minerals. Nothing is wasted, everything that is not needed anymore is a nutrient or energy for someone else.

7 Work How the water hyacinth is desperately trying to convert lost nutri-ents from soil erosion into biomass. However this plant is misun-derstood by humans who call this an invasive species that must be killed with chemicals, instead of appreciating ist capacity to recover lost soil.

8 Sustainability How an old cement kiln is converted into a system that brings nutrients back to the soil. The cement kiln offers a fine breeding ground for anaerobic and aerobic bacteria that will convert waste into energy (methane).

9 Creativity Humans only use their creativity to solve one problem, eat sugar from cane, or assemble products without knowing how to disas-semble. Any plant, animal, fungi or bacteria knows how to combine as equals assembly and disassembly. Humans seem to lack creativity.

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10 Savings Humans need to be reminded that there are future generations. In the natural systems, no one is capable of consuming more than is needed or produced by the system. Procreation is often determi-ned by the availability of food.

11 Joy Nature produced so many varieties and alternatives and someti-mes it seems that it is only for the fun of it. There are 300 varieties of orchids in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta alone. And there are miniature orchids and large orchids. It is simply a pleasure to see and enjoy.

12 Open Systems All science is based on the notion that there is a „closed system“ and we limit ourselves to obervations of one, of comparisons of one with another(one). Natural systems are constantly interming-ling and combining throug an open system.

13 Patience We are living in a world where we get instant gratification for all we want. This makes us impatient. In Nature, patience is key, it simply is not possible to go too fast and to want everything right away. However, a bacteria can multiply in seconds, an algae in minutes, a fungus in days. Plants and animals tend to need more time.

14 Know your limits When a tree grows up to 20 meters high, it does not decide that since it worked up to 20 it will grow through to 40. The human mind seems to be different, and we are in a constant search for ever big-ger and greater, going beyond the limits. The only way to succeed is to break the limits. This is the basis for the manmade disasters that are all too often described as natural disaster.

15 Adaption There are no standard solutions in Nature. Everythig is local, better even everything is adapted to the local conditions, especially the resources available and the partnerships that can be construed.

16 Dialogue and Feedback

Humans did not realize that bacteria talk to each other. Of course there is no bacterial alphabet, but unless we learn how to under-stand how to communicate, not just with fellow humans but also with all other species with which we share the planet, we are unlikely to convert this world into a sustainable one.

17 Duplicating the Good

If something is working well, then Nature duplicates it. If something is not working, it is simply recalled by the maker. Nature does not impose what is not working up to the best possible standard, it only shares what has demonstrated to fit in the best.

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21 Virtues

18 All are intelligent Anthropocentrism puts the human at the center of the Universe. However, every species with which we share the planet has evol-ved into a unique part of a complex system of which we are a part as well. There is no one who is the best, since the contribution of all is important to the whole web of life.

19 Order Nature creates order out of chaos. The power to take the energy from the sun, and the gravity of the universe and to start building life that is simple and basic at first, into a complex, predictable and therefore orderly world makes us go beyond the concept of discipline, where one simply follows the rules, to the concept of order where one makes use of the basic rules of chemistry, biology and physics as these are applied in different fashion by each of the kingdoms of nature.

20 Future in Mind Nature applies a sophisticated concept called autopoiesis. The capacity to self-evolve, including the capacity to create new com-ponents as is needed in the light of new efficient uses of energy or nutrients. This capacity to create what is needed at a specific time and place was already observed by Darwin who noted that the island of Galapagos with tortoises had cactus evolve into trees with a stem high enough to prevent the fresh branches to be eaten, whereas islands without tortoises have cacti without stems.

21 Dreaming The most powerful virtue is to continue imagining the future and life, with passion and joy providing the energy in life to overcome hardship and the perseverance to go for a whole dream, not just half a dream.

It may be worth going through some of the debates that ensued after a brief presentation. Children who are surrounded by family and teachers who are physically larger, stronger and even imposing are greatly impressed with the evolution theory taught in the biology lesson that dictates only the strongest will survive. In order to be the strongest, power, money, and muscles will be needed. There are many who believe that when power is combined with money it leads to survival and eventually happiness. What makes a species belonging to any of the five kingdoms in nature strong?

The fact that a plant or an animal has strong parents does not make it strong. In nature, the strongest is the one who gives the most. The principle is simple: give away what is not needed to those who can make something useful out of it. Nature applies a very simple design concept: ”Whatever is waste for one

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is useful for another in a different kingdom”. This creates a cluster of inter-connected species belonging to the five kingdoms of nature, where everyone benefits from somebody else’s ”waste”. Let us take a tree as an example.

A tree with many fruits will attract many birds that love to eat the fruits. If the tree has an abundance of fruit, then more birds will come. The more birds, the more droppings they will leave behind. These droppings are whatever the birds do not need after consuming and digesting all the nutrients from the fruits. These alkaline droppings offer great food for micro-organisms in the soil. The more droppings, the more soil bacteria. The more soil bacteria, the healthier the underground. The richer the soil, the richer the rainwater and the more nutrients for the tree. The tree will obtain nutrients through its roots and generate new leaves. If the tree has more leaves in the spring, then the tree will be able to get more energy from the sun and it will grow bigger and taller. The more leaves in the summer, the more leaves are lost in the fall.

All the dry leaves, which are of no use to the tree, fall to the ground. These leaves create a thick carpet on the forest floor and are the favorite food for fungi. The fungi are not alone. They are accompanied by earthworms and ants. These are busy creatures digging around the soil for food.

The fungi and the earthworms, in partnership with micro-organisms, break all this tree waste down and convert it to humus. The more humus the tree has, the more it will grow, and more flowers will blossom following spring. If the tree is full of flowers more bees will come and feed off the nectar. This in turn helps in the creation of more seeds and more fruits, which will then make it viable for the tree to get more soil bacteria from the droppings of the birds that feed on the fruits.

Survival and eventually strength in an ecosystem therefore depends on sharing whatever one does not need. Perhaps this is the most basic role we have in society, and everyone shares that responsibility. So, the virtue of co-responsi-bility means we take it upon ourselves to share whatever we do not need, what you would consider waste, and to make it available for those who turn that waste into something useful for themselves. This system whereby everyone

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shares by giving away what they do not need will evolve into a system that makes us all healthy, happy and strong.

This simple observation of Nature teaches us a lot. Only those who respect the weakest and the smallest have the opportunity to become the strongest. Just imagine that the tree does not like the face of the earthworm. It has a grudge against this ”blind and ugly creature without legs” simply because it does not know which end is its head or tail. Well, if the tree had the chance to impose its will there would be no earthworms around. Evicted from this habitat around the powerful tree, the earthworms will have to find refuge elsewhere, perhaps around another Tree. After the earthworms have all emigrated, the tree may be pleased it does not have to tolerate these small creatures anymore, but one thing is certain, small as they are, if the earthworm is not around, the tree may indeed survive and grow, but it will never ever become the strongest around.

Unfortunately, industry does not operate in this way. Industry is focusing on its core business and whatever it does not use in its production process is consi-dered waste. Whenever we have an issue we cannot handle, we call it a problem. Whenever Nature has an issue one species cannot handle well, it is resolved by another species, most likely belonging to a different kingdom. Waste is a problem for a society that does not yet understand very well how the waste of one species can be the food for another. Actually it is no use to offer your waste to your brother, you have to offer it to a stranger. Your brother will be offended because you think he is your garbage collector; a stranger who belongs to a different family of species will be most grateful. Waste is excessive in industry because the leftovers of one process are never shared nor valued and are consi-dered a burden for industry and society; waste is typically burned or dumped. It means that the potential of each component is simply disregarded or even destroyed. It stands to reason that young people would like to see the term productivity” redefined.

Perhaps the most comforting virtue that emerged in these discussions is “dreaming”. Yes children are aware that their parents, the teachers and the school system are trying to expose them to the real world. But children do not want to give up their dreams. The harsh reality is that sometime in the future

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they have to make a living. Too many adults around them clearly do not enjoy their jobs, trading time at work for freedom over the weekend. The shock for Alice in Wonderland is that after such a great and intense time of discovery and joy, she wakes up to realize that it was nothing but a dream. Children are keen to convert their dreams into reality. Of course they have figured out that the prince is not coming with the glass shoe, but they do want to earn a living doing what they are passionate about.

While at university, many of us active in a student organization for business (AIESEC) dreamed of creating our own company, becoming our own boss and charting our pathway through the mazes of business. But by the time we received our diplomas most of us were busy trying to find a job. In the end there was only one (me) who created a business within six months after finishing university. How come we are prepared to give up our dreams for money and experience when the world needs entrepreneurs with passion and social responsibility who are willing to go the extra mile, use some creativity to venture into the unknown. If new businesses are only created after we believe we have enough experience, we are likely to make only cosmetic changes to what we learned. That is why I wish to expose, and not impose, reach and not teach.

It is comforting to know that the virtues the next generation seems to display after extensive exposure to the wealth of opportunities such an interconnected life offers have been honed and are up to the task. Dreaming, living your dreams and making dreams come true is perhaps one of the most inspiring experiences in life and I must admit, more than one of my dreams has come true (albeit at times accompanied by nightmares).

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Toilet, © Fotolia

PArt IV

The Future is in our Hands

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Learning versus teaching

“Reach don’t Teach Expose don’t Impose“

A.S. Majali former President of the University of Jordan

What else do we need to do to prepare our children for life besides making all these connections with an interconnected way of thinking, within a realm of virtues and science, with insights in emotions and arts and the drive to make a difference? The annual report by the OECD “Education at a Glance” stated that if governments were to cut the budget for education by 30% academic performance would not get worse. The last report clearly stated that if the method of learning does not change, any additional funding would be a waste of money.

What do we teach our children? Currently we first concentrate on reading, spelling, writing, and mathematics. Academic subjects are considered the building blocks of knowledge, but all too often we focus solely on math and reading. Human beings can leverage their innate intelligence with the scientific insights at their fingertips without visiting the classroom. Take the experience of Thebe Medupe, the first PhD in astrophysics from South Africa. At the age of 13 he built his own little telescope. Dr. Medupe went on to create the largest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. Thebe’s grandfather used to tell him about an important star called Naka. Naka is quite bright and marks the beginning of winter. When people see it in the early mornings they know it is time for young boys to leave their mothers and fathers to attend initiation schools. Naka in his native language Setswana means horn star, and it is called this because long ago people used to blow cow horns to announce its first sighting and there were celebrations in the village. Thebe later learned that Naka is known by astronomers as Canopus, the second brightest star.

Greg Foster, a filmmaker, approached Thebe to make a documentary on tradi-tional African knowledge of the night sky. It is a documentary mostly about the filmaker’s journey throughout Africa searching for Africa’s relation to the cosmos, studying how the Dogon in Mali and the Bushmen in Namibia

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depend on the stars for their daily lives. For these people knowledge about the movement of the stars is a matter of life and death. It is striking how integral the stars are to their daily life. They use them to predict the coming of the rainy seasons and to work out when they can start planting. Their knowledge of the stars is extremely precise. Thebe met an old man in a Dogon village in Mali who told him about the positions and times of the rising of the Pleiades cluster in great detail. When he checked what the old man had said with the software on his laptop he found the man was spot on.

Unfortunately, the present education system is already considered overburdened and science is taught in many schools in such an archaic and disconnected manner that students do not have any opportunity to imagine its application to the real world. How many can relate to the fact that observing the stars offers hints about the planting season? Academics give us the fundamental skills and concepts that facilitate higher level thinking. We need to know how to read, write, do basic math, spell, and perform certain tasks – all this just to get by.

The Brazilian pedagogue Paolo Freire could teach illiterate adults how to read and write in a few weeks just by focusing on the subjects that they really need and like. We mentioned it before, where there is a will there is a way, when passion is involved we succeed quickly. Why do we need years to teach our children in advanced countries to master the basics of the alphabet? Probably because we teach it in such a disconnected manner that children do not relate to anything at all. Just imagine all the time spent on getting these reading skills. By the end of elementary school there is still a staggering amount of kids who cannot get through a paragraph in a book. Our outdated pedagogy still treats children as if their brains are empty and need to be filled with everything we know. That is the core of the criticism coming from the OECD, a think tank which is known for its conservative approach and is also known as the rich men’s club.

The opportunity our society has is in defining academics as the launching pad for everyone to acquire insights and a framework for navigating life. Since schools consider academics to be the goal of teaching, children are tutored, tested, prepared and drilled for standardized tests that measure academic success. That

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is the way I graduated from Sint-Lievens College, in Antwerp, Belgium in 1974 and nothing has changed nearly four decades later. The double whammy is that some governments give money to schools based on these standardized scores, so even if theoretically a school is opposed to six testing weeks per year full of multiple choice exams, there is no choice but to implement them anyway, otherwise funding is withheld. Is that the way you leave no child behind? This is the way you leave a whole generation behind, as CNN described in its special on education in the summer of 2007.

You know by now how we can link scientific concepts from the worlds of physics and biology to every-day life – infusing them with emotions, arts and mathematics. Thousands of basic scientific concepts could be implemented in our homes, offices, schools and even stores. These insights in science offer innovations to business and even allow our children (and their parents) to imagine a new business model that works with what is locally available and responds to all our basic needs. What’s even more incredible is these business models could even make people happy! That sounds like the Blue Economy I proposed in another book. Children do not need to become designers of dry toilets, but at a time when there is a dramatic water shortage, children become pioneers when they bring home the message about what possibilities there are out there combined with a basic understanding of what is behind some of the ideas and an innate capacity to explain it all in a plain language everyone understands. After all, children quickly comprehend the idea it really does not make sense to mix solid and liquid discharges with drinking water when our bodies evolved over millions of years to discharge liquids through one channel and solids through another channel. Why did evolution go through the trouble of processing these two waste streams separately if they were meant to be together?

The present generation will need (and wish) to design a healthy life style, positive futures for themselves and their communities and sustainable solutions for the world while cross referencing this with economic viability. We will need to come up with solutions to major dramas such as the destruction of the rain forest; the inconvenient truth about climate change; the dramatic increase of cancer and infectious diseases among kids and adults; the proliferation of

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allergies; the destruction of whole ecosystems due to man-made pollution (or should we say ignorance); and, worst of all, the suffering and prevailing hunger of the poor. In this complex world of limited resources, sustainability must be based on a solid understanding of the best science, a grasp of the tremendous opportunities before us that have been left unexploited, the use of an incre-dible portfolio of innovations that have been proven by nature over time and a demonstration of deep respect for culture and tradition.

Solid and strong academics are the launching pad for solving problems. We should shy away from our craving for a set curriculum with fixed solutions that rely on rote learning and memorization. There are so many books that offer you 10 ways to get rich fast, and 10 ways to be happy, and 12 ways to lose weight; all these books are about fixed and predetermined solutions that may work for a few but can never work for everyone. Remember that children – once aware of the differences - are calling for the virtues of adaptation and respect. We must have the capacity to manage the more than 1,000 scientific concepts at our fingertips and the 100 innovations that will change our way of doing business forever. Science has created the insights and somehow few have reached the mainstream and even fewer have been presented in an interconnected manner.

Go ahead and solve a linear problem such as 1 + 1 = 2, but also be able to solve non-linear problems. Did you know that hardly anything in nature follows linear math? Just about everything is non-linear in nature, except for the human way of thinking. Academics can be infused with science – again to expose us to as many concepts as possible. We should engage in interdiscipli-nary projects based on a cycle such as the seasons and then tied in with arts, science, literature, math, dance, music, technology, economics, management and so on. Scientific concepts are taught through exploration, through building and destroying model bridges. What’s the best way to learn about compression and tensile strength, or buildings with natural air-conditioning systems if we are not exposed to how this works using the basic principles of physics which provides explanations for equalizing air pressure and strengthening material forces.

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We need to bridge the gap between the artificial learning environment in school buildings to the Internet and the real world. We need to connect our desire for being as healthy as we can within the environment we live to the pursuit of happiness. We are very keen on creating spaces that open up literally and figuratively into the world using authentic learning materials such as the internet, literature, tools and art supplies and artifacts. We should not be just gobbling up facts to be regurgitated; learning must be based on exploration that produces new ideas and revelations. It is a cascade of never ending opportu-nities and facts, solidly based on science that will make children want more … more than we are capable of giving them today. If we succeed in this the next generation is guaranteed to live up to our expectations and will do better than we ever imagined.

“Learning is about seeing connections Among phenomena

You did not see before“

Vaclav Havel

People in this day and age should have the tools and the intellectual flexibi-lity to find unique portfolios of solutions for situations that change over time and place. In this generation a fast pace and constant change are givens. New models for cell phones, computers, iPads and iPhones – in fact all technology – have bred a generation that has no fear of figuring new things out. It is just the way things are for this generation – we know no differently – and forget about reading directions, simply switch your iPhone on! Since the underlying goal of leveraging our five intelligences is to ensure a healthy life style, a satis-fying profession, a harmonious community and a sustainable world, this adap-tation to “changing solutions” is perhaps the most critical success factor of the present education system. Solutions have to adapt to the reality in which we live and the expectations we have about a better future. These simply cannot be the same everywhere.

If we propose one solution for the same problem regardless of where in America or the world the challenge is occurring, then we negate individuality,

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culture, tradition, history, biodiversity, local ecosystems, and the power of co-evolution. Developing in children the capacity to understand local condi-tions, to appreciate unique situations and to imagine multiple options is what schooling should provide. This will necessitate a shift from teaching everything we know to providing a platform from which we can learn everything we need to know to make happen what we imagine is in everybody’s best interest.

Re-reading the previous chapters, a big question came to my mind – Why haven’t most schools ever taught us or why aren’t most schools teaching our children to think inside these interconnected systems that clearly create so much space to innovate and make a difference? If it too late for ourselves, we should at least ensure that our children get that chance. Why aren’t the types of programs with multiple benefits integrated into most programs? Why do we zealously pursue discipline? Should we not embrace undisciplined children, that is to say children that are not stuck within one discipline, but can embrace all of them.

We as adults were never exposed to this way of thinking and acting. We are driven by the Homo economicus, the individual who looks for money by pressing scarce resources into a revenue stream. Fair enough - that is the past. However, in looking at published and web-based materials at the elementary, secondary school, and even university levels, I find very few developed frameworks on systems thinking which would help children to easily discover hidden connec-tions that shape their dreams and prepare them for life. Schools should have this open ended learning system as part of their everyday program.

Everyone has been encouraged throughout this book to ”connect the dots”. The ability to think with the facility to make connections is arguably an intel-ligence; we called it the fourth intelligence. Alternatively, the ability to think in terms of a connected system could be categorized as a personality trait related to other qualities such as flexibility, adaptation and perception – attributes in people who are ready to chart new paths with new possibilities. Above and beyond the natural abilities of each individual, we should do whatever we can to become better systems thinkers, to become better systems innovators, who are permanently on the lookout for new connections. Adults who look for creative solutions, who have designed a healthy lifestyle which is transparent to

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all, a home that is beautiful and personal and who are committed to creating a harmonious community and a sustainable society cannot think about them-selves and the present generation only. We have to reflect on the pathways to creating a better future by improving how we prepare future generations.

The question is how to create a learning system so that all children are prepared for everything life has offer, are happy and liberated from the burdens of poverty and illnesses. In the present system children simply memorize facts and formulas, creating pockets of isolated knowledge. The physics class will teach the Newtonian formula, how the apple falls from the tree, but no one has any idea how the apple got in the tree in the first place. How many children realize that no tree will ever grow in a vacuum, even though the hypothesis of Newton’s law is that the apple … falls down to earth in a vacuum? How realistic is this world of science when children do not even know where their food comes from?

Rote teaching not only eliminates creativity and blocks children’s natural yearning for connectivity, but the information is easily forgotten. Most adults took geometry and chemistry as high school graduation requirements. Do many of them, besides engineers and architects, remember what was covered in these courses? Needless to say, much of learning today is disconnected from the realities of life as children experience it. Teachers know all the answers to examinations questions by heart – nothing out-of-the-box going on here - and in worst cases the same exams have been used for twenty or thirty years! Wouldn’t it be great to present children with questions the teachers didn’t have ready answers to? I bet you that the children - knowing that the teachers do not know the answers - will search like mad to find the responses. And, our experi-ence has shown that they will indeed find them.

I designed a curriculum for children based on stories. One of my fables “The King of Hearts” is about the heart of a whale. This is a way of teaching elec-tricity, pumps, nutrition and the distinction between fantasy and vision all at the same time. The story instructs the children that a whale can pump 250 gallons of blood per heartbeat because of the “things” in its food. Even though teachers do not know what this “stuff ” is, we know from what we have

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experienced all around the world that it never takes the children more than a couple weeks to figure out that we are referring to potassium, sodium and calcium. When I asked a psychologist how it is possible that not just one of the children figures this out, but somehow the whole class does, she asked me how I think children learn dirty words? Indeed, one child figures out the meaning, everyone is curious to know it as well. The next thing you know is that everyone is using the word. This is nothing new; this has been going on for centuries.

Life is intrinsically complex and diverse. The “web” of life is always changing and co-evolving with whatever happens in and around the surrounding community. Our generation tends to look for one right and permanently right answer, not a variety of answers that might – just might – change as time passes by or change the outcome of tomorrow. It should come as no surprise that communities often fail to solve problems because there is no connection made between the opportunities and the phenomena right in front of them. Policy-makers may be confronted with two clear problems at once, but the inclination to solve both problems in an interrelated way does not occur to them. Societies and communities are capable of responding to everyone’s needs, building on their innate capabilities and respecting the specific lifestyles that each one of us wishes to pursue.

For example, few adults realize that a decision such as becoming vegetarian in order to save animals from a brutal life could speed up the destruction of oak forests in China. Once a person is made aware of the fact that the Chinese risk destroying their oak forests to supply the world with designer mushrooms (such as shiitake) a piece of knowledge replaces a belief founded on a super-ficial piece of logical information. Then the shiitake-eater can rethink the reasoning behind choosing shiitake over meat and make a more informed decision. What can we do about this? Look at other mushrooms, buy shiitake locally, grow your own mushrooms on coffee waste! As stated in the beginning, I oppose forbidding things. We are proposing an understanding of the realities in the world through uncovering the connections between phenomena that have remained undetected until recently. We wish to see solutions emerge by establishing links where we did not see them before. Who knew that coffee and tea are hardwoods? Once the connection is made, then pruning can be used

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to farm prized mushrooms that grow on hardwood only, without ever having to touch an oak tree again. Now apple orchards become natural centers of mushroom farming.

Another example is with biodegradable plastics. What should we think about plastics made from corn that cause causing the prices of tortillas in Mexico to skyrocket? Let us look at the opportunity to create plastics from food waste as is already done in Japan. Instead of producing plastics from starch extracted from corn, we first eat a good meal at a restaurant and all the leftovers are collected. A simple process will extract all the starch from the scraps. A fungus then produces exactly the same plastic that was made from corn starch. First you eat and then you make plastics with the leftovers. In this way we are not contributing to making corn more expensive, we are not taking food away from the poor and we can still have our dream of shifting our consumption patterns to non-fossil fuel based plastics. Doesn’t that make sense?

What about ecological detergents? Do many people realize that most of them use extracts from palm oil and that to meet the demand for more palm oil millions of acres of rainforest have been destroyed to create the space needed to grow them? As the forests are destroyed, the habitat of the orangutan shrinks. This primate has now been brought to the brink of extinction. Dozens of examples demonstrate the general lack of understanding of entire systems. We simply do not see the connections and business is simply not prepared to go outside its core business. The businesspeople are only looking at the one business they know and financial analysts are only looking at the one sector they monitor.

Remember that Starbucks can make 1.5 million times more from coffee than is the standard today. If we expose ourselves and our peers to fast evolving strings of connections we all will learn instinctively how to go beyond the obvious. Human beings are inquisitive and explorative and those of us who see the difference between isolated problems and the connection between challenges are the ones who will see all the opportunities. Learning systems can encourage everyone’s mental facility to see the whole picture even if the connections at times are based in fantasy.

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Producing drinking water is a priority. How many cities and communities are not suffering from an acute shortage, and if there is no shortage now, many wonder where water will come from in the near future? While reverse osmosis has been established as a standard on the market, new systems emerge whereby water is filtered without using any filters, membranes or chemicals. It is purified by using the vortex, this swirling movement that characterizes all water and air flows. While we know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, it certainly is not the most energy-efficient one. If one wishes to bulldoze from one point to the other, then we must take massive friction into account. Water flows in swirls, this increases the pressure and impurities gather in the center. These impurities flow into a nozzle that extracts dirt from water. This cycle can be repeated three to four times until the water is clean. And nothing but the laws of physics were applied.

In Alice in Wonderland the story connected in a most incredible fashion and never ever seemed to end, until Alice woke up and realized it was a dream! Children intuitively operate in terms of interconnected and even illogical systems in which everything is related and alternatives are bountiful. Adults constantly remind children and themselves of what is and what isn’t, what they should believe and what they shouldn’t believe. Frequently societies end up adopting these beliefs, letting dreams and visions of a better world be replaced by shaky logic - instead of bravely figuring out their own truth.

We have to instill in people that sense of wonder that pulls us toward Nature - to experience, explore and find the hidden connections. This must be done before we are completely addicted to the television and video screen. We need to experience the passion that comes from designing this little world in which we want to live. Someone who has never tasted an orange cannot know how an orange tastes until he or she has experienced it him or herself. If you have never listened to Mozart, you cannot imagine how beautiful the music is. If you never learned to see reality as a huge interconnected world, you can never savor the pleasure of looking positively at harsh reality and imagining the solutions that make sense, that are based on science and that can make a difference now. Now that you have been exposed to this, let us practice Zen and the Art of Blue.

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Children learning, © Fotolia

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Chapter Twelve

the blue economy

“Motivation with Integrity has no limits Capacity with Motivation is powerful

Understanding with Capacity is potent Knowledge with Understanding has meaning

Experience with Knowledge offers vision“ Dee Hok turned positive

Humanity knows how to make steel, but nature knows how to make bamboo. Steel requires massive amounts of energy to produce and the mines leave scars on the face of the earth. Tropical bamboo is an excellent construction material. It is vegetable steel. This material is extremely resistant to hot and humid weather. Farmed and harvested in the tropics it competes with cement and concrete as a construction material. It does not contaminate at all and its forests are known to regenerate creeks and rivers. And there are more than 2,000 different kinds of bamboo that attest to the joy of biodiversity!

Bamboo can be harvested three years after planting and from then on whenever you need it. Bamboo has the structural sturdiness of reinforced concrete with steel and consumes 170 times less energy to make. Its tensile strength can reach up to 28,000 pounds PSI (pounds per square inch). Of what significance is that for you? Bamboo is very strong. And based on German research undertaken in 1999 and 2000 at the behest of the ZERI Foundation, it is even stronger than steel. Poor families plant and harvest bamboo to build affordable housing. After an initial waiting period they can harvest 65 poles of bamboo each year on a one thousand square feet plot of land, sufficient for constructing a home with a balcony. In other words, they can grow their own home. A decade ago I contributed to publishing a book by VITRA in Germany with exactly that title.

In Colombia, tropical bamboo, or Guadua angustifolia, is a traditional material for constructing homes in the highlands known as the Coffee Region or Eje Cafetero. Three story constructions have survived rain, humidity and earth-quakes for more than a century. Bamboois a natural construction material that grows in over 100 countries and provides affordable housing for over one

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billion people. It offers an excellent alternative to “modern” methods which are expensive and consume lots of energy. Bamboo is beautiful, especially with the grand designs of masters like Linda Garland and Simon Velez. On top of that, it removes carbon dioxide from the environment. What more could you want?

I like to dream up and design production and consumption models that respond to people’s needs with what is locally available. I refuse to believe that the concept of scarcity is central to traditional economics. The reflections I am making here are meant to inspire innovative thinking in fields ranging from physics and chemistry to biology, all the way to management, economics and finance. If we do it right, if we find the connections and see the synergies, then we can move from scarcity to sufficiency, and even abundance and full employ-ment. That is the ultimate set of associations we need to make. This is where we need to create a better understanding of how entrepreneurs can succeed in social, financial and environmentally sustainable development where business has not succeeded in much more than greenwashing and hollow commitments to “CSR” (corporate social responsibility). The power of business at the micro level and economics at the macro is so decisive and often so divisive in our societies that a new model imposes itself. You know, the past is not bad. But the future can be much better. The logic of an open market economy makes sense for Chido and the orphans, it works for Paolo and drinking water. I have documented dozens of cases where we can go beyond the triple bottom line, we can generate multiple cash flows and build up social capital. Information must flow freely, and we have to expose as many people as possible to all the various paths into the future. I called it the Blue Economy which evolves in step with this Blue Earth, characterized as it is by a blue ocean and a blue sky. Even the Avatars are blue!

This innovative approach to business and economics translates science into projects, emulating natural systems where “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”. This will bring forth an economy that will outperform the present system. It will produce the best and the healthiest products at lower costs and reduce risks by generating multiple cash flows. The valuation of assets will increase building up capital in the process. Actually, it doesn’t produce just any kind of capital; it builds social capital which lifts the entire community.

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For social capital to accumulate money must flow and not accumulate in bank accounts. The Blue Economy is resilient and flexible and is able to respond faster to all our basic needs like water, food, energy, housing, health care and creating jobs because it is driven by an entrepreneurial spirit and supported by a learning environment. The only true obstacle the Blue Economy must contend with is the old guard of business people who benefitted too much from the old way of doing business and are not prepared to sacrifice their stranglehold on the market to allow the advent of something new. They will suffer the same fate as Goliath. David changed the rules of the game without notifying Goliath. Entrepreneurs will be exposed to the hundreds of opportunities and will adapt their business models along the lines of The Blue Economy. Tradi-tional management models based on core business and core competences, will find it harder and harder to respond effectively as they are pushed deeper into the straightjacket of supply chain management. Why? At the end of the day it is all about cash flow!

Clusters of connected industries, patterns of integrated production and consumption indicate there is a major force to be reckoned with that I would call “the integrated cash flow”. The integrated cash flow of a coffee farm also produces cash from selling mushrooms. This makes joint social, environmental and economic development a precondition for making more money. If the farmer decides to stay with the monoculture of coffee, then poverty will reign until the World Bank experts advise the farmer to start growing passion fruits and plow all the coffee bushes into the ground. A piece of land that cannot sustain a family with coffee (or passion fruits) alone has to evolve from a coffee-only model to a business model where coffee remains at the center but is joined by diversification within the coffee culture that thrives on the genera-tive capacity of the five kingdoms of nature. This kind of productive system will allow us to escape the poverty trap once and for all by converting scarcity in sufficiency, perhaps even abundance and creating self-employment, health and happiness.

Regenerating a rainforest offers unique opportunities to increase land value because a piece of land that produces nothing is worthless. A piece of land that produces energy and fresh water to cover its own needs while at the same time

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boosting biodiversity becomes valuable as Gaviotas has demonstrated. Liabi-lities such as waste and land degradation become cash generating assets and problems turn into great opportunities because the connections that simply were not visible before have been uncovered. The principles that we see emerge in the Blue Economy are basic and well documented. It is driven by case studies, one of the most effective tools in learning. I wish to share some of the prin-ciples of the Blue Economy which thrives on the discovery of the countless connections that we have not seen before. Literally thousands of entrepreneurs have risen from their comfortable chairs and moved from vision to reality. Some of the principles are counter-intuitive, but I am convinced these will appear reasonable by the time you finish reading this book. You have contem-plated so many positive thoughts that what comes next may well be self-evident for you. It may entice you to read the book “The Blue Economy” where I take the Zen I have described here and implemented it beyond our personal lives.

The 12 principles of the Blue Economy defy the logic of current business practices. This is merely a first draft and over the years I believe we will learn how to navigate realizing that the only holy truth is that there is no holy truth: there are temporary truths and as we learn more all the time we will see clearer how little we knew at the outset. But at least we are deciding on a direction and walking our talk. As I end my fables I end here - that it has only just begun.

Bamboo, © SXC

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12 Principles of TBE

the 12 PrINCIPLes

oF

the bLue eCoNoMy

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1 Entrepreneurs in the Blue Economy merge social, ecological, cultural and economic results to create a highly competitive business model.

The purpose of the Blue Economy is to respond to basic needs with what is locally available. Its success does not depend on subsidies or taxation, while government policies are enabling and not directive. Today business sets out to make money, and only then perhaps committing some of the profits to do good while paying exorbitant bonuses to a few at the top. Too many businesses from farming to renewable energies depend on government subsidies financed with excessive taxation of revenues. Sometimes environmentally sound products only succeed on the market because a marginal group of consumers is prepared to pay the premium.

The innovation in the entrepreneurial approach is that a competitive edge in the market produces non-financial benefits which cannot be quantified but serve the community and the environment. Take the pioneering water hyacinth project, where a plant that is considered a pest in Africa is used to combat malnutrition by farming mushrooms as a source of nutrients which strengthen the immune system of children suffering from malnutrition. This demonstrates that “the unreached” can be reached if we have an insight that unleashes the capacity to generate value out of something that was considered a major nuisance but can make a positive contribution to society. Water hyacinths, a blight in the waterways of Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, are destroyed by professional companies at the cost of millions. The money wasted on this aquatic plant that is rich in fibers and recovers the nutrients lost in the rivers and lakes could be converted into a catalyst for development.

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Harvesting water hyacinth, © ZERI

Chido Govero, © ZERI

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2 Entrepreneurs in the Blue Economy increase output and require less input, pursuing growth in co-evolution with nature.

Numerous development experts from the industrialized world have formu-lated objections to a further expansion of the world economy, claiming that growth would choke the environment, create an imbalance in our ecosystem and jeopardize life on the planet. The excessive C02 footprint growth brings with it would destroy our habitat. The no-growth option disregards growth opportunities that have a productivity factor of 1.5 million as described in earlier chapters. There are so many opportunities to increase our capacity to respond to basic needs with what we have. Arguing in favor of a no-growth strategy while requesting industrialized nations reduce consumption to match is intellectually attractive but simply not realistic.

We can increase output without requiring excessive amounts of energy or raw materials when all the innovations implemented are based on benchmarked technologies proven by ecosystems as described in The Blue Economy. Better still, we can convert liabilities into assets as demonstrated with the cement factory that was converted into a processing center for solid municipal waste. And these innovations can make productive use of what is considered waste. There is no need to deplete our limited resources provided we pass down nutrients and energy in a way traditional economists are fearful of. We have given detailed descriptions here of many instances such as the wasteful coffee production: a cup of coffee only represents 0.2% of the coffee bush’s biomass ... what would the result be if 100% were used in a systems approach that puts all the five Kingdoms to work? You can increase the flow of nutrients calcu-lated in terms of essential amino acids by a factor of 1,000! This is an opportu-nity to increase value to the world economy by a factor of 1.5 million. This is a type of growth we cannot reject!

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Cement factory, © Fotolia

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3 Entrepreneurs in the Blue Economy increase productivity, create jobs and eliminate pollution.

The Blue Economy is based on a systems approach and aims to increase the productivity of labor, capital, raw materials and the system as a whole. Recent management practices stipulate labor is to be substituted by capital to increase competitiveness and productivity. In the development concept of the late 20th century high labor costs were replaced by low labor costs. Traditional economic logic says unemployment is a necessary evil. The post financial crisis economy is growing in output without creating jobs. Lower market prices resulting from globalization are supposed to eliminate inefficient producers who are not allocating scarce resources efficiently. That logic only applies when the core business strategy prevails. Once the economy evolves to an integrated system whereby all raw materials continuously cascade through a network of produc-tion and consumption there will be more jobs and productivity will increase.

A beer brewer who only produces beer can only make use of the 8% of the starch in the barley, the rest is wasted. Perhaps barley farmers would consider genetically modifying barley to produce more starch. But wouldn’t it make more sense to use the spent grain after starch extraction to bake bread, still good for 92 percent of the biomass? While genetically modifiedGM barley could improve efficiencies, no one pretend it could improve +90 percent! While eEmulating natural systems can multiply and improve resources so what is the fuzz about GMO all about? While the country of Gabon is importing malted barley to produce an outstanding beer locally, the same nation is strugg-ling to pay for imported grains to bake bread. While the government searches for subsidies to import grain for bread, it has a middle class rich enough to buy barley for making beer. The spent grains - which tend to have strong smell - were considered a nuisance for the President and were therefore ordered to be incinerated. The spent grain, including some 26% protein, simply went up in smoke. So if the option is to use an oven it would be better to save money on operating the incinerator and convert it into an oven for baking bread. Creating more jobs while reducing production efforts is exactly what the entrepreneur-ship of the Blue Economy is all about.

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Beer ingredients, © Fotolia

Bread from spent grains, © Fotolia

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4 The Entrepreneurs of The Blue Economy generate an integrated cash flow that is higher than the consolidated cash flow.

Traditionally trained MBA graduates will mull over production schemes searching for innovations that will achieve better economies of scale and lower marginal cost prices to increase market competitiveness. Such a clear focus on producing more of the same at higher volumes forces companies to focus on their core business. Through outsourcing, supply chain management and cost-cutting the unit price will drop and the consumers will pay less and less for a standardized product that will be traded around the globe. The focus is on cutting costs. The entrepreneurs of the Blue Economy create clusters of economic activities with increased economies of scope. The creative contribu-tion is the broadening of the business scope while generating multiple benefits, including more cash flow. The focus is on generating more revenues.

Take the case of tomato skins which are a waste product for ketchup producers. The skin needs to be disposed of at a cost. If entrepreneurs realized that tomato skins can be used to produce lycopenes, twice as good as betacarotene, then the cost could be converted into an income. Of course ketchup producers are not thinking about fine chemicals used in cosmetics. However, the cash outflows paying for disposal of the skins is a cost if one were to operate within the logic of the economies of scale. If, on the other hand, the cost is converted into a competitive product sold for cash then we are reversing the trend. Since several costs of stand-alone businesses are converted into income, the integrated cash flow for the whole cluster is higher than the consolidated cash flow which is simply the sum of all individual operations. This does not come as a surprise. After all, the basic principle of a system is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. How comforting to see this confirmed with a careful analysis of cash flow - the parameter that makes entrepreneurs tick.

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Tomatoes, © Fotolia

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5 Blue Economy Entrepreneurs offer higher quality at lower prices.

When the system integrates products designed for reuse as an added value in a second process it provides a considerably higher quality which would not be affordable in the stand-alone core business approach. How much do you pay for dried shiitake at the store? It is difficult to find anything for less than 50 dollars a kilogram. However, if all one million coffee farmers in the world were to farm shiitake on coffee waste then the price would be driven down to perhaps five dollars.

Instead of using hormones and genetic modification to increase output, this increase in productivity is driven by the cascading of materials and the use of natural processes. The same goes for lycopenes, which are too expensive today. But if the biggest tomato processors in the world converted this waste into revenue, the natural product might even become cheaper than the synthetic substitute.

Bringing the price of spirulina down to one dollar a pound wholesale, will allow this marvelous source of protein and micronutrients to become a staple food. And carbon dioxide from coal fired power plant can be converted in the process to a life generating product that has the potential to eliminate malnutrition.

We can fill books with examples of how this interconnected world of produc-tion using plants, animals, fungi, algae and bacteria is simply so efficient that even the most expensive items can become quite affordable and still offerwhile offering the highest levels of quality. Actually this is a welcome change from the present economy where the cheapest products are often the lowest quality and unfortunately the most sold!

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Shiitake mushrooms, © Fotolia

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6 Entrepreneurs of the Blue Economy reduce prices for core products, eventually reaching “zero”.

“The Internet Economy” offers core services for free. No one pays for a Google search, to open a profile on Facebook or to use Skype? These core services are offered for free since the platform creates a community where other services are offered that generate enough cash to pay for the core service. The entrepreneurs of the Blue Economy are applying the same principles to the production and distribution of products and services that meet basic needs. For example: water is considered a commons, meaning it should be offered for free to those who need it. This is practiced in Las Gaviotas, Colombia where water is offered for free to the local population. How can that this be funded without subsidies?

Since consumers in Bogotá and beyond are prepared to pay a premium price for water from the regenerated rain forest - just like there are clients who buy Evian or Pelligrino at 2 dollars a bottle - these sales generate a good income for Gaviotas. This high margin sale generates cash that not only provides the income to further regenerate the forest, it also makes it possible to provide water to the local communities and anyone who comes by for free.

The same logic applies to the production of spirulina in Southern Brazil. These very nutritious micro-algae can reduce widespread malnutrition at a fraction of the cost of spirulina on the market today. The reduction of production costs to a fraction of the standard is possible simply because there is such an excess of CO2 emitted by coal fired power stations. “Use what you have” is one of the core principles of the Blue Economy.

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Las Gaviotas water bottle, © ZERI

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7 The entrepreneurs of the Blue Economy pursue more efficient, more local, more diverse and more resilient businesses.

Natural systems never attempt to maximize one output – they attempt universal optimization That optimum is achieved by working with the best materials that are locally available, cascading nutrients and energy through the five kingdoms of nature and exploiting the laws of physics in the smartest way. Efficiency levels are high because all nutrients and energy are sourced locally. Increased diversity and a strong capacity to occupy niches indicate the best has been made with what was available. This in the end makes the whole system resilient since there are multiple sources of nutrients and many providers of energy.

Some people question the efficiency of a natural system and pretend that the human system is the most effective one. One could take the traditional view of productivity and claim that the fish are very inefficient procreators because they lay thousands of eggs and only a few hatch. This is a reflection of the typical singular and core business approach. The production of fish eggs is not only intended for procreation. This rich protein concentrate has served many others’ appetite and is part of a delicate exercise to keep all the species in a dynamic balance.

There is a strong generative capacity in every local ecosystem. Man’s search for productivity and quality based on economies of scale has eliminated his capacity to identify the inherent advantages and strengths embedded in local systems with their wealth of biodiversity and abundance of energy derived from the exploitation of the laws of physics. Nature does not know the concept of “wasting waste”. Humans are the only species capable of producing something no one desires.

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Maggots, © Fotolia

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8 Entrepreneurs in the Blue Economy base competitiveness on economies of scope, diminishing the importance of economies of scale.

The search for ever lower marginal costs in a linear production process even-tually reaches self-defeating proportions. A tree does not grown beyond certain proportions as it is aligned with the capacity of its ecosystem and its fine network of connections with every living species. A tree doesn’t pretend to stand 500 feet tall once it has reached 50 feet. Industry has neglected this reality in its pursuit of economies of scale. This forces management to go beyond the natural growth of business, forcing corporate strategists to embark on a mergers and acquisitions strategy. This imposes a leveraging of the balance sheet, taking on so much debt that a company loses its agility, risks increase and short term performance to meet debt payments drives all decisions, since its success determines the bonuses of management.

The new interconnected network of social, ecological, industrial and cultural activities permits industry to design competitive business models that characte-rize the Blue Economy. The dynamic interplay of complementary production and consumption provides more strength, resilience, flexibility and cash flow. Nature is organized along the principle that the waste of one is a nutrient or an energy source for another. In this way a cluster of complementary activities evolves. The value added generated by one core product (e.g. coffee) becomes the basis for the value generated by a cluster (e.g., shiitake, cattle feed, biogas). It does not make sense to grow coffee alone, produce ever more coffee and neglect all other income generating opportunities by going for the economies of scale of one output only. It is time to embrace the principle of the economies of scope.

According to calculations made by Wes Jackson from the Land Institute in Kansas, USA, more biofuels can be harvested in a sustainable way from the natural prairies in the American Midwest than monocultures of genetically modified corn could ever produce. The interplay of local biodiversity is more productive than single crop cultivation that is dependent on fertilizers and irri-gation and depletes the aquifer. Without subsidies ethanol from corn couldn’t

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even compete on the market. So what is the logic of diverting billions of tax payers’ hard earned money to finance a farming and processing system that is less productive (and certainly less beautiful and much less romantic) than a prairie that used to feed herds of bison?

Jatropha, © Fotolia

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9 Entrepreneurs in the Blue Economy increase and accelerate innovation while reducing risk.

Rapid innovation and the introduction of breakthrough innovations has always been slowed down and resisted by vested interests. In my book “The Blue Economy” I dedicate a whole chapter to explaining why today’s market leaders will never implement the solutions that we have at our disposal. The logic of the present business model resists any innovation that forces write downs of existing capital investments that have not yet been depreciated. The innova-tive business models that build on innovations or clusters of innovations will render the existing capital set up obsolete. Extraordinary write-offs, a drop in market share and profitability will be the result. The core competence on which the existing model was based will become outmoded.

The Blue Economy approach to the design of innovative business models whereby products and processes without value are converted into productive assets relies on the speedy introduction of a portfolio of innovations. These breakthroughs ought to be quickly embraced simply because they generate additional cash flow and respond to real needs on the market. By bundling sectors which were first considered unrelated, a solid multidisciplinary portfolio of innovative and competitive businesses emerges that jointly change the rules of the game on the market. This will even further stimulate creativity as new opportunities are discovered.

By using the vortex, a swirling movement of water that presses out air and dirt, we replace chemicals, filters and membranes with simple physics. This platform technology is based on a mathematical model and has 37 proven applications ranging from the making of ice to the cleaning of swimming pools and the production of drinking water or the irrigation of golf courses. Each appli-cation generates better cash flow and a dramatic improvement of cash flow reduces risks associated with investment. This is why a faster introduction of more innovations of the types that are described in this book actually reduces risks. This is counter-intuitive but easy to demonstrate.

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Vortex, © SXC

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10 Entrepreneurs in the Blue Economy convert uncompeti-tive industries into competitive ones through diversification from within.

Clusters of industries in this Blue Economy convert something of no value into valuable inputs. Liabilities, defunct or underused infrastructures, are in reality hidden assets which can generate cash and convert the errors of the past into social capital in the future. Businesses can reestablish their competitive position around a cluster of newly created and quickly implemented portfolios of competitive businesses. This has the capacity to generate more revenues, using whatever is locally available. The successful implementation of this diver-sification strategy requires a broad understanding of the vast opportunities that those who are forced to pursue the core business at all cost simply cannot see.

When the largest citrus plantation in Africa went bankrupt one thousand jobs were lost. One cannot blame the bank or their analysts for not being able to identify new cash flow. Their focus was the reduction of costs. If they had only known that the citrus peels that were discarded by the now defunct fruit juice factory could have generated the additional income needed to put the juice factory and the plantation to work competitively. The extraction process requires CO2, which could be purified from the exhausts of one of the coal fired power stations, itself providing an additional source of revenue. The production of natural, high-quality soaps from citrus has permitted the local hospitality industry to reduce its impact on the local rivers which were over-whelmed with synthetic soaps carrying flashy brand names.

When Las Gaviotas was looking for renewable energy it studied palm oil and other tropical nuts and fruits. In the end it was the turpentine, a by-product of the processing of the resin, that became the cheapest and most abundant local source of fuel, replacing not only the fossil fuels but also vegetable oils that would have required additional planting. Reestablishing competitiveness is thus based on innovations that render businesses very entrepreneurial indeed.

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Lemon Soap, © Fotolia

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11 Entrepreneurs of the Blue Economy compete by exploiting the laws of physics, substituting blatant symbols of unsu-stainable consumption with inspiration from nature.

The laws of physics have the potential to provide inspiration and practical solutions in our search for more water, food, housing, health care, energy and jobs. If we are prepared to accept how everything in nature makes the best use of all available forces, then we can imagine solutions that go way beyond the present consumption model.

We will discard forty billion batteries this year. Instead of inventing green batteries we need electronic devices that require no batteries at all. A cell phone can be powered using two simple physical forces: piezo-electricity and tempe-rature differentials. So instead of looking for a green battery how about no battery? This would eliminate one of our clearest symbols of unsustainable consumption. Over twenty percent of the used batteries are now poisoning our water tables.

We use titanium to shave every morning. Once the blades become blunt they end up in landfills. We could replace the metal blades with a silk roller. Silk from the mulberry can become stronger than titanium provided it has been processed with pressure and moisture control. By using more silk we promote the natural generation of top soil. For each ton of silk the mulberry creates ten tons of fertilizer. That is sustainable production and consumption.

We discard an estimated 250 billion plastic Coke bottles around the world every year. If we were to replace this massive waste with glass we could create inexpensive building materials. How? Glass can be crushed and heated until it reacts with CO2, producing a lightweight foam. Actually glass foam, frustules filled with CO2, replaces at least four chemical-based products, including insu-lation, paint, pest control and fire retardants. We realize that physics can replace chemistry even in water purification, health care, food production and building design.

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Industry is always looking for predictable results. If one were to maintain a linear production with ever lower marginal cost prices, then our drive toward increased productivity and ever larger economies of scale will logically bring us to use pesticides, herbicides, and chemicals. The development of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and even cloning is the rule of the game and can be justified within that logic. When Swiss researchers launched Golden Rice under the pretext that the integration of betacarotene into the gene of a rice corn would reduce the risk of blindness for some fifty million people, it is hard to object to this breakthrough when it is presented in this way. On the other hand, if we realize that the water in the rice paddies typically generates forty times more betacarotene through the natural presence of micro-algae, then we understand how misguided this totally disconnected Golden Rice proposal is. We all too often want a quick solution and do not see the unintended conse-quences of our quest to do good.

Glass and Silk, © Fotolia

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12 Entrepreneurs of the Blue Economy manage their businesses emulating the immune system.

The management of a single product or core business is transparent and predictable. Information is processed throughout the company as if it operates like the brain and the nervous system. Downsizing has been the buzzword for many executives, recommended by consultants and implemented from the top down in an effort to regain a higher share price on the stock exchange where laying off people has always been equated with better valuation on the market. The slashing of middle management through outsourcing has been the norm to regain competitiveness. Management needs a different metaphor to cope with complex networks of ever changing relations and connections.

The immune system operates in a highly decentralized way. Part of the system takes responsibility and takes action The immune systems operates in a highly decentralized way with part of the system taking responsibility and taking action without any delay or consultation, sharing information like a multicast system that leads to independent action based on a better understanding of the local situation. Such a management style inspired by the immune system spells the end of corporate headquarters (the brain) in its present format. The Blue Economy brings platform innovations to the market that can never be managed centrally. This is why it generates so many opportunities for entrepre-neurs all around the world. The development of business networks requires a high level of self-organization.

EvaluatingThe evaluation of the present economic system that is based on centralized management and core business we certainly cannot say it is bad. is certainly not bad. It has performed better than anything we ever had before. However, it simply is not good enough and has demonstrated over decades to be incapable of responding to the basic needs of all. So it is high time for some major improvements. This invites is why we invited entrepreneurship and innovation because the. The present economy inherently has a tremendous potential to respond to people’s needs with ever higher levels of efficiency, on the condition that we imagine more and more relationships in products and

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processes. If economists were to take their homo economicus seriously then everyone trained as an MBA would search for more value with an ever decrea-sing amount of non-renewable inputs and an ever increasing amount of rene-wables. Then economists could design production and consumption models which enhance life on Earth.

Unfortunately, too many of the dominating business practices do not promote life at all. Too much of business cannot even pretend to provide health and happiness. The time has come to change this fundamentally. I believe we have a pathway to achieve this.

EXPO Bamboo Pavillion, © ZERI

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ePILoGue

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And it only has just begun

When you drink a bottle of water a day for 25 years …..

The search for the creation of this Blue Economy has only just begun. Centuries of narrowing down the reality of our lives into the smallest subjects and recently designing business plans for the tiniest niches managing minute changes in products, price, place and promotion has not permitted us to see the marvelous web of connections that not only unfolds before us, this web of connections is empowering us to see a new future. It possibly affects everything in a positive way. The way we eat, the way we live and the way we learn. The effort all of us undertake to search for the connection is not a waste of time nor is it making life difficult. This is enriching life beyond what we have imagined before. The time has come to look at the whole, discover the connections and see what happens. Before closing the book let us jointly study one concrete example of what happens when you imagine and then implement a system with multiple connections that you and I previously could not even have dreamed of.

Let us follow the chain of events that start with your decision to drink a quart of water a day. It is important to drink water. Hydration of the body with (alkaline) water is one of the greatest habits everyone should acquire. The question is which water do you buy? Is it tap water bottled after filtration by a well known brand? Is this fine water from one of the purest sources on a far away island or a precious mountain? Perhaps it is produced with reverse osmosis from seawater?

If you purchase this water from Las Gaviotas in Vichada Colombia, you would be drinking water from the region where Paolo Lugari initiated the conversion of the savannah into the rainforest it once was.

Let us suppose that your decision to buy water is not made just once in a lifetime. Can we assume you will drink water … for the rest of your life? Let’s see what happens: if you buy one quart of Las Gaviotas a day, over minimum a 25 year period you actually will spend enough money for Gaviotas to reconvert some eight hectares of land into rainforest (at a cost of 1,100 dollars per

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hectare). Yes, thanks to drinking water from this source you are regenerating the rainforest! Did you ever expect that your purchasing power could perform this magic?

25 years x 1 dollar a day = 9,125 dollars at a cost of 1,100 dollars per ha = 8.3 hectares

The regenerated forest generates cash primarily by planting, farming, harve-sting and processing resin. Based on the 8,000 hectare example we know that biodiversity recovers rapidly. Originally there were only seventeen grass species in the region of which eleven were non-native. Now there are already over 250 plant species thanks to the newly created biological bridge with the Orinoco Basin. Can you imagine that by drinking a bottle of water from this source you are regenerating biodiversity?

Planting and processing generates two permanent jobs for each hectare. Excuse me for insisting, but did you ever realize that by drinking water from this source you are actually generating two permanent jobs? Who said that you as an individual cannot do much about the challenges in the world? If ten million Americans were to begin paying more attention to the water they consume and to their health they would generate two million jobs without the need for subsidies, taxation or higher prices for the consumer.

The newly recreated forest brings additional rainfall which warrants the provision of more drinking water. So the more you drink, the more water you generate; that is the power of connections driven by the web of life. So let me spell this out clearly, by drinking water you generate more drinking water! We know that in a system the whole is more than the sum of the individual compo-nents. And, it only has just begun. Indeed, on top of that, each hectare will absorb eighteen tons of carbon from the atmosphere into the soil, the under-growth and the trees, each year for at least twenty-five years. That eradicates enough carbon to offset the emissions generated by fifteen Americans.

So, if you drink water from this source, you not only offset your own emissions, the emissions generated by shipping the water, you actually offset the emissions

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for 15 fellow Americans as well. That is actually getting to be too good to be true! Indeed, in a simply isolated narrowly defined bottle of water that basically is nothing but H2O in a plastic container you are not doing any of this. But when you design the system and imagine all the connections then it just gets better every time you turn a page.

The eighteen tons of carbon fixed per year represent 144 tons for eight hectares. Over twenty-five years this adds up to 3,600 tons of CO2. If each ton of CO2 were sold on the voluntary carbon exchange it would generate an additional revenue (over twenty-five years) of 10,800 dollars, actually doubling the revenues that you generated by buying the water at a dollar a bottle. This makes the project even more viable. Basically, you are building social capital and offering a future to a whole generation and region that had no idea how to pull itself out of poverty.

When - thanks to you drinking one liter of water every day for twenty-five years - Gaviotas plants 1,100 trees per hectare, it is necessary to thin the forest in order to let the ecosystem grow properly. Some 500 to 700 trees need to be taken out between the sixth and the tenth year. This represents a once in a lifetime generation of 200 tons of wood since each hectare will provide at least twenty-five tons of wood. This wood covers potentially all your lifetime needs for furniture and paper. The leftover wood that is in excess of your needs could even be used for the production of ethanol, an ideal substitute for gasoline. The cellulosic leftovers are burned in a furnace, generating steam in the boiler and producing electricity in a sustainable way. This source of fuel does not compete with food, is renewable and sustainable and all thanks to you drinking water from this source.

Now the trees are tapped for their resin for the next twenty-five or perhaps 40 forty years. The resin generates turpentine and colophon. Each tree produces one gram of turpentine every day which is locally purified, employing simple decanting techniques to provide tractors and motorcycles with a renewable fuel, thanks to you drinking this water! Each truck that delivers drinking water to Bogotá returns full with used cooking oil that otherwise would have polluted rivers or would have been disposed of in landfills. Now the purified used

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cooking oil is blended with turpentine, covering all fuel needs of the region, including the shipment of the water to the city.

The cash flow that is generated in a system designed so that everything is connecting will provide social capital and peace. This may seem a bit exagge-rated, but it is true. Why? Because when people have water, food, housing, jobs, health care and education there is little need to fight. On top of that, just about every other person living in Gaviotas plays a music instrument; when people can sing and dance they are less interested in guns and violence subsides.

You can start using the same logic from any other angle. Suppose you are worried about your carbon footprint and would like to offset your excessive use of fossil fuels that are contributing to climate change. Say you decided to buy carbon credits at three dollars a ton. This will cost about 250 dollars per year for the average person if you offset this by purchasing voluntary emission credit from Las Gaviotas. Well, if you do that for twenty-five years you are spending 6,250 dollars which will … regenerate biodiversity, bring the rainfo-rest back, create jobs, provide drinking water and all the other goodies that you have noted such a system permits.

Can you imagine that all our production and consumption over the next few decades could make current business practices a thing of the past. That we could start connecting just like our universe and the Blue Earth have been doing for billions of years. Then we will leave the age of scarcity behind, we will live in harmony with all other living creatures and poverty may finally be a problem of the past.

Perhaps this sounds like a dream. But the best thing we can do in life is realize our dreams.

It is this type of new economy that will emerge as a result of the connections that we see and put to work for the benefit of humanity … that is to say, for the benefit of all of us. That is why we call this the Art of Blue.

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www.marioninstitute.org/programs/ gaviotas-carbon-offset-initiative

www.blueeconomy.de

www.zeri.org

This book is about your health, your home and how we all can learn to live in harmony.

Gunter Pauli reflects on the obvious questions we do not ask, and guides the reader to the obvious answers that are presented as the best we can imagine today. Hope-fully tomorrow we can even do better.

The thought provoking flow of thoughts in this book questions the very production and consumption system that characterizes modern day society. Gunter Pauli refuses to put anyone on a negative path, he wants each one of us to look for the better. This is the "Zen" of the book, and you can embark on your personal Zen: stop and think for a moment about being healthy and happy.

Simple dialogues on simple things like your daily break-fast and your kids bedroom reveal a world around your microcosm that is so similar to the macrocosm that envelops us. And while we are increasingly aware of the threats to the environment that is our life support system, this book introduces a learning system that permits you to navigate from the universe to your home, enabling each one of us to pursue happiness.

If we can take charge of our own being, then we can master the Art of Blue; just like our wonderful blue earth, with a blue ocean and a blue sky.

www.blueeconomy.de

ISBN-13: ISBN-10:

978-3-942276-01-63-942276-01-6

Documents

Zen and the Art of Blue - Balipara Foundation · broadband internet conference on December 5, 1995 linking Nelson Mandela from his home in Pretoria, Shimon Peres from his office in