Almost a month ago now, I was in Antarctica and already it seems far away. People have asked me a lot of questions, and I thought I’d share some of these with you and give you some insight on how I’ve been thinking about sustainable development and what makes sense to other people. I’ll talk about them over a few entries during the next weeks.

One of the most difficult questions I’ve gotten is, “So what’s the outcome of the trip?” I’ve struggled with that. The thing is, the whole experience was quite multidimensional. There were a lot of different kinds of learning. It’s really hard to package everything into a single "outcome," but I’ll give it my best shot.

Antarctica is an isolated wilderness. For those of us familiar with the three circles of sustainable development, Antarctica is pure environment. Going to Antarctica is a chance to step out of the economy and take a look at it from the outside, so to speak. The purpose of our trip to Antarctica is to explore the relationship between the environment and the economy from a different perspective — that of the environment.

Let’s start first of all looking at the environment from the perspective of the economy. For the most part we’ve ignored the role of the environment in our economic development. We used to see the world as being only economy; the environment did not matter. Imagine two boxes, one that says "economy" and the other that says "environment." There's no relationship between the two boxes. Most of our development from the last 200 years or so up until recently was based on this kind of view, that basically our economic activity is something quite separate from the environment. Sure, the industrial revolution was fundamentally about taking pieces of nature (wood, cotton, iron, coal, water, etc.) and transforming those inputs into outputs, but nature was limitless; there would always be enough nature, so we can safely ignore nature.

You have to remember that this was a time of relatively low populations compared to today. The issue back then was mainly with people and the question of efficiency — how to get the more work out of the least people. Taylor (look up Frederick Winslow Taylor) introduced scientific management as a way to increase the productivity of each worker. Henry Ford revolutionized the world by applying these kinds of principles to the production of his Model T. Efficiency.

During the last 100 years though, we’ve come to see that this simple picture doesn’t really hold. We’ve begun to realize that not only do we use nature as the source of the inputs to our production, but we also use it as the storage space of our waste. We kind of learned this lesson the hard way actually, as a result of a string of environmental disasters, dead fish and dead trees. The latest place where we’re learning this lesson is with CO2 and climate change. I mean CO2 is a natural byproduct of life on Earth. It’s pretty revolutionary to think that the Earth has to some degree reached its capacity for managing CO2; basically the CO2 storage space is full.

Not only have we reached the limit of the environment or nature as a storage space, but we’re also reaching its limit as a source of inputs to production. This is a really scary thought. The fact is we’re running out of stuff —metals, energy, water and land. The only thing we’re not running out of is people. And each wave of people is going to want more and more. Efficiency today is about how we use resources, not people; how we get the most out of our energy and water. We are recognizing that there is real economic value to be found in nature, a positive one by using it wisely and a negative one by using it poorly.

In sum, what we’ve learned is the more we take, the less there is to take. Economic activity is fundamentally tied to the environment.

So what I’ve discussed so far is the value of the environment to the economy. But that’s not the full story really; it’s just one perspective. What if we flip the equation? What does the economy look like to the environment? Any ideas? Imagine sitting at the edge of the Antarctic continent staring out into the sea and the world beyond. What does economic activity look like from the perspective of the environment?

Think about it and let me know what you think.

Visit the Antarctica expedition home page for previous posts, discussions and educational links.