Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
tions' interface with the environment. As Richard White points out, many
environmental historians still view nature as something very separate from
culture and society. If you are a historian and you study the environment,
you don't study people.That is changing now. For many environmental his-
torians, however, business is still a sort of black box, a dark and evil capital-
ist entity, not a part of the natural world, not something environmental
historians need to study, and better left to urban and business historians and
historians of technology.
2
The concept of industrial ecology is based on a completely different
vision of business's relationship to the natural world. It is founded on the
recognition that business and nature are inseparable parts of a single inter-
active “industrial ecosystem.” Biologists examining natural ecosystems
observe that in nature living organisms are knit together with one another
and with the natural world, drawing nourishment from the bodies and
wastes of other organisms as well as from the water and minerals in the soil
and the energy produced by the sun. So it is for industrial ecologists.They
see that business is also woven into the natural world. Business enterprises
feed on the natural resources found in the earth, on energy ultimately
derived from the sun, wind, or geological forces deep within the earth, and
on the manufactured inputs of their industrial supply chains. They return
their wastes to the earth, the seas, and the atmosphere.
Industrial ecologists like to use flow diagrams to explain this because it
helps convey this systems understanding of the way industry and nature
relate to each other. Figure 1 is a flow diagram of a simplified industrial
ecosystem. It focuses on the materials and energy flows that course through
an industrial ecosystem as goods are manufactured.The flows start with the
extraction of natural resources from the earth. From here materials and
energy flow into the industrial sphere, where they are converted into the
inputs used to manufacture products and then into the products themselves.
In this form they are then distributed to and used by consumers, who ulti-
mately dispose of them, returning the materials and energy that composed
the goods back into the earth.
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Figure 2 illustrates this idea in more detail. It is so complex that it is dif-
ficult to take in quickly, but it is worth giving a good look because it graph-
ically conveys the fact that the industrial ecosystems encompass all aspects
of the interface between industrial society and the natural world.The parts
of the diagram labeled “Households & 'Personal Consumption' ” and
