Future Shock, Natural Capitalism and The Shrinking Colorado River

Two important but largely forgotten ideas from the past — future shock and natural capitalism — are colliding right now in the complicated world of delivering Colorado River water to the cities, towns and food-producing regions in seven southwestern states.

Radical change in climate is forcing us to live a version of the radical future that Alvin Toffler warned us about in his 1970’s book “Future Shock.” Toffler described a future changing so fast that adapting to it might require a complete rethinking of humanity’s relationship to the planet and the rest of the living world.

Future shock, Toffler said, was a disorienting mental imbalance that leaves people feeling bewildered, homesick for stability and crippled by a sense of their own backwardness and incompetence. Future shock tends to inhibit clear thinking and the ability to cope with changing conditions.

Some twenty five years after Toffler’s insight, a new breed of environmental futurists shook off their imaginative paralysis and took the first steps toward rethinking the future. Their ideas were acknowledged with fanfare at first, but then shelved in the library of utopian notions.

In their 1999 book, “Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution,” Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins set out a radical agenda. As pragmatic and well argued as their proposals were, they seemed to be too embedded in consumer culture for many environmentalists, and were brushed aside by mossback water planners, urban officials and the powers that be in the world of agribusiness. Their arguments deserve a second look by environmentalists and perhaps a first look by business leaders and politicians.

Now, 23 years into the worst drought in over a millennium in the Colorado River Basin, it’s clear that how we’ve responded to the future shock of climate change has been abysmally inadequate. Despite all the warnings and all the evidence, we simply have been overwhelmed by change.

The simple message of the drought is that the seven states in the Colorado Compact — California, Nevada and Arizona in the “lower basin,” and New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado in the “upper basin” — must start using less water — much less water — from the Colorado.

The stakes are enormously high. If water consumption isn’t radically reduced, the Colorado’s two major reservoirs — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — won’t be able to supply vital hydroelectric power to the Southwest. And there’s even a chance that drinking water, and water for irrigation, could dry up periodically as well.

The federal government, which oversees the Colorado River Compact, has given the seven states ample time to negotiate reductions in usage among themselves. But they can’t do it. The inability to adapt has become so chronic that a new future shock situation has arisen. The federal government has laid out a plan that would basically override 175 years of water law in the west. The feds are proposing to simply reduce an equal amount of water each of the three states in the lower basin can get from the Colorado, despite their history and agreements. The reduction would be immense. Arizona, Nevada and California would each get a third less water a year, until the drought lifts.

That’s a future shock situation not only because of the massive reduction, but because it circumvents the West’s principal water distribution rule of prior appropriation. The rule is simple. Those states and regions and cities that got water first have senior rights. In a pinch, they always get their water first. California has senior water rights to Arizona and to Nevada. By mandating an equal reduction across the board, prior appropriation is temporarily suspended. For states, tribes, farmers and cities, the loss of senior rights, even if it won’t last very long, is a shocking and unprecedented state of affairs.

The trick of using less water has relatively little do with personal water use. All waste is bad, but the water you and I use is literally a mere drop in the bucket to what agribusiness uses. Farming accounts for 70% to 80% of all the uses of Colorado River water. Some would say that’s as it should be, given the startling fact that food grown in California amounts to something close to 90 percent of winter vegetables for the entire country. But now we have to grow more food with less water by rethinking agricultural technology top to bottom.

Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins present in “Natural Capitalism” four principles that are designed to achieve a revolutionary end without causing a crushing defeat of the old by the new. Their view is what I’d call an adaptive rather than a destructive revolution.

In a 2007 article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), the book’s authors summarized the core ideas of a natural capitalism adaptive revolution: First, “dramatically increase the productivity of natural resources.” Next, “shift to biologically inspired production models.” Then, “move to a solution-based business model.” And finally, “reinvest in natural capital.”

The piece cites “farsighted companies” that are making “fundamental

changes in both production design and technology” to develop ways to make natural resources stretch “five, ten, even 100 times further than they do today.” It seems entirely possible that agribusiness could innovate its way to revolutionize irrigation and fertilization systems so they not only use less water but cease destroying topsoil, annihilating other species and wasting land.

For me, the most fascinating principle of natural capitalism is biomimicry, using biological processes as models for innovation. For agribusiness, and other industrial water users, creating “closed loop production systems, modeled on nature’s design” could reduce waste and despoliation to nil. As the HBR piece says, “every output either is returned harmless to the ecosystem as a nutrient, like compost, or becomes an input for manufacturing another product. Such systems can often be designed to eliminate the use of toxic materials, which can hamper nature’s ability to reprocess materials.” Biomimicry could be a way to continue expanding our food supply while diminishing our use of water. The book authors stress to the business-minded HBR audience that “business must restore, sustain, and expand the planet’s ecosystems so that they can produce their vital services and biological resources even more abundantly.”

Even after more than 30 years, these principles still seem radical at first glance. But if we are, as Toffler says, to stay clear of the symptoms of future shock and resist being “overwhelmed by change,” we have to embrace ideas that can correct the massive mistakes we have made. The way we’ve operated in the world up to now has created circumstances to which we cannot adapt using old ideas and the technologies they produce. Climate change and drought are basically the result of a kind of twisted thinking that makes pollution — like the burning of fossil fuels — seem not only profitable but efficient. We have to leave those crippling ideas behind and replace them with new ideas, like natural capitalism and others, that are not invested in perpetuating the future shock conditions of our climate battered era.

As Alvin Toffler wrote 50 years ago, “by now the accelerative thrust triggered by man has become the key to the entire evolutionary process on the planet. The rate and direction of the evolution of other species, their very survival, depends upon decisions made by man. Yet there is nothing inherent in the evolutionary process that guarantees man’s own survival.” Water conservation guided by ecological principles give us hope that if we take care of the world around us, heal the wounds we’ve caused, we can secure a better fate for our selves as well.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it