I'm glad to be back in Portland. I have fond memories of the years my son spent here at Lewis and Clark College. If the weather cooperates, you might ride the aerial tram from the waterfront to Oregon State Health University and take in the view.
Look east and just a little south. The mountain rising nearly 12,000 feet into the sky is Mount Hood. It served as a prominent landmark for Lewis and Clark and the expedition they called the Corps of Discovery.
Much as was Lewis and Clark's journey west, our path to a sustainable world is not always clear.
Today, I will discuss how we are all connected to Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery. I will discuss how science can serve as a guide on our sustainability journey. I will also point out some obstacles and opportunities we can expect along the way.
Meriwether Lewis studied cartography in my home town: Philadelphia. After finishing his studies he met up with Clark and the rest the team in Pittsburgh. Two years and four months later, they sighted Mount Hood from the Columbia River.
They knew that Mount Hood signaled that the coast was near. "O, the joy" Clark would record in his diary when the ocean finally came into view.
If you follow Lewis and Clark's route down the Columbia toward the Pacific, you'll travel past the city of Portland. From there, some 45 miles downstream, you'll arrive at Longview, Washington.
In Longview, on the banks of the Columbia, you will find one of Weyerhaeuser's oldest facilities. At Longview we manufacture lumber, liquid packaging containers and newsprint. We have a large pulp mill there.
Not too many years ago you could see and smell our Longview operations from many miles away. Not so today.
That facility operates more cleanly and more efficiently than ever before.
It is an example of progress toward sustainability.
At Weyerhaeuser, we follow a disciplined path, informed by science and technology to reduce our environmental footprint and increase the productivity of our process.
Let me give you examples of our success in the last 10 years:
- companywide discharges of absorbable organic halides - decreased by more than 92 percent
- sulfur dioxide emissions from our pulp mills down 24 percent
- Particulate emissions - down 74 percent
- volatile organic emissions from our wood products mills - down 44 percent
Science is often called on to inform company decisions. That is also the case with the current quest for a global framework for sustainable practices.
But is sustainability a purely scientific concept? Is it an economic concept? Is it an ecological concept? What can we learn from the past? How should we factor in variables for future unknowns? When information seems inadequate, what course should we take?
Science, economics, ecology, and history all illuminate the past. Sustainability is an expectation for the future. Let's look a bit further at these complex relationships.
1564: the year of the birth of Galileo Galilei. You know the story of Galileo's experiment. He dropped different weight stones from the tower of Pisa. While that story may be fiction, Galileo's experiment did exist, at least in thought and theory.
He proposed the following: Assume that you have a heavier rock and a lighter rock. Both are dropped at the same time. Assume the heavier one falls faster. Now tie the two together. Would the lighter one act on the heavier one, reducing its speed? That outcome would contradict the idea that the two are heavier when tied together and therefore should fall faster. Both answers can't be right.
The fact? All objects fall at the same rate, regardless of weight - at least in a vacuum. Galileo discovered a fundamental principal of gravity.
This probing for understanding is how science works.
We non-scientists remember just the "Eureka's" - but the scientists know that those moments of clarity are separated by long periods of argument and doubt. Often strongly held beliefs must be put aside. In many cases, what's originally accepted as fact ends up being fiction.
I am reminded of flying horses. For centuries, people thought that when a horse ran, all of its legs left the ground when the front legs splayed forward, and the back legs splayed back. Look for this depiction in early 19th century paintings at the next art museum you visit.
So real was this belief that scientists were shocked when slow motion film revealed that the horse has at least one hoof on the ground when its hind legs or front legs are extended. The moment the horse takes flight is when its legs come together underneath its body.
Today, when we see the paintings of horses splayed in full flight, we chuckle. But in the 18th and early 19th century, the flying horse was reality in the minds of most observers. It took the development of photography to prove otherwise.
Said Albert Einstein: "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
Galileo is given credit by scientists ranging from Einstein to Stephen Hawking for the invention of the modern scientific method: pose a hypothesis and then affirm or discount it through experimentation.
The method works best with isolated variables and a focus on only one thing. This, of course, takes time. And proof requires replication by other scientists. Taking even more time. And you can't always isolate variables, or replicate results. This is the case with our eco-systems and climate, where experimentation with isolated variables is not plausible.
A sustainable future anticipates thoughtful action on many fronts with many variables and agents of change. Science will be necessary but not sufficient to the task.
The late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould in his book "The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox" explains why. He examines the ongoing gap between science and the branch of academia that includes art, literature, religion, and philosophy.
Gould concludes that both hold a rightful place in seeking understanding. In other words, he says, science explains what "is" and the humanities, what "ought" to be.
Economics is thought by some to be a science - by others to have elements of religion and philosophy. Many turn to economics to understand sustainability.
Economists like game theory. They look hopefully for models of what they call "rational bad behavior" that can predict how greed, anxiety, or irrational exuberance will influence human production and consumption.
But these models may be far too limited to inform the sustainability debate. Nobel prize-winning economist Robert M. Solow, describes the difficulties of defining sustainability. He focuses particularly on the underlying construct that each generation should leave the world and its resources unchanged. This view assumes that modeled "bad" behavior will exhaust nature's supplies.
Solow asserts that this concept of sustainability is an inappropriate application of economics. He shows that economic models measure only short-term expectations in the marketplace. What economics can't do is predict what future generations will want or need, or the tools and technologies at their disposal.
Therefore, to manage resources as though demand will be constant is irrational.
There are many famous examples of economists getting the future all wrong. One has been poking his head up every 20 years or so for the past 200 years.
In 1798, British economist Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population. He projected that in the very near future extreme poverty and famine would result from unchecked population growth. He had some pretty convincing economic models, but his predictions never came true.
Nevertheless, he is still cited in literature about population growth. Says New Yorker magazine in a recent review of several new books on the topic: "The world seemed to have been liberated from a Malthusian long night of hunger and drudgery. Now the 'dark tints' have returned."
Malthus has been wrong for 200 years. There's no reason to believe that he'll be right this time around.
As American land-economist Henry George observed: "Both the jayhawk and the man eat chickens; but the more jayhawks, the fewer chickens, while the more men, the more chickens."
Put simply, Malthus failed to account for human ingenuity. What economics does tell us is that the market works, and when left unfettered it brings forward innovations that only a bold few imagined possible.
Human intellect is an infinitely renewable resource.
If we turn from economics to ecology to help understand sustainability, we learn that it might not just be people who are ingenious. Some in that field wonder if plants use us just as much as we use them.
World renowned botanist David Mabberley says that human influence on crops like wheat, oats and barley is no different than the dispersal of seeds by the birds.
The wheat presents desirable attributes and is subsequently propagated by man. Where is the dividing line between the species? Mabberley doesn't see one.
This one-world view was first proposed in 1864 by George Perkins Marsh. Many call Marsh the father of modern ecology.
In a landmark study that looked at water run off from cities, he noted that altered drainage was affecting the surrounding forests, even though they were perceived as separate and far-removed from civilization. His conclusion – understand and embrace the dynamic relationship in order to protect both.
Henry David Thoreau couldn't accept the embrace. He left Walden Pond when he noticed the track he had worn on his daily walks. He had gone to nature to simply observe. His observations changed his beloved woods. He saw himself as a problem and decided to leave.
"People as problem" is a dead end path. Oxford scholar Phillip Scott calls for a new language in ecology. He notes that many of his profession are stuck in dead end thought. It is time, Scott says, for ecologists to view people as part of the solution.
So let's look at history for clues about future sustainability. On a remote island in the Pacific, the inhabitants of Easter Island didn't get it.
Jared Diamond in his book "Collapse" explains how Easter Island society fragmented into competing fiefdoms. Each fiefdom cut and harvested smaller and smaller trees over many generations to move the famous stone figureheads. Eventually, only small shrubs were left. No one remembered the vast forests.
As Diamond and others recognize, all human societies depend on extracting natural resources. Successful societies increase their productivity by constantly discovering and inventing new ways to optimize both what can't be renewed, and what can.
Today, we know more about harvesting trees than the Easter Islanders. In North America, we harvest rationally and forest land acreage is actually growing. Yet misperceptions and lack of understanding persist.
Let me drop a few stones from my tower. How often have you heard, the exhortation "save a tree?" Perhaps some of you use this measure in your sustainability metrics. It seems intuitively right, but it is not.
After all, we can't save individual trees they're not immortal. They will rot and die – or die and rot. Either way they decompose, returning nutrients - and their stored carbon – to the earth and atmosphere.
We can't save a tree, but we can save a forest – a forest can last forever.
A forest can be "saved" in two ways. It can be set aside from commercial use, foregoing economic value but serving other purposes such as recreation or refuge. The public may choose this forest use for public lands and will pay for its care through taxation.
But 57 percent of our U.S. forest land is owned privately. There's a way to save private forest land, too. It is to ensure that the trees have economic value. If the trees have value, the landowner will retain the land for growing trees.
Land and water will be protected and new trees planted as soon as possible. If people do not use forest products, timberland values are diminished. If the highest and best use is not tree growing, the land will be developed for other purposes.
The forest is not threatened by cutting down a tree. It is threatened by lost value in the marketplace.
Therefore, to save a forest one must grow, cut, use and re-grow the trees.
So just what is sustainability? It is certainly more than the intersection between science and forecasts of resource abundance. It is at least the intersection of all the disciplines of human endeavor.
Sustainability is about the potential of the human mind to solve important problems for people and the planet. It is about our ability to adapt in ingenious ways to protect the world around us without getting in the way of progress. It is about tapping into the power of markets to fuel growth and prosperity while finding better ways to meet our needs. It is about our willingness to confront new truths.
As Lewis and Clark, all of us here are pioneers. Sustainability is our horizon. There are answers all around us.
There are flying horses, too. It is up to us to drop stones from our towers to learn the difference.
As a final thought, I encourage your optimism that the intersection of different disciplines is not a collision. I encourage you to consider the close association between probability theory, double entry bookkeeping and art.
All three are dependent on the concept of proportionality, which was a revolutionary mathematical breakthrough in the 15th century. Leonardo da Vinci studied with the bookkeeper Luca Pacioli, who first applied the mathematics of proportion to counting inventory.
Before Pacioli, merchandizing was unchanged for thousands of years. Items coming in and going out were counted and recorded separately. Pacioli saw the opportunity to enrich his employers by counting in context—one bale in for one ducat out. The pile of inventory should be proportional to the original pile of ducats. This is the basis for the system of double-entry bookkeeping we use today.
Pacioli tutored da Vinci in the emerging mathematical solutions to proportionality. Da Vinci used the new math to gain his mastery of perspective. It is illustrated superbly by his famous "Last Supper," which allows the viewer the seemingly impossible opportunity to look up through the basketball net while at the same time looking down at the rim.
Such art proves that rationality need not be tedious, and that creativity allows even the most logical minds to soar.
In many ways, we are this generation's Corps of Discovery. We are already making the world a better place: not just for those who come after us, but for ourselves. And while our journey is not yet complete, an ocean of possibility is in sight.
It is time for each of us to inscribe in our journals "O, the joy."
Thank you.
