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Roland Clift · Angela Druckman Editors Taking Stock of Industrial Ecology Taking Stock of Industrial Ecology Roland Clift • Angela Druckman Editors Taking Stock of Industrial Ecology Editors Roland Clift Angela Druckman Centre for Environmental Strategy Centre for Environmental Strategy University of Surrey University of Surrey Guildford , UK Guildford , UK ISBN 978-3-319-20570-0 ISBN 978-3-319-20571-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-20571-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015957425 Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 . The book is published with open access at SpringerLink.com. Open Access This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. All commercial rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www. springer.com) Foreword Industrial ecology has come of age: it has its own journal, its own society and, in this volume, a fi rst full retrospective – ‘taking stock’ of its fi rst quarter of a century as a scientifi c fi eld. It is a remarkable achievement. To speak of society as having an industrial ecology would barely have been understood, as little as three decades ago. Early in the 1990s, I submitted an article for a newspaper with the phrase industrial ecology in it, only to have the editor send it back to me, corrected to industrial ‘economy’. At the time, we all knew exactly what the industrial economy was (or thought we did), but clearly industrial ‘ecol- ogy’ could only be a typo. When I explained that it was not, the editor deemed it best to remove the term, because ‘no one would understand it’. Two decades later industrial ecology is a clearer concept than industrial economy. The former even has its own Wikipedia entry; the latter, strangely, does not. Language is a curious commodity. Its malleability appears sometimes to be almost infi nite. Meanings change and mutate over time, as intellectual territory is created and destroyed. We can respond to this linguistic contortionism in several distinct ways: at least two of them are wrong. One of the wrong ways is to suppose that the meanings embedded in terms are not just fi xed but rightly so. We can spend a lot of time and energy defending the territory that language creates: defi le my meanings at your peril; they are part of my identity and protect my legitimacy in the world. This is a subtly disguised variant on G. E. Moore’s (1903) naturalistic fallacy: what is, is what ought to be; and woe betide offenders. The best way to avoid such an error is not to be too attached to the precision of language. Alternatively we can celebrate the loss of meaning in late, postmodern, advanced consumer capitalism, where nothing is any longer sacred, and defi nition counts for naught. Accepting this fl uidity of meaning, it is all too easy to allow ourselves to fl oat above rigour and defi ne away contestation. In fact, a cynical variation on this theme is to deliberately employ such tactics to create your own territory. Academics throughout the ages have fallen foul of this. Let us put two unfamiliar words together and build a career from it. Come on; it is easy: epigenetic precognition, categorical v vi Foreword hyper-glaciation, collateral proto-determinism. Anyone can play. Does it matter what it all means? Probably not if it gets my papers published. Alan Sokal (1996) famously highlighted the problem in a paper submitted to a leading sociological journal to see if they would ‘publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it fl attered the editors’ ideological pre- conceptions’. Sadly, the journal failed the test; they published it. But because they did, the sociological lesson still resonates: not every unfamiliar coupling of familiar words can be expected to last the course, let alone contribute to knowledge. The best way to avoid this error is to become a little more attached to the precision of language. Science must somehow chart a course between these two positions. How should we ensure that our linguistic efforts amount to more than academic birdsong? How can we develop intellectual territory which contributes meaningfully to understand- ing? It seems to me that successful scientifi c terminology has to have three specifi c characteristics. First, it must resonate with the cultural context into which it falls. Second, it must have integrity, allowing its proponents to convey a coherent and articulate vision. Finally, it must express humility, showing a preparedness to extend its boundaries, change its focus and, occasionally, when no longer needed, to expire gracefully in favour of new meanings, better understandings and clearer visions. Industrial ecology must at least partly have satisfi ed these conditions. For otherwise, there would be nothing after 25 years to take stock of, and, as this volume shows, there clearly is. Industrial ecology emerged at a time when detailed understandings of the eco- logical impacts of human activity were painfully thin. Business knew too little about their supply chains. Citizens understood too little of their footprints. Climate scien- tists had barely begun the extraordinary collaborative endeavour to chart the impacts and progress of anthropogenic climate change. Accounting systems, so rigorously developed for profi t and loss, were woefully lacking in the raw material basis of the modern economy. Industrial ecology, or something akin to it, was clearly missing, not just in our vocabulary but in our understanding. Its emergence resonated with a real need: to understand better the complex links between industrial systems, human society and the biosphere. Industrial ecology was resonant. Industrial ecology also puts forward a vision. From the outset the language con- veyed both an idea and an ideal. The idea was that industrial systems are also, in and of themselves, a part of the natural world and not apart from it. Human systems are irrevocably entwined in natural systems. Separation is impossible. Two simple questions form the basis of material fl ow analysis, one of industrial ecology’s most important tools. Where does it come from? Where does it go to? These two ques- tions are amongst the most powerful tools we have in our search to understand the material connection between the economy and the earth; and this connection lies at the heart of industrial ecology’s vision. But Frosch and Gallopoulos’s seminal 1989 paper in Scientifi c American went further than this. There was, in that early vision, an unashamedly normative compo- nent. Since industrial systems are inextricably connected to natural ecosystems, should they not seek to be more like natural ecosystems? Our economies preside Foreword vii over a largely linear material throughput. Raw materials are extracted from the earth, pass through the industrial metabolism (an early linguistic variant on indus- trial ecology) and are dumped unceremoniously into the environment afterwards, polluting our atmosphere, our oceans, our rivers and our soils. Nature appears to be more conservative than this: more circumspect in its operations, more responsive to the scarcity of available resources. Natural ecosystems tend to reuse, recycle, upcy- cle and, otherwise, re-employ materials, either in the same or in another ecosystem, prodigiously. Might it not be a good idea, if industrial systems were to do the same? At fi rst sight, this normative ideal looks suspiciously like Moore’s naturalistic fallacy all over again. It is not generally advisable to argue from what one observes in nature to what ought to be. But there is a subtle difference here. There were cer- tainly plenty of rather too linear ecosystems that collapsed entirely, their integrity damaged beyond repair, their species sometimes lost forever. What nature shows us then is not what ought to be, but what emerged through evolution as a successful adaptation in the face of scarce resources. To aim to adopt a successful strategy is not the same as accepting the naturalistic proposition. Industrial ecology’s norma- tive ideal amounts to a necessary (but not suffi cient) strategy for survival. Finally then, we come to the question of humility. Each new discipline convenes around a set of personal histories. The contributors to this volume are all serious scientists, who have dedicated their lives’ work to improving our understanding of human society and perhaps its chances of survival. None of them arrived in the world as fully formed industrial ecologists – if such a person could even be said to exist.

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