The Logic of Revolutions

The New Economy is both not new and new. It continues industrial-age patterns, yet it also may hold the seeds for a truly postindustrial world. As such, it brings us to a crossroads. We can either continue moving ever more rapidly in a direction that cannot be sustained, or we can change. Perhaps no time in history has afforded greater possibilities for a collective change in direction.

"Creative engineers understand the role of constraints", says Elter of his Lakes experience."Design engineers always deal with constraints: time, weight, operability. These are all real. The extraordinary creativity of [our] team had its source in recognizing a different constraint—the constraint of nature, to produce no waste. Zero to landfill is an uplifting constraint. It's worth going after. It's not manmade". Constraint and creativity are always connected. No artist paints on an infinite canvas. The artist understands that rather than just being limits, constraints can be freeing, especially when those constraints that have genuine meaning are recognized. What if product and business designers everywhere recognized that their constraints came from living systems? What if they adhered to the simple dictums: waste equals food; support nature's regenerative processes; live off energy income, not principal; and, borrowing from Elter's team, do it for the children. As occurred with the Lakes engineers, might this not free everyone's creativity in previously unimaginable ways?

Such rethinking will not happen all at once. It will not arise from any central authority. It will come from everywhere and nowhere in particular. The first Industrial Revolution, according to author Daniel Quinn, was "the product of a million small beginnings. [It] didn't proceed according to any theoretical design [and] was not a utopian undertaking".^[25] Likewise, the next Industrial Revolution, if it is to happen, will have no grand plan and no one in charge. It will advance, in Quinn's words, on the basis of "an outpouring of human creativity", innovations not just in the technological but in the human landscape as well—the only way a new story can arise.

^[25]Quinn 1997, 200–201.