Paper of Joel Magnuson submitted for 'Buddhist Values in Business' workshop on 24-25 November 2012 in Brussels. More: www.bububrussels.blogspot.com

1. “Changing the Way We Approach Change”
Joel Magnuson
Presentation for the workshop: “Buddhist Values in Business and its Potential for
Europe”
Brussels, Belgium
24-25 November, 2012
There is a story that goes around in Yoga communities about an old woman who
lost her sewing needle. She was looking frantically in the grass and shrubs in front
of her home when a man came by and asked her if he could help. After they looked
for some time and with no success, the man asked, “Where exactly were you when
you dropped it?” The woman replied, “I was inside the house.” Surprised the man
asked, “Then why we looking out here? We’ll never find it here” The woman said,
“Well, it’s just too dark in there.”
Perhaps many of us in societies everywhere are like this woman. While we are
increasingly struck by the twin crises of global warming and resource depletion,
we seem to be groping around for solutions in places where they will never be
found; all the while holding steadfast to our established and habitual way of doing
things that are, and remain, heavily dependent on fossil fuels.
The evidence is striking now that global warming and global resource depletion are
current, real time, anthropogenic events.
The ravages of climate instability and resource depletion are now palpable and
visible: high energy costs, summer droughts and crop failures, soaring food prices,
the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico a couple of years ago that spread in the water
like some kind of giant sea monster, radioactive waters surrounding Fukushima
Daiichi, and now, of course, we’re witnesses to the nightmarish images of the fury
unleashed by Hurricane Sandy… just like Irene before that… and Katrina before
that…

2. In the spirit of the theme of this conference, I would like to talk a little bit about the
systemic relationships among these things: between the way we act in the world
economically and the environmental crises that are staring us squarely in the face.
The words “economy” and “ecology” both have a prefix derived from the Greek
word, oecos, meaning “household” or perhaps in a broader sense, “habitat.” This
common linguistic origin implies that how we pursue our livelihoods and how we
interact with our natural environment are inseparable. Economic activity will
always have an environmental impact—however benign or pathological, and
environmental changes will always have an impact on the conditions of our
economy—again, however benign or pathological.
When we talk about economic activity and our daily routines of producing and
consuming things, or as people say, “business as usual,” we are talking about a
global network of interdependent economies that are powered primarily by oil,
coal, and natural gas. With each round of production and consumption, we send
more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and this creates higher planetary ambient
temperatures. Even what seem like very slight, incremental temperature increases
are creating systems conditions of drought, crop failures, and climate instability;
conditions which we could suitably identify as a kind of environmental backlash
that has wrought severe damage and havoc on the Atlantic coast and will cost tens
of billions to repair.
And with each round of production and consumption we use up more oil. Because
of its extreme energy density, liquid mobility, and comparative low cost, this is our
paramount energy resource. I heard a geologist say that a barrel of oil is the energy
equivalent of 12 people working full time for a year. So even at $150 per barrel it
is still practically free energy. And this is precisely why every economy in the
world has fashioned itself in the image of cheap and abundant oil.
By the way, the reason I said “$150 per barrel” is because that is what oil prices
spiked up to between 2002 and 2007, and that spike sent shockwaves through the
global economy and was one of the principle causes of the Great Recession, an
economic crisis from which we have yet to fully recover.

3. In the years to come, oil prices are certain to climb back up again. The reason we
can be certain of that is because we have entered into that very important historic
moment in time at which global oil production peaks out and begins it inevitable
decline. The Peak Oil moment.
Critics of this peak oil argument will want to squabble over this or that detail about
when oil production will or did actually peak. But pinpointing the exact month of
peak production is largely a trivial academic argument. It could be last year, today,
or five years from now, but all of that will be decided by future historians.
Here’s what we know: Geologists anticipate that by 2040, U.S. oil supplies will
have descended to 90% below its production peak that occurred in 1970, and world
oil production will have descended to at least 63% below its current production
peak. Given this and our constant drive for economic growth, there is no question
that oil will get progressively more scarce and more expensive.
Also, venturing down the downside of Peak Oil is not going to be the same as it
was going up the upside. It will not only diminish in quantity, it will steadily
diminish in quality compared to the last fifty to hundred years of oil production.
Put it this way, when oil companies have to pony up billions in capital in order to
drill for oil under the ocean and cook it out of tar sands, this is a pretty good sign
that the cheap, conventional stuff—you know the stuff that just squirts out of the
ground—is close to gone, and we don’t have to wait until oil prices hit $300 per
barrel to draw that conclusion. Since the price of oil is the benchmark for energy
prices overall, energy in general is going to get much more expensive. And the
higher the price of energy, the greater the shock waves it will send through the
global economy and therefore, the more significant of a disruption to business as
usual it will be.
Despite this, the corporate institutions that dominate our current global system of
production, finance, and commerce are driven by an imperative for endless growth
and expansion. Now there’s a logical reason for this growth imperative, and it is
not just pressures from growth in human population.
The people who manage these companies and the trillions in investment capital are
bound by a fiduciary responsibility to generate returns for their investors. Whether
in our 401s, mutual funds, or bank accounts, we all expect our financial

4. instruments to generate compounding returns. To achieve that, however, businesses
have to sell more products and expand their markets, this means finding more
consumers with the purchasing power to buy… thus more production more
consumption more production –on an endless treadmill of exponential economic
growth.
Even at modest economic growth rates estimated by the Social Security
Administration of 2.2 % annually, that would mean that our $15 trillion dollar US
economy would double every 33 years. At that growth rate, a newborn today would
see our economy grow to nearly the size of the entire global economy at retirement
age.
So, when we talk of the intersection of the economy and the environment, we are
confronted with a troubling scenario: our economic institutions are programmed
for ongoing growth, but the carrying capacity of our planet cannot sustain it.
It’s not hard to imagine how this contradiction is going to play out. Nations
everywhere are embarking on a mad scramble to find other sources of energy. The
most likely scenario will be to ramp up the use of the cheaper and more abundant
fossils: coal and natural gas. But as we increase our consumption of these fuels to
replace oil, we will truncate their lifespans and cause them to peak out within a
couple of decades. Energy-hungry eyes are looking once again toward nuclear
power despite the ominous dangers associated with radioactive waste. Regardless
of how convinced we are that it is safe energy, ramping up nuclear power will only
hasten yet another systems condition: peak uranium.
As we continue with this scramble for energy, the carbon pollution created by
burning coal and gas and the dangers associated with highly toxic nuclear waste
will increase proportionally. And once we have finished with all this and consumed
these resources to exhaustion, then we will end up right back where we started:
facing extreme energy scarcity. Only by that time the world will be a far more
unstable, toxic, and dangerous place to live.
Reflecting on this inevitability, investment banker and oil industry analyst Jeff
Rubin in his book titled, Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil
and the End of Globalization, 2009, Rubin warns that limited supplies of oil and
virtually all other resources are binding global economic expansion like a rope that

5. is tightening around every economy in the world. Proximity will matter again, the
global division of labor will become increasingly obsolete, and we’ll all have to
become much more locally self-reliant. Rubin isn’t only one saying this. Richard
Heinberg, Rob Hopkins, Bill McKibben, and virtually every serious oil geologist
and energy physicist are drawing the same conclusion.
So, if this is what is to in store for us, then I say it would make good sense to start
working on re-localizing our economies straight away… and let’s get it right this
time.
Now inevitably in these conversations, there arises the topic of technology and
alternative energy. Of course, when we confront complex problems of this nature,
technology has to be part of the solution. But technology is always fostered within
a specific institutional context. Since our dominant institutions are fixed with this
economic growth imperative, then technological development will serve this
imperative.
Consider this. Over the last few decades, the U.S. economy was supposedly
shifting to a resource-light “information economy.” Computers and the internet
made us more efficient and were supposed to help us save on material resources,
but the result was the opposite. During this period, the consumption of materials in
general in North America increased by 54 percent: from 6.6 to 10.1 billion metric
tons. As this region’s population only increased by 35 percent during those same
years, this means that material consumption per person has steadily risen.
Information technology served to pick up the pace of globalization and economic
expansion such that consumers were able to wolf down pieces of our planet in
unusually large chunks. Technological progress makes us more efficient, and the
more efficient we become at producing and consuming things, the less costly they
become, and therefore the more we produce and consume. This is our way.
Also, as we download and store PDF files, send jpegs back and forth, watch
streaming videos, trade stocks or pay bills online, update Facebook pages, and so
on, many of us perhaps do not have a clear sense that this digital activity has a
physical component and burns prodigious amounts of energy. This online activity
is processed and stored in about 3 million data centers worldwide. These data
centers are essentially warehouses packed with high-powered servers that process
trillions of gigabytes of data and burn up about 30 billion watts of electricity every

6. year, and most of that comes from coal powered utilities. Moreover, these centers
get hot and are cooled with industrial cooling systems, and run diesel auxiliary
generators around the clock to hedge against power failures. According to MIT
graduate and inventor Saul Griffith, “The Internet’s energy and carbon footprints
now probably exceed those of air travel…perhaps by as much as a factor of two.”
Yes, technology will be an important dimension to change and progress, but only if
we first create new and quite different institutions to direct its development.
As for renewable energy, like technology, it will have to be part of the solution.
The problem, however, is scale and density. Unlike ready-to-go fossil energy,
renewable energy such as solar, wind, geothermal, algae ponds, etc., is very low
density and has to be manufactured so that we can harness and use it in the same
way we do oil and coal. This requires enormous, complex, and expensive
infrastructure. And because we only have a very, very small amount of this
infrastructure relative to our overall energy consumption profile, we would have to
aggregate trillions of capital to build it up to the scale with which we use fossil
fuels.
And here’s Catch 22, that capital can only be aggregated on our current fossil fuel
energy base that is beginning its descent; not to mention the fact that we would
have double the size of our economy every 33 years. In other words, ramping up
renewable energy to the scale with which we use fossils and to carry the mantle of
endless growth is simply not possible.
So, as we begin to see and feel the reality of this energy descent, we’ll have to
make some hard choices. The choices we make today as we adapt to mounting
scarcity may be the most important historical events of the 21st century. We can
choose to be forward thinking and work actively toward positive changes in a spirit
of celebration and make this transformation in ways that are healthy, ecologically
sound, economically stable, and just. Or, we can choose to be complacent, to
continue treating our world as an infinite resource pipeline and an infinite waste
dump, to brace ourselves for endless conflicts over dwindling resources, and to
trudge through one debilitating economic or environmental crisis after another,
pushing all of humanity through a long historical period of decline. This would be
a tragic downfall for humankind, but the ultimate cause of our downfall would not
be these crises themselves. The ultimate cause would be our refusal to deal with

7. the obvious fact that the Oil Age—this age of seemingly infinite abundance—is
approaching its end.
We often say that our desire for high material standards of living is to provide for
our families—our children. The cruel irony is that our children and grandchildren
will be the first generations to experience the full brunt of the economic and
environmental damage we are doing now. That is, unless we do something to
change that.
If so, what do we do exactly?
For a start, if we recognize that the imperative for endless growth is institutional,
then we can see that institutional change has to be part of the solution as well as
technology. Economic institutions--corporations, banks, market systems—script
our economic behavior with rules, norms, and shared strategies… they create dos
and don’ts of our economic activity. If we seek to truly adapt to the profound
changes that will accompany the end of the Oil Age, then we will have no choice
but to build new institutions that will script our economic behavior with entirely
different rules, norms, and shared strategies—particularly at the local level.
In my forthcoming book, The Approaching Great Transformation, I write about
citizens, entrepreneurs, and community leaders who are doing just that. B Lab’s
Benefit Corporations, Permaculture Credit Union, The Evergreen Cooperatives in
Cleveland, and the list goes on…
These people are developing new and very different economic institutions in their
communities that are centered not on endless growth and expansion, but on self-
reliance, ecological permanence, stability, and a celebration of human creativity. I
foresee that in time these small institutional developments will be the source that
will help guide us toward wholly new economic systems.
These institutional changes need to formed on a deeper and more solid
philosophical foundation. Accordingly I turn to economist and philosopher, EF
Schumacher.
For Schumacher, the dubious claims of orthodox economics is an extension of a
much deeper crisis, or defilement, of societies’ innermost convictions—our

8. metaphysical core. These convictions are the center from which the ideologies
surrounding all scientific disciplines emanate like rays of the sun. For Schumacher,
this core, or what he called the “eye of the heart,” was traditionally grounded in the
teachings found in all the great spiritual traditions, such as Christianity, Judaism,
Islam, and Buddhism. In these traditions, this core is cultivated from not just from
knowledge, but from deep insight and wisdom. For Schumacher, the “foul is fair”
maxim is the antithesis of wisdom.
The eye of the heart, filled with this insight and wisdom, informs the mind and
liberates the soul. It is that which gives the spiritually informed person the power
to recognize and discern truth from fact. In all the great spiritual traditions, love,
compassion, reverence for beauty and nature were elevated above the world of
facts. For Schumacher spiritually informed wisdom is what allows us to live with
each other and with our environment and to develop ethical principles to guide our
behavior and institutional development.
Schumacher was concerned that the ideas grounded in the great spiritual traditions
have been gradually purged from this core and replaced with what he refers to as
“materialistic scientism.” In the scientific community, spiritual traditions have been
largely dismissed as authoritarian megalomania or preachy dogma and have been
replaced by the mechanistic constructs of the 19th century. This is particularly so in
economics. For Schumacher, the result was that the metaphysical core became
filled with cynicism and life-destroying and soul-destroying confusion. For him,
this is a kind of spiritual emptiness and a belief system that leads people away from
compassion toward cynical axioms of self-interest, survival of the fittest, and
predatory competition. These axioms further justify violence, aggression, and a
self-aggrandizing culture fraught with delusions of power and grandeur.
In his view, the meta-economic vision of materialistic scientism blinded the eye of
the heart and left us adrift without insight and wisdom. He admits that such a
vision is appropriate for understanding the workings of the inorganic world and
engineering, or what he calls, “science for manipulation.” But it is wholly
inappropriate to humanity and its capacity for self-reflection and spirituality. By
holding ourselves in a paradigm that consists of moving, mechanical parts we are
mirroring ourselves as inanimate objects—we have lost our understanding of what
it means to be human. By doing so, we undermine our ability for individual and
cultural development.

9. As Schumacher saw it, we are destroying the land, climate and ourselves not
because our technology is flawed, but because the innermost convictions that we
hold to be unassailable have been defiled. He is critical of the core concepts that
have solidified into our metaphysical center and this center is what informs and
guides all forms of inquiry. More specifically, for Schumacher, materialism has
purged wisdom and higher-level truths and has allowed our cultures to be debased
with the idolatry of wealth, fashion, self-aggrandizement, and technological
gadgetry. From this core emanates a vicious ecological attitude toward our natural
habitat that is nothing more than a quarry for exploitation—a transgression against
future generations.
Schumacher concludes, “The idea that a civilisation could sustain itself on the
basis of such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity.
It means conducting economic affairs of man as if people really did not matter at
all.” Schumacher saw this as a crisis of how we perceive the world. If so, then the
solution has to be, at least in part, in changing our worldview. If through our own
efforts we can change our habits of thought, we could break from our attachment to
continual growth and self-interest. With a different mindset perhaps people can go
about building new systems.
In the Buddhist tradition, such transgressions are on the surface of a much deeper
existential crisis of defilement: the core defilements of greed, aggression, and
delusion. These defilements are the root causes of human suffering.
The first Noble Truth of Buddhist teachings is to recognize the existence of human
suffering. I would like to contend that part of this process of recognition is to open
our eyes and see that these core defilements have become institutionalized and
woven into the cultural fabric of modern societies—particularly in the US, but
Europe and other places are not far behind.
Institutionalized greed, aggression, and delusion are rampant on Wall Street,
saturated as it is with speculation and ethical opprobrium. But even in more subtle
ways as in the expectation most people have that their personal investments should
always grow… seemingly callous and uncaring attitudes towards the suffering we
causing and will cause future generations… and the endless contortions and
pathologies spawned by media advertising.

10. In the days ahead, I hope to learn more from you, my learned colleagues about how
a true Buddhist practice, a mindful practice, can help guide us away from these
defilements and toward healthful, peaceful living.
With a clear and quiet mind I hope we can all become proactive in our
communities and seek:
*To transform households away from the conventional role of acquisitive and
obsessive consumers to become integral parts of an ecologically and economically
stable community.
*To transform financial institutions away from speculation and the expectation that
financial systems are always going to pay off exponential returns; to restore
financial institutions to their original and core function of providing financial
services for local development.
*To transform business models away from growth obsessed, profit maximizing
corporations to social enterprises that exist to provide for the needs of the
community.
*To transform markets and market exchanges away from a nexus of greed and
speculation to community centers in which people not only make necessary
exchanges of money, goods and services, but are also are the centers of vibrant
local cultures.
*To transform local governments away from the conventional agencies that are
captured by moneyed interests to agencies that are democratically accountable to
their communities.
*To transform labor organizations away from conventional models of exclusive
self-interest to the stewards of craft traditions and the joys of good work.
With these transformations, re-localized communities will become the sprouts of
new life and healthy agitation that will evolve toward systemic change. If
communities everywhere can become more self-reliant and empowered in this way,
citizens can press upward more strongly from below for better national legislation
and accountability from their government.

11. To do this… to really step outside the circle with vision and aspiration and to
become the true agents of change for the better is not going to be easy. There will
be obstacles, skeptics, and cynics. Like Diogenes who went out in broad daylight
with a lantern looking for an honest man, there will always be the smirking cynics
questioning our motives, sneering about so much idealistic dreaming and so on.
But it has always been this way. Hasn’t it always been the white crows and black
swans who have lead the evolutionary shifts in history? Galileo, Vincent Van
Gough, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Susan B Anthony, Martin Luther King. Many
were scorned in their lifetimes, but remembered after.
And besides, what choice do we have. Eventually we’ll come to realize that
dragging on with business usual is not really a choice at all.
This is no time for cynicism, but it’s the perfect time to dream up new ways of
living. This is no time for predatory banking, but it is the perfect time to help
organize a new financial cooperative in your community that is created to provide
badly needed services. This is no time for building another corporate empire to
dominate the global economy, but it is the perfect time to create a modern-day
marketplace as community center with regular fairs, workshops, meetings, poetry
slams, live music, great food, handyman labor, finance, medical services, fabric,
and so on.
This is also no time for more economic growth for growth’s sake, but it is the
perfect time to create a new commonwealth comprised of enterprises that provide
for our communities because we need them for mindful living, and it is the time to
give our ecosystem a chance to breathe again.