Industrial Ecology: IndieEco

Indie Rock - doing it your way. IndieEco - doing it your way with Nature.
Industrial Ecology is also known as Natural Capitalism, Systems Thinking, or even Biomimicry. Although the purists would be quick to point out the differences between these, the approach is the same: look at the big picture, and manage a system without creating problems somewhere else. Systems Theory is concerned with the understanding of synergistic complexity (things that are complicated, and manage to help other complicated things out) and the design of systems that produce desirable synergies. This is best summarised in the principles of Natural Capitalism, that Life creates conditions conducive to life:

• Harnessing advanced resource efficiency to create profits by eliminating the need to pay for extraction at one end and pollution at the other
• Eliminating the concept of waste by redesigning industry along biological lines, closing loops in the flows of materials, and not producing persistent toxins - Biomimicry
• Changing the business model to encourage these two shifts by rewarding the provider and the customer for doing more and better with less for longer – Flow of services
• Reversing planetary destruction by restoring natural capital. Any good capitalist reinvests in the capital that is in short supply

Industrial Ecology, as a philosophy , is very useful, but as a Methodology still needs a lot of work. Books that have been helpful are listed below.

• Hawkins P, Lovins AB, Lovins LH, 1999, Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution. London: Earthscan Pub.
• Dostal E, Cloete A, Jaros G, 2005, Biomatrix: A systems Approach to Organisational and Societal Change, Cape Town: Mega Digital
• Ehrenfeld JR, 2008, Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming our Consumer Culture, London: Yale University Press

As a tool, the trashing of conventional disciplinary silo's are important - the name for this is the awkward word, Transdisciplinarity. The working form of Transdisciplinarity not only requires a mash-up of university research departments, but also a healthy mix of research and all other aspects of society: the public - from all backgrounds, all forms of business, politics, marketing, the works. Communication is the biggest challenge, and the 'philosophy/methodology' issue that trips Industrial Ecology up becomes a threat too. Manfred Max-Neef's writings has been most useful, but this is still a difficult area to work in.

• Max-Neef M,2005, Foundations of transdisciplinarity, Ecological Economics, 53 (1), 5-16.

In the IndieEco part of the PhD project, technological transformation is rapidly converging with social transformation. Watch the blog for musings on this, it's a tough topic.