The Meaning of Social-Environmental Sustainability - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 123

process, I worked with employees of the Slovakian Federal Forest Service.
One man, the Chief Forester, then near the end of his career, had been in
charge of the forest during the days of the Communists. As I was about to
leave Slovakia, the Chief Forester took me aside and said, with great emo-
tion: “Chris, if I learned one thing from you, it is that the forest is sacred—
not the plan. Thank you.” With that, this man reversed the thinking of his
entire 40-year career. I have seldom encountered such courage, humility, and
dignity.
We all need such courage, humility, and dignity if we are to be worthy
trustees of our home planet as a biological living trust, because a living trust
is like a promise—something made today but about tomorrow. In making a
promise, we relinquish a bit of personal freedom with the bond of our word.
In keeping that promise, we forfeit a little more freedom of action in that we
limit our actual behavior. The reason people hesitate to make promises lies
in the uncertainty of circumstances on the morrow. Helping to quell the fear
of uncertainty is the purpose of a living trust.
Though a trustee may receive management expenses from the trust, the
basic income from the trust, as well as the principal, must be used for the
good of beneficiaries. In our example, the healthy and diverse forest is the
capital, and under appropriate conditions, some trees can be considered inter-
est on the capital to be used by current generations. In our capitalist system,
however, natural resources are assumed to be income or revenue, rather than
capital. Capitalism in practice has a way of drawing down capital and thus
precluding options. This is a complete irrationality even by its own internal
methodology, which holds that capital is to be preserved and enhanced, and
not dissipated. That said, a true trustee is obligated to seek ways and means
to maintain or enhance the capital of the trust—not to diminish it. Like an
apple tree, one can enjoy the fruit thereof but should not destroy the tree.
For economics to survive throughout the 21st century as a constructive
and useful profession, it must accept the moral essence of a biological living
trust. It means we must think in terms of potential productivity instead of
constant production. It must also advance beyond resisting change as a con-
dition to be avoided (clinging to the current, linear, reductionist, mechanical
worldview of competitive exploitation in an effort to fulfill the Growth Ethic)
and embracing change as a dynamic process filled with exciting opportuni-
ties for the present and the future—the beneficiaries.
In a biological living trust, the behavior of a system depends on how
individual parts interact as functional components of the whole—not on
what each isolated part is doing. Thus, to understand a system, we need
to understand how it fits into the even larger system of which it is a part.
Consequently, we will move from the primacy of the parts to the primacy
of the whole, from insistence on absolute knowledge as truth to relatively
coherent interpretations of constantly changing knowledge, from attempt-
ing to solve old problems with old thinking to creating new concepts tai-
lored specifically to the current, changing social-environmental context, and