Read an Excerpt
Quantified
Redefining Conservation for the Next Economy
By Joe Whitworth ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Joe Whitworth
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-614-1
CHAPTER 1
A New Conservation for a New Era
Imagine walking into a job interview at a major manufacturing company. You've already gotten the tour of the administrative offices and are surprised by the absence of modern technology, let alone the large stacks of papers heaped on employees' desks. You've just completed the interview, answering all of the CEO's questions. Now it's your turn to ask some questions.
"Of all the widgets you manufacture," you begin, "which have been the most and least profitable?"
"I'm not sure," the CEO says.
You try to hold back your amazement. "Who are your biggest competitors?" you ask.
"Oh, there's a handful," she says, her voice trailing off.
You shift in your seat, trying to hide your discomfort. "What are your long-term goals for the company, and what threats could undermine your success?"
"We've been meaning to develop a business plan. It's just that we've been so busy managing our day-to-day affairs."
In today's world, it's hard to picture a business of any kind making these mistakes. What twenty-first-century corporation could survive if it neglected to define its objectives or analyze its progress? How long would it take for a business to tank if it failed to gauge market trends?
Yet this is exactly the way we approach our environmental problems. We lack real awareness of the situation; we don't fully understand the current state of our natural areas or what our actions might mean for their future. We don't precisely define our goals for improving the environment or use innovation and technology to help us achieve them. Nor do we adequately analyze our progress to make sure we're obtaining quantifiable results. It's like driving without a dashboard. We don't know how fast we're moving or whether we'll ever reach our destination.
The consequences of the current approach are devastating. Despite well-intended efforts by numerous environmentalists, policymakers, and philanthropists, the health of planet Earth continues to deteriorate at a startling rate. Sure, the environmental movement has won many notable battles. Yet, over time, the significance of these wins has declined to the point where we are now rapidly losing the war. Although today's environmental realities have changed, modern environmentalism keeps plugging away with the same outdated toolkit, and it is reaping an ever smaller return on its investment.
So how has the situation changed since the dawn of the environmental movement? Consider the following:
• World population has doubled to 7.2 million.
• U.S. population has grown by more than 55 percent to 316 million.
• The amount of pesticides used in the United States has tripled to 1.1 billion pounds per year.
• The number of worldwide dead zones has spiraled from roughly 30 to more than 500.
• The total number of freshwater species has declined by 50 percent.
• Global Atlantic salmon catches have fallen by 80 percent.
• Total acreage of U.S. wetlands has decreased by more than one third.
• The amount of U.S. land consumed by urban development has doubled.
• Annual carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming have risen by more than 80 percent.
If a time machine landed a human being from 1970 on today's planet, this passenger would find himself thrown into an almost unrecognizable world. The planet we live on today is dramatically different from that of a generation ago, when the modern environmental movement was born. To address today's realities, we need a radically different approach, not just an extension of the one we've used in the past.
To put it bluntly, we need to wake up and smell the future — because it's already here. We have entered a new environmental era, one with far more daunting problems than we faced 50 years ago. Yet we continue to muddle along like the manufacturing company described at the beginning of this chapter, doing things the same old way, failing to adapt to the new reality before us.
Adapting to the new reality requires implementing bold, innovative approaches that are a true match for the severity of the problems we face. It also means being adamant about obtaining results. For the environmental movement to continue to be relevant, it needs to remake itself into a more agile force that continually reevaluates the current situation and then adapts its practices to achieve the highest possible return on its conservation efforts.
It's not just environmentalists who need to change. Governments and philanthropists working on these issues need to get serious about demanding results. And agriculturalists and businesses need to recognize that it's in their own interest to conserve natural resources on which their livelihoods depend. If we're to survive a future in which 10 billion humans call planet Earth home, we must all work to solve our problems, and we need to begin now.
The good news is that, with the right focus and tools, we can achieve a more resilient environment. Think about all the human and financial capital that has been poured into the economy since the end of World War II. The resulting economic growth has been astounding. From 1950 to 2011, the gross world product — the combined gross national product of all countries in the world — has mushroomed from $7 trillion to $77 trillion. These staggering numbers have come about because we've made financial gain our priority and consequently have spent the past several decades perfecting a set of practices that ensure businesses achieve the highest results.
Quantified conservation is about applying that same laser focus to achieve similar gains for the environment. It's about leveraging the best practices used by today's successful businesses and social sector organizations to overhaul the state of our natural resources. And it's about embracing the same sophisticated set of tools to bring about measurable improvements that ensure both a healthy environment and a thriving economy for decades to come. Simply put, quantified conservation is a twenty-first-century approach to solving the twenty-first- century problems that confront us. It offers a framework built on the following five principles, all of which the business world relies on for its success:
• Situational awareness to provide an objective understanding of the real- time environmental problems we face
• Bold outcomes that define the results we seek
• Innovation and technology to achieve our desired outcomes at the pace and scale needed for success
• Data and analytics to prioritize those environmental projects that have the most impact, measure our results, and monitor our progress
• Gain, which becomes the threshold question for public, private, and philanthropic investment by tying every dollar to measurable net benefits achieved for the environment
Although the chapters that follow are about using quantified conservation to improve the future of water, these same principles can be used to tackle any environmental problem. Whether the goal is saving our forests, restoring the diversity of wildlife, or reversing the effects of climate change, quantified conservation can address our environmental problems with far greater precision and sophistication. It's that kind of focus that will be needed if we're going to maintain a healthy environment in our twenty-first-century world — one in which we're bumping up against the limits of our natural resources with greater frequency and severity.
Situational Awareness
There's an old adage that says you never step into the same river twice. Yesterday's water that flowed past the point at which you're standing has long since moved on. In the same way, our world is always changing. The pace of change in the twenty-first century is incredibly fast and continues to accelerate. To get an accurate pulse of the current situation, we need to continually monitor it so we can constantly reevaluate where we stand and quickly make the necessary changes.
Companies that don't do this well end up losing market share or eventually go bankrupt. Consider the Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry, a company that revolutionized mobile devices. Just a few years ago, Black-Berries were so popular that users called them "CrackBerries" because of their addictiveness. Yet BlackBerry failed to keep pace with market trends. Having built its success on keyboard-equipped mobile devices, the company failed to anticipate the consumer desire for touchscreens. It lacked the agility to stay ahead of the competition, and in 2013 it was forced to sell because of its declining financial position.
Now consider a company like Apple, which went from near bankruptcy to billions within a decade. With a focus on out-of-the box concepts ranging from the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad, Apple anticipated trends in the rapidly changing market and introduced a chain of must-have products that mirrored its "think different" motto. The key was consistently adapting itself. Rather than resting on its laurels, Apple continued to gauge the market and create new innovations that customers wanted. As Apple's Steve Jobs put it, "If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next."
The unfortunate reality is that modern environmentalism has gone the way of the BlackBerry. With its focus on advocacy and litigation, the environmental movement initially hit some huge home runs. Yet our streams and rivers are now in many ways worse off than when the Clean Water Act was passed nearly a half century ago.
Today, more than half of the 3.7 million miles of streams in the United States are polluted or damaged. Take the Colorado River, for example. This once mighty river system that provides water to 40 million Americans has lost so much water that it now rarely reaches the ocean. Likewise, the iconic Mississippi River has become so polluted that it's created a massive "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico that's literally choking out fish and other marine life. Unfortunately, dysfunctional rivers such as the Colorado and the Mississippi are now the rule in America, not the exception. Simply put, water is in trouble. And when water is in trouble, everything is in trouble, including the economy, the environment, and life itself.
With so many environmental groups and policymakers working to protect U.S. rivers, how can our watersheds be headed for crisis? It's not that Conservation 1.0 hasn't had its successes. After all, it brought about the U.S. Clean Water Act, which has virtually eliminated point source pollution — or pollution discharged into rivers directly from factory and sewage plant pipes. Thanks to these early advocacy efforts, we no longer have fires burning on rivers, as on Ohio's Cuyahoga River. That was a huge victory, and today's rivers are certainly better off for it.
Yet, in the meantime, a new set of problems have emerged. The major water pollution problem we now face is nonpoint source pollution — mainly fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides from agricultural production that seep into the water from multiple points along rivers and streams. Add to that skyrocketing population and an advanced economy, both of which are putting unprecedented pressure on our limited water supplies. And add to that the worsening megadroughts and intense flooding created by climate change, which are making our water supplies less and less predictable.
For The Freshwater Trust, the realization that the return on our conservation effort was diminishing came in 2002, when I completed an analysis to better understand our successes and failures. We had begun as a fish advocacy organization, and we had made some important wins along the way. We had successfully listed several of the first Pacific salmon under the Endangered Species Act. We pioneered the first water trust in the nation, using the model of the land trust to protect streams and rivers. And we had established a reputation as a small but effective conservation group.
Yet increasingly, it felt like we were fighting over commas in fish management policies. We were no longer moving the needle for wild fish. In fact, we were barely holding the line against fish declines.
We saw the imperative to redirect our focus from fish advocacy to river restoration because that's where the metrics showed we could achieve the greatest gains for the environment. As it turns out, the decision was spot on. As we continue to analyze our progress, it's clear that we are having far more impact by adopting this new focus, with the potential for even greater impact in the future.
Situational analysis starts at the organizational level. It's essential that environmentalists, policymakers, and philanthropists — and anyone who plays a role in protecting our watersheds — continually step back to assess the current situation and evaluate the return they're getting on their conservation investment.
At the project level, too, we must understand the changing situation of specific river systems in order to fully understand what must be done to fix them. Soaring population, climate change, changing land use, and economic advances are altering our rivers and streams all the time. How well and how quickly we react matters. Being situationally aware requires continually monitoring the state of our streams and rivers to obtain an objective understanding of the present reality. Situational awareness at both the organizational and project levels is a critical first step if we are to address the magnitude of the freshwater issues we face.
Outcomes
Once we understand the state of our watersheds, we can then establish concrete goals. Given the current rate of deterioration, we cannot tinker our way to success. The outcomes must be clear and ambitious — and at first blush, they should sound unreasonable. As escalating population puts increased demand on our rivers and climate change creates unpredictable water supplies, incremental improvements won't be enough.
In setting outcomes, we can learn a lot from Google's Larry Page, who believes that incremental improvements of 10 percent don't do much beyond furthering the status quo. Instead, what Page expects of his employees is that they create products and services that are 10 times better than the competition. As he told Wired magazine, "Thousand-percent improvement requires rethinking problems entirely, exploring the edges of what's technically possible, and having a lot more fun in the process."
In the same way, we need to set our sights high. We need to establish bold outcomes that demand thousand-percent improvements over the status quo. In short, we need to live by the gospel of 10x. This may seem like a tall order for the environment, but it's standard practice among the world's most successful companies.
Take Amazon, for example. In 2004, the company set a goal for its series of Kindle e-book readers to make available "every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds." Setting a clear and ambitious outcome enabled Amazon to establish a well-defined focus, and, not surprisingly, the results have followed. Today there are more than 1 million books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs available on the Kindle under 60 seconds. Kindle sales continue to surge and are expected to reach a whopping $5.5 billion by 2015.
So what outcome has traditional environmentalism set for itself? For the most part, it's been to stop things from getting worse. The vast majority of money and effort isn't being applied to undoing the harm already created or making positive gains happen but to stop further environmental damage from happening. Imagine Amazon or any other business establishing for itself a goal this timid. No improvement, no innovation — just holding the line. It wouldn't take long before a company would be trounced by its competitors.
As can be seen from all the black lines in figure 1.1, damaged rivers abound in the United States. With more than half the miles of our streams and rivers already in trouble, simply holding the line amounts to a weak outcome. To make real gains for the environment, we need to change those black lines to a healthy blue. We need to take rivers that have already been damaged and restore them to their natural state so that we have enough clean freshwater for both a sustainable economy and a sustainable environment.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Quantified by Joe Whitworth. Copyright © 2015 Joe Whitworth. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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